[readthenotes1]

Although we are often taught that it is slavery slavery slavery, the electoral college is also an attempt to prevent the tyranny of the majority - something the founding fathers were worried about.

It is also easy to forget that we are called the United States for a reason. We were more like the EU than we are like France...

[bwanab]

There's no historical justification for that assertion as far as I'm aware. If you know of one, I'd love to see the reference.

Preventing the tyranny of the majority is what the separation of powers to executive (President), judiciary (Supreme Court), and legislative (Senate and House) was set up for.

Preventing domination of the small states by the large states was why the Senate and House were structured as they are.

[superfrank]

Is it? I'm no history buff, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the main way the founders attempted to avoid the tyranny of the majority was by having the Senate be two representatives per state regardless of size.

[flopriore]

Yes, it's easier to show with an example.

- California has 38,940,231 inhabitants and 54 electors. That means 1 elector every 721,115 inhabitants - Oklahoma has 4,053,824 inhabitants and 7 electors, so 1 elector every 579,117 people.

[int_19h]

Giving some people more votes than others "prevents" tyranny of the majority by substituting it with tyranny of the minority.

And the Founders had far more nuanced opinions on this subject than modern right-wing politics tends to imply. Consider Federalist Papers #22:

"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America3; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."

[krapp]

>Although we are often taught that it is slavery slavery slavery, the electoral college is also an attempt to prevent the tyranny of the majority - something the founding fathers were worried about.

It's still slavery slavery slavery. The tyranny of the majority the founding fathers were worried about was from Northern abolitionists. Framing this is abstract philosophical terms is disingenuous, the political and culture context of the time matters. The Electoral College would never have been conceived, much less enacted, if the preservation of slavery wasn't a non-negotiable term for Southern states to remain in the Union (and it eventually failed in that regard.)