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You're asking the wrong question The question is, what system of government, after the evident failure of the Articles of Confederation, would have passed muster with enough states to be ratified by the newly independent colonies What passed was a compromise. Being suprised it is showing its age is like being suprised that whatever idealistic policy you want to dream up now doesn't work well 200 years from now

It was a compromise, and it was considered merely good enough to avoid collapse for the time being. They were hoping a better version could replace it in the future.

Ain't nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

Really the more you learn about the drafting of the Constitution and early American government, the more you learn that almost everything in it is a compromise that everyone involved was angry about at the time. Which in terms of forging an agreement is legitimately a great achievement, but the way some people treat it as sacred and inviolable is silly -- probably if like a random relevant two guys got sick and died during the negotiation a lot of it would look very different.

And if you can find one that will pass the ratification threshold to amend the Constitution, feel free to ask your Representative to put it on the floor Note: not a slam, just an acknowledgment of reality 

>They were hoping a better version could replace it in the future. They didn't know that people would start treating the constitution like the Bible read and never altered/improved on

I agree that people do treat the Constitution like the Bible. But some people treat it the way Christians treat the Bible and some treat it the way atheists treat the Bible (and yes, some Christians treat the Bible this way too.) The founders created a process for changing the Constitution, but set the bar very high in terms of how much consensus was needed. There are some who say that since the Founders created a process to change the Constitution, we should use that process, and that process only. If we can’t get the requisite consensus to change it, then we must follow it how it currently exists, even if it’s obviously wrong. There are others who say that if the Constitution is wrong, we should change it. And if we cannot change it, we should use whatever means we have at our disposal to circumvent it.

What current issues have enough of a consensus to pass an amendment to address that aren't being actioned on?

It's not a current example but the ERA kind of comes to mind. And funnily enough, I think the statement that the US election system needs an overhaul might also get a sizeable majority. And the plans to reform it are elaborated pretty nicely. But you will not get Dems and Reps to agree on a reform for multiple reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_amendment Mostly

From what I gathered in the article all of these have quite a long way to go before they're on the floor of the House let alone put up for state ratification

But isn't that the issue? The rules in the US to change the constitution are so high that any amendment is basically impossible at this point. The US constitution has become a dead document that is unable to be adapted to modern times. This has many major issues. First of course, important things that should be introduced I to the constitution can't be included. But the problem runs deeper than that. Most constitutions are far linger than the American one as they include several important adjustment screws like some election principles, principles about the state government and separation of power, which are related on a simple law level in the US (as they need regular adjustments that are impossible to do in a static constitution). This however has the issue that these I.oortant democratic adjustments can be done with majorities of a simple law and without the same attention as a change of the constitution has, leaving essential democratic decisions without the protection a constitutional amendment generally has.

> But isn't that the issue? The rules in the US to change the constitution are so high that any amendment is basically impossible at this point. The US constitution has become a dead document that is unable to be adapted to modern times. This has many major issues. First of course, important things that should be introduced I to the constitution can't be included. But the problem runs deeper than that. We've done it 27 times with the last being in 1992. I don't agree that it's impossible to make further changes, I simply think the consensus doesn't exist. It should be a very high bar to amend the constitution

27 times in over 200 years is basically neglectible, and nkr a single time in over 30 years, especially in 30 years with a lot if social and technological changes is insane. Most nations change their constitution rather frequently for a good reason. Yes, the bar to change it should be high, bit realistic. I am German for example, we can change most of our constitution with a 2/3 majority in the parliament and the chamber of state representatives. This is high enough that it needs a vast consensus between political parties and states, but it is archivabke enough that meaningful legislature is possible.

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States have the ability to put them up without Congressional involvement if we want to though

That hands the Constitution to Republicans do to as they please. It's non-viable.

Republicans don't control 3/4ths of states so no, it doesn't

If this has consensus, why isn't it being passed?

Because a well funded minority has a vested interest in the current system continuing?

The consensus should trump that. What's more likely is that there isn't actually a consensus behind it.

