[travmatt]

Hard disagree - I personally will never agree to the idea that fairness is achieved by taking away people’s representation in their elected leader.

It’s a stretch to call the electoral college the genius of western democracy, since every other western democracy doesn’t celebrate a system in which the minority can rule over the majority. The fact that every other major democracy can achieve this without stealing votes is a worrying tell. American presidential elections are becoming increasingly unrepresentative, with the winner of these contests being the opposite choice of the voters who actually voted (Bush ‘00 and Trump ‘16). I think this distortion is a root cause of political paralysis today, as narrow minded interests continue to assert their control over national policy at the direct expense of the majority.

This is in addition to the fact that the electoral college is a throwback to before America was actually a democracy, and part of a system which was explicitly designed to enslave a portion of citizenry and disenfranchise an additional portion. Lastly, if the goal was to moderate the influence of urban vs rural areas, the population differences between 2018 and 1830’s America are quite staggering, and trying to use a system based on 1830’s population levels is nonsensical.