[allknowingfrog]

Everyone acts like the electoral college was a blunder. The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy. You were supposed to be involved in local politics, where you could actually know and evaluate your representatives. Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.

I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.

This is, incidentally, how we massively screwed up the federal government. In the original design US Senators were elected by the state legislatures, the premise being that they would prevent federal overreach into the regulatory domain of the states because they would be directly accountable to the state governments.

Then populists who wanted to do everything at the federal level pushed for the 17th Amendment which eliminated the state governments' representation in the federal government and people stopped caring about local politics because it started feeling like an exercise in futility when federal law could preempt anything you wanted to do and the thing meant to keep that in check was deleted.

And the federal government was supposed to have enumerated (i.e. narrow, limited) powers. It doesn't have the scaffolding for people to hold it accountable. You can elect the local dogcatcher but the only elected office in the entire federal executive branch is the President of the United States. Which is fine when the main thing they're doing is negotiating treaties and running the Post Office but not fine if you're trying to do thousands of pages of federal regulations on everything from healthcare to banking to labor to energy.

[dkuntz2]

That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.

In a fifteen year period 46 senate elections were deadlocked in 20 states, at one point Delaware had an open senate seat for four years due to this.

That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force, not moving for senators to be elected by the people.

[AnthonyMouse]

> That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.

That seems more like an excuse than a legitimate reason. If that was actually the problem you could solve it by adopting a mechanism to break ties, putting the vote to the public only in the event of a tie, having the state legislatures use score voting which makes two candidates getting exactly the same score far less likely, etc.

But if they want to do a power grab then they get further by saying "we have to do something about these deadlocks" than by saying "we want to do a power grab".

> That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force

It's supposed to be an anti-democratic force, like the Supreme Court, the existence of Constitutional rights and the entire concept of even having a federal government instead of allowing local voters to have full plenary power over local laws. Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.

[judahmeek]

> Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.

This is a great point as is the point that the existence of a federal government itself is anti-democratic.

The Senate was initially created as a body that was incentivized to promote federalism itself (especially through their power to approve federal judges) & a federalist republic seems to be the most democratic system because it incentivizes a balance between individual liberty & the ability to restrict someone else's liberty through law.

Right now, the balance of power is too centralized which makes for radical changes every time a different political party takes control of government.

[DANmode]

> I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

Randomly-selected citizens would have outperformed what we’ve gotten in the last few elections at minimum.

Genuinely think we should consider that.

[deltoidmaximus]

Athens actually had part of the legislative body chosen by random lot. It makes some amount of sense as a check against entrenched power structures.

[shigawire]

>I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

I reject this premise. I'm not omniscient but I have a pretty good idea.

[FranklinJabar]

> The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy.

This doesn't make their decision good. It has consistently failed to produce politicians that represent the needs of the people who live here.

Democracy may be bad; but what we have is orders of magnitude worse.

[Marazan]

The Electoral College is part of the slavery compromise and the slavery compromise was a blunder.

[AnthonyMouse]

That doesn't really fit the math. At the time of the founding the largest colony was Virginia and of the original 13 colonies, 9 were in the North and only 4 were states that ended up in the Confederacy, i.e. it was the slave states that were underrepresented in the electoral college and the Senate.

[TheCoelacanth]

No, because the slave states got to count slaves as 3/5 of a person for EC purposes.

If the president was elected by popular vote, slaves would count as zero because they obviously weren't going to let them vote.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's independent of the EC. They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC. And obviously that part of the system is no longer in operation, whereas the part Democrats complain about is that each state gets +2 electoral votes regardless of its population.

Which nominally gives slightly more weight to the lower population rural states, but that isn't even the primary consequence of the EC. The primary consequence is that it gives significantly more weight to swing states, which by definition don't favor any given party.

[Marazan]

> They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC

Yes, I suppose if you could accept the idea of a ludicrous hypothetical alternative that would have zero chance in reality of being implemented you can contort yourself enough to ignore that the EC is part of the compromise on slavery that forms the Constitution.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's ludicrous by modern standards because the premise of owning other people is ludicrous by modern standards. Giving states more votes based on them having people there who can't actually vote is exactly the same amount of ludicrous, but that's also the part that isn't there anymore.

The primary thing the electoral college does in modern day is allow -- not even require -- states to allocate all of their state's voting power to the candidate that wins the majority of the state. With the result that they mostly do that and then states like New York and Texas get ignored in Presidential elections because nobody expects them to flip and getting 10% more of the vote is worthless when it doesn't flip the state.

Ironically it's the partisans who are effectively disenfranchising the people in their own state. If the states that go disproportionately for one party didn't want to be ignored then all they'd have to do is allocate their electoral votes proportionally according to what percent of the vote the candidate got in that state. Then getting 10% more of the vote in a big state would be as many electoral votes as some entire states. But the non-swing states are by definition controlled by one party and then they're willing to screw over their own population to prevent the other party from getting any of that state's electoral votes.

[garciansmith]

Virginia was a slave state at that time (I think it was 8 slave states to 5 non). The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Virginia was a slave state at that time

Indeed Virginia was a slave state at the time, and was later part of the Confederacy, and it was the most underrepresented state in the Senate and electoral college at the founding, since those bodies cause higher population states to be underrepresented relative to their population.

> The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.

All of the states had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed. But it was already gathering detractors even then. The states that wanted to keep it the most were the ones that ended up in the Confederacy and they were both a minority of the original colonies and a minority of the states at the time of the civil war.

[FireBeyond]

> Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

Not for nothing, but the party that bangs on hardest about the sanctity and infallibility of the Electoral College is the one that is far and away the worst for "American Idol-type politicians". In recent times:

- Donald Trump

- Ronald Reagan

- Fred Thompson

Even at the state level:

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

- Jesse Ventura

- Sonny Bono

- Clint Eastwood

[mastax]

Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.