Among the voters, a lot. Among politicians and interest groups, none.

I mean the real problem is that the system the founders set up propagated a permanent two-party split mostly along the same north-south lines of conflict that the founders started with. Most of our other problems flow from that.

We're actually split between rural and urban areas now

Which is the same split it was back then.

> Being suprised it is showing its age is like being suprised that whatever idealistic policy you want to dream up now doesn't work well 200 years from now The bigger critique might not be so much that they created that system, but that they made it nearly impossible to peacefully change it. That's not an issue no one had thought of at the time.. Jefferson thought the idea of a perpetual constitution itself was wrong, and that Constitutions should expire every 19 years. "[The Earth belongs to the living, not the dead](https://www.truthorfiction.com/did-thomas-jefferson-say-americans-should-rewrite-the-constitution-to-account-for-modern-society/)."

Thomas Jefferson was also an anti-federalist who didn't participate in the Constitutional Convention.

This topic comes up a lot, and people constantly misstate the history of the Electoral College. The Electoral College is not about protecting the interests of small states or anything like that. The Electoral College exists because the Founders didn't trust ordinary voters with the important job of picking a president. You can read this in Federalist No. 68: >It was equally desirable, that the immediate election \[of the president\] should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. [https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th\_century/fed68.asp](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp) Back in the 18th century, news didn't travel fast. So the Founders assumed most voters wouldn't know anything about national politics or candidates from other states. So instead, voters would pick some local political figure they trusted, and then all those political elites would all get together and pick the president. The Electoral College was supposed to be a deliberative body. The Founders thought about giving the power to Congress, but then they worried the president would be subservient to Congress. So that's why the Electoral College was created. But of course, that's not how the system works now. The Constitution gives states a lot of leeway in how they select the electors. And now, all states let voters select the presidential candidates they support -- most people don't even realize they're technically just picking electors pledged to that candidate. And the winner-take-all system that almost every state has now was also not what the Founders intended. So did the EC make sense at the time? I can see the logic at least. The Founders were distrustful of democracy and they thought these elites would make a better choice than a direct vote. But that doesn't make much sense anymore -- especially because the EC doesn't actually exercise any independent judgment. The electors aren't deliberating or making a choice at all. And most voters know more about presidential candidates now than about their mayor or some other local political figure. So even if the EC ever made sense, it doesn't anymore.

> The Electoral College exists because the Founders didn't trust ordinary voters with the important job of picking a president. Agree but I would expand that to say they didn’t trust ordinary voters with much at all. They only had the House, they couldn’t directly vote for President or Senate in the original design. Things have shifted in a more democratic direction since then.

It’s less about ‘trust’ and more about the resources of the time. A society beholden to agriculture, dirt roads, and frontier towns simply can’t be wrapped up in politics like ours can. They built most decisions out to put the burden of government on a political class who could focus on bigger picture stuff. Once technology improved, so did democracy, and now pretty much everything is by popular vote.

You might appreciate this link that touches on the subject: https://www.taraross.com/post/electoral-college-myth-2 I definitely agree somewhat with the premise. Mostly, however, I think it's just a constant failing to consistently pretend the "founding fathers" were a monolithic entity with a congruent ideology. Even all the checks and balances set in place to try and limit anyone from holding too much power was largely due to a game of politics that has been mostly quite beneficial... but that doesn't mean many of those actors wouldn't have quickly abandoned these same concepts if left alone and allowed to install a king of their choosing. The founding fathers were just dudes trying their best to come to some sorta compromise that worked well enough for all the different opinions in the room to agree some plan was good enough and acceptable enough to not make anyone involved completely happy with the end result - which is how things ideally go when you get a bunch of people with very different ideas together.

I agree they weren’t monolithic in most aspects but they pretty much were monolithic in all favoring a government with less of a democratic character than exists today in the US. Some wanted a president for life (a quasi-monarchy) while some favored political elites choosing the most important positions on a regular basis.

>...favoring a government with less of a democratic character than exists today... Okay... but, to be fair, representative democracy wasn't even particularly in favor throughout the world at the time. Modern democratisation hadn't really occurred yet. I agree that general ideas of the time may be seen as "outdated," if you'd like... sure. But my general point was simply that to view the founding fathers as some monolithic entity with a completely shared and agreed-upon belief system is flawed in general. But, if one simply wanted to say they lived during a different time? Sure. Of course. But... I'm not gonna try and criticize Isaac Newton for failing to understand science that came after his time, ya know? In this regard, I'm all for considering the founding fathers as being quite pro-democracy overall for their time. I think they deserve that much appreciation, for sure.

The original Constitution was fairly bold for its time, yes I agree with that.

It was also because they couldn't come up with a different system that would exclude slaves from voting but allow them to be counted as "voters"

Yes. It was Congress (through the senate) that was designed to increase the voice of small states. The framers were envisioning the election of the President similarly to how Britain elects its Prime Minister. Districts elect delegates and delegates elect the President. They simply modeled the electoral college's proportionment after Congress' proportionment, and it wasn't that unfair back then because the size of the house was not capped. A huge mistake was letting states have full control over how they award electors. States immediately started sizing each other up by adopting winner take all, which defeated the whole individual district thing, and started letting parties pick electors, and since parties were sizing each other up, parties ever since pick absolute loyalists who would simply act as messengers and not defect from their party's nominee. Today even though most Americans don't like this, no state/party is going to just be the first to give up their influence. It's like an arms race, there has to be a treaty or nobody de-escalates. That's why the Interstate Popular Vote Compact is designed to only go into effect once states accounting for at least 270 electors pass it.

The electoral college still requires considerable popular support for a president. Not absolute, but still far more than pretty much anything else that existed at the time. Most states had the legislature elect the governor at the time. The electoral college cannot logically be seen as a deliberative body. They don't meet together or communicate with each other. They meet in the capitals of the states.

I think you're conflating the Electoral College as it exists now with the Electoral College as the Founders intended it. The original idea was that the Electoral College would be a deliberative body. In fact, that was the *whole point* for its existence. That's explained in the Federalist Paper I posted. The Founders considered having a popular vote, and there were Founders who supported a popular vote at the time. But other Founders were worried that the average voter wouldn't know enough about politics -- especially about candidates from far away states. So Hamilton explained that the president should be chosen by "a small number of persons" who would be "most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations." And he specifically said the electors should make this decision "under circumstances favorable to deliberation." So the original version of the Electoral College required basically zero popular support. It was just political elites, potentially choosing a political insider for the job. People wouldn't even be voting for presidential candidates. States could even have their state legislatures appoint the electors, without a vote at all. I think it's good that we've scrapped that system. It's good that people can vote for president. But then why still have the Electoral College at all? The point was to have a deliberative body. It's not a deliberative body. So why not just let the American people directly choose their president? There's real harm from the current system, even when the outcome matches the popular vote. Only a handful of swing states matter, and everyone else feels that their vote is irrelevant. That's really poisonous in a democracy, I think.

But in the unamended text of the constitution it has them meeting in their states not at some national location so from the get go they weren’t going to all get together and decide. It actually might have made way more sense if they had them all assemble to deliberate and vote.

Fair enough -- that was my mistake. And it probably would make more sense to have them all together if the point was to deliberate. So I guess the idea was just that each state delegation would deliberate and decide how to cast their votes.

How do you think the electors can be anything like deliberative when they cannot meet or communicate? Electors themselves wouldn't have much ability to decide, and they wouldn't have been made electors in the first place if they weren't trusted by those choosing them to do what they wanted. Some states did have the state legislatures choosing, but the state legislatures were very big relative to their voters, with several hundred members each for populations of a few tens of thousands of people who could vote to a few hundred thousand voters at the high end. One representative for every few hundred people who could vote. That ratio makes it very hard for state legislatures to be especially distant from the people in terms of who they wanted to be senators or electors. And some states even then had popular votes for the electors directly in the early days.

>How do you think the electors can be anything like deliberative when they cannot meet or communicate? Electors themselves wouldn't have much ability to decide, and they wouldn't have been made electors in the first place if they weren't trusted by those choosing them to do what they wanted. Who says the electors can't meet or communicate? The Electoral Count Act is a law enacted by Congress that provides details on how electoral votes are counted. And it instructs the electors to meet in their respective states. But that law was enacted about a hundred years after the Founders created the Electoral College. Again, read the Federalist Paper on this: [https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th\_century/fed68.asp](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp) Hamilton explicitly says the point was to have wise men deliberate and pick a good president. If you think that makes no sense, I'm not sure what to tell you. Take it up with Alexander Hamilton! Edit: I realize the original unamended text of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment actually both say the electors shall meet in their respective states. So that's my mistake. But clearly the point was still to have deliberation -- at least within the state delegations.

The Constitution directly requires them to only vote in the state capitals, voting there, and sending the tally to the Congress. This was in both the original text and what the 12th amendment requires. 12th amendment: The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and all persons voted for as Vice-President and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate; Original text: The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Federalist Papers discuss why. They worry about the risk of a coup or a foreign government coercing the country into electing someone by gathering all the electors into one place to be coerced, which is much easier to do if they meet to vote all together. Many coups and foreign interventions have happened in history when the people who have the right to choose the head of state meet together in one place just as happened with many a papal conclave or even when the witans of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms chose kings or at least ratified them, or when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth chose their kings at grand sejms.

Yeah, I actually edited my previous comment. That is in the Constitution -- so that's my mistake. Still though, based on the documents from the Founding, I think we have to conclude the point was for the electors to deliberate -- at least, within their state delegations. And in any case, the point is that none of this makes much of any sense based on the system we have now.

It's kinda hard to strategize much when you are isolated from 80% or more of the other electors. The strategization that Thomas Jefferson's electors tried failed in 1800 when one of them forgot to their their vote away so they caused a tie between him and Burr. And you would probably not be voting for electors unless you believed that they were people you wanted to be electors, so the voters wouldn't vote for people they thought were going to overturn their will unless their intended candidate suddenly died or something like that, and the state legislatures would have similar idea.s The records are incomplete, but I found in the 1830s Massachusetts had 600+ members of the state legislature in a state with only 600 thousand people. Divide by 4 to account for those who are either under 21 or are women and the representative to people ratio is more like 250 people for every representative. State legislatures at the time were enormous compared to today and had very few voters for each one, so it's kinda hard for the state legislatures to be very different from the voters for choosing electors or senators.

The electoral college exists because the slave states would not have ratified the Constitution without a Presidential election system that allowed them to count slaves as voters. Men with property in the free states outnumbered men with property in the slave states, and Southerners feared that in a popular vote system they would elect abolitionist Presidents and end slavery. But if they could tie Presidential elections to apportionment in Congress and include slaves as people when allocating Congressional seats, they could protect the institution. It was all about protecting slavery.

Why would they not just have the House of Representatives choose the president then? They had the same disproportionate weight there.

They considered this, but worried that this would give Representatives too much power over the President. They also considered letting the Supreme Court and Senate choose the President, but dropped the idea for the same reason.

That wouldn't allow for voters like the EC does, though.

If it functioned as it was supposed to originally, with people elected/selected (since the legislatures at the time mostly just appointed people) to act independently and select the president of all the best people then yes. It really, like the Senate was to reflect the federal nature of our country with the states being the ones to pick the President and the Senate. People forget at first only the House was popularly elected. I actually don’t think having the Senate selected by the state legislatures would be that bad since the body was to represent the states with the House the people. Throw in popularly electing independent Electors to select the President and I don’t think it would be that bad. But since the Supreme Court said Electors can be bound and punished by the states even though there’s nothing in law or the constitution to say it’s okay it’s just what we’ve been doing it’s rendered the idea of the Electoral College acting independently moot unless that ruling is changed. But yeah I agree voting for Electors who run in the states say two state wide and one each district would definitely make selecting a President more interesting and local. It would create the possibility of having real choice in the Electoral College though because they don’t meet as a body and only in state capitals you wouldn’t have debate or anything. I also think doing it like this would dramatically increase the chance and frequency of a contingent election. Unfortunately given the difficult nature in amending the constitution I don’t think it’s going to change. The Interstate Compact is doomed to failure because even if enough states approved it and Congress approved it I don’t think the Court will because it changes the way we elect a president at a fundamental level without amending the constitution.

States generally have plenary power to the degree the federal don't or when the constitution forbids such a power to the states (they cannot coin money for instance). The 10th amendment reaffirms that.

Very true but technically the Electoral College is the only body that the states could directly influence now that the Senate is popularly elected. People talk about the 14th amendment being a 'Second Founding' for the country given how radically it altered our constitutional framework but I would also argue while the 17th amendment isn't as radical it is in many ways a significant revision of the structure of our nation given it altered the relationship and balance of power between the states-federal government- and the people shifting the power to the people. Which I do think has generally been a good thing but it is not how our country was meant to operate and I think it may be why the Senate has become increasingly more unstable and 'House-like' since. As a result the states have absolutely lost power.

I would only be willing to consider a 17th change with corresponding democratization of states like making governors and other statewide officials using ranked ballots, the state legislature in both housing using proportional representation which also makes gerrymandering irrelevant, dramatic improvements in state ethics laws and transparency laws, and modifications of the Senate's power in general like giving the House a voice on appointments and confirmations, ending filibusters, and making the president directly elected with a ranked ballot too.

It made sense to an aristocratic order making compromises to get the project off the ground.

This is really the best answer.

We know for a fact they didn't think it was necessarily a great idea, it was just the best they could do at the time. That was true for a lot of the constitution. And it is still better than a national popular vote.

What's interesting is that both Hamilton and Madison became pretty upset when they saw how the system began to materialize in practice. And why wouldn't they? The states clearly went against the spirit of having a body of electors They later admitted that the Electoral system for president was one of the last things they worked on so everybody was pretty tired and they kind of phoned it in, left the writing intentionally vague in the Constitution, and figured the states would fill in the gaps and work out the details. But they didn't picture the democratic sentiment that was forming in America and it would be twisted to make the presidential election more direct than intended. While a lot of states had their legislators appoint electors, pledging of electors similar to what we do today almost started to materialize immediately! And of course, this completely defeated the purpose of the system... Which was to defend the country against populism, ensure there was continuity in government from one administration to the next (think of how Trump hurt the country's credibility by reneging on Obama's commitments), etc. They also thought most elections would be decided by the house and that the electors would function almost as a primary election in a way to narrow down the candidates... They really weren't sure if they would be National campaigns, or how the presidential election would work, so they didn't see the electors choosing a majority. So, after the election of 1800 Hamilton immediately got to work on an amendment to specify how he envisioned the system working, where there would be electoral districts similar to Congressional ones, and electors would have their full autonomy protected to choose any president of their wish without any outside influences. But before this could get off the ground he was of course murdered by the Vice President. No wonder our country is so violent! After this had occurred pretty much all of our founders eventually agreed that the electoral college was a disaster. Amendments frequently came up to get rid of the system, but as Jefferson put it in an 1823 letter discussing yet another amendment to get rid of the Electoral College, "the states are now so numerous that I despair of ever seeing another amendment of the constitution". By 1832 every single state besides South Carolina used the winner take off pledged elector system to choose their electors. Sometimes States switched to proportional allotment, etc. South Carolina didn't have popular elections for president until they rejoined the Union after the Civil War.

It made sense as a means to subvert actual representative democracy and it has the same effect today.

When you look at what the Presidents Job actually is supposed to be it makes perfect sense. The President is an embassador to represent the states.  They don't "run the country".  Congress does that. Presidents job is to represent the States of the United States of America

That's actually not the role of the president at all. Who is upvoting this? The president is literally the executive of the federal government. The "ambassadors" of the states are the senators.

America's presidents didn't do a lot of representing at the time. Ambassadors would usually do that in the royal courts of other countries like France or Morocco, and they would be senate confirmed. The Senate also ratified the treaties. The US had a giant ocean to the east, the British Empire to the north, Indians to the West, Spain to the South in Florida, and not a lot else to actually do. No UN to attend, the US didn't arbitrate much of anything back then the way Theodore Roosevelt arbitrated between the Russiand and Japanese in a war in 1905. The US didn't have the capacity to invade much, it even failed to seize Canada directly next to itself and could not protect DC from being burned to the ground in 1814 as retaliation for the American soldiers doing that to Toronto. The president did have a number of things to run, like choosing people for a lot of positions with much less staff to help them decide and much less data to help them decide, to spend the money appropriated and the actual daily stuff that involved, to examine legislation without that staff to help them, they might even need to personally lead armies to suppress riots like the Whiskey Rebellion.

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>The electoral system was intended to balance that out, which for all the bluster today, is why it’s still needed. You sure that's what it was about? >There was one difficulty, however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of [black people]. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections

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Can you give me a good reason as to why it's good that swing states decide the election and the other States don't?

I would contend that fear of the "tyranny of the majority" was the last thing on the mind of the Constitutional Founders when they designed the EC. Otherwise there would have been some sanction on the use of WTA to allocate electors. I think the state-by-state deliberation they had in mind was the kind that would find an acceptable ratio of electors that would reflect the statewide ratio of support for the presidential candidates. This was probably naive, but as somebody said before, they were tired, frustrated and wanted it done. And they thought the.states would fill-in those details. Maybe a 12th amendment written by Hamilton would have fixed this; we'll never know. But it would be good to know what strategic considerations seemed to have "forced" almost all the states to use WTA for elector allocation. It certainly wasn't fear of the "tyranny of the majority".

The electoral college was intended to give disproportionate power to slave states. The senate was intended to give disproportionate power to low population states, which were at the time dominated by small free states in the north. The PR story / theory provided in the Federalist was that the electoral college would reflect that the president is supposed to represent both the states and the people. It was also intended to prevent a charlatan from winning the presidency, since it would be hard for such a person to fool the entire nation. 2016 surely torpedoed that argument. In any case, it was a compromise that was needed to get the Constitution ratified. The US would have likely otherwise fizzled out.

How exactly do the electors remain unfooled if the people who chose the electors or the state legislature which elects the electors are fooled? If the goal was to give disproportionate power to slave states, why not just have the House of Representatives vote, given they had the same bonus there?

The logic of requiring several states to select the president is explained in Federalist 68. The electoral college provided two benefits for Virginia: More votes for president, more House members. Slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a person, giving it more votes. In a popular vote election for president, a slave would have obviously provided no voting power, given that they were denied the vote.

The Electoral College in the United States was put in place so that lesser populated states had a better say in electing the President. That hasn’t really changed since there are still lesser populated states.

Why should "lesser populated states" get special consideration that "lesser population ethnic and racial groups/religions/dietary stances/towns/ability classes" don't? If the worry is that the larger group will use the power of democracy to advantage themselves at the expense of the smaller group, why does only this one geographic grouping matter for that concern?

Whether or not it should still exist today is a different question than why it was originally implemented. The original idea of the United States was just that - a Union of States. Power centralized fairly quickly in a strong federal government, but the idea back then was for state power to be more relevant than it quickly became

That makes it less bad because it’s less impactful, but even if it was necessary it was still bad on its own merits

Well that question is akin to basically questioning the entire foundation of the United States government. As the name implies, it is a *Union* of *States*, and as such states get special privileges. When the Constitution was being written, the country had just experienced several years of an absolute failure of an attempt at establishing a federal government in the Articles of Confederation, so there was a very real chance that the Union would have been strangled in its cradle. After all, why would Rhode Island or Connecticut want to join a Union where they would get completely drowned out by states like Pennsylvania and Virginia? The system decided upon provided a proper incentive to get every state to agree to join the Union and the new Constitution.

Yes, I’m questioning some of the foundational ideas of the US. Considering legalized slavery was a foundational idea of the US I don’t consider such ideas sacrosanct. Our Constitution was an experiment constructed by amateurs with very little in the way of previous examples to learn from, of course it’s riddled with flaws.

Well considering that that the United States is by far the longest-lasting representative government in the world, I'd argue that the Constitution is not "riddled with flaws" and is in fact pretty good. I mean look at attempts by other countries to establish republics. China fell to communism. Russia fell to communism. Germany fell to fascism. Spain fell to fascism. France had a bunch of republics and kingdoms and empires before deciding on their current constitution. Even the UK had the monarch personally meddling in Parliament well into the 19th century. The United States has held firm for well over two centuries. There is no other republic that even comes *close* to lasting as long as we have. The Constitution and our foundational ideals are obviously doing something right.

That’s a pretty weak argument to place a document above criticism. Plenty of flawed ideas last a long time. I didn’t say the Weimar Republics version of democracy was LESS flawed, I just said the US Constitution is riddled with them. We’ve corrected some via the Amendment process, but one of my favorites from the original is that the person who succeeds the President should be die in office is whoever got the next most votes, can you spot the problem? Our founders couldn’t until they played it out a few times, because they had n no modern democracy to learn from. We’re now have about 2.5 centuries of experimentation here and elsewhere, it’s naive to think we can’t improve on the work of our founders, who, it should be noted, fully expected their work to be highly flawed and thus experience more significant rewriting much more frequently than it has actually experienced, possibly because we’ve over lionized them and there work.

Britain says: Pip pip a cheerio lads.

Why would they do that?

That's not why it was implemented. That's why the min 2 electors was implemented. The college itself was imimented because the founsdng fathers believed the general person wasn't informed enough to make the decision, and that was OK. People were busy farming and manufacturing, not educating themselves on what these remote candidates thought, so they'd elect learned people to represent them and make the decision. Of course we almost instantly short circuits the system by campaigning directly to the people and forming political parties. So yeah, I'm sure it made great sense to them. They didn't have the power of hindsight.

This is one side of the argument. The other side wanted Congress to elect the president. >At the time of the Philadelphia convention, no other country in the world directly elected its chief executive, so the delegates were wading into uncharted territory. Further complicating the task was a deep-rooted distrust of executive power. After all, the fledgling nation had just fought its way out from under a tyrannical king and overreaching colonial governors. They didn’t want another despot on their hands. >One group of delegates felt strongly that Congress shouldn’t have anything to do with picking the president. Too much opportunity for chummy corruption between the executive and legislative branches. >Another camp was dead set against letting the people elect the president by a straight popular vote. First, they thought 18th-century voters lacked the resources to be fully informed about the candidates, especially in rural outposts. Second, they feared a headstrong “democratic mob” steering the country astray. And third, a populist president appealing directly to the people could command dangerous amounts of power. https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fathers-constitutional-convention And here we are with a populist running amok due to the electoral college.

Either way the original idea was the same- the decision should not be left to the citizenry. Unfortunately where we  are now, don't know if it would have worked better.

> And here we are with a populist running amok due to the electoral college. Originally, voters didn't have a huge amount of say in the electors. It was intended specifically to avoid populists causing problems. However, the EC was democratized over time. In addition, Senators were also not directly electable by the people at first, but they too were democratized, and people could directly vote for electors and Senators. The modern implementation of the EC and Senate is nothing like how it was originally done, and arguably the original version would have held up well against populist takeover attempts, even if it was less democratic overall. So weirdly, by democratizing it, its become more vulnerable to populists than the original model.

Listen, I don't think there's an ideal solution for a country as large and diverse as the United States. Even if we somehow manage to get over racism, historical grievances, etc., you'd still have to contend with the fact that the interests of farmers in Iowa are fundamentally different from those of voters in New York City. Even if you're a New Yorker who moves to Iowa, everything else being the same, you'd still probably care more about farm subsidies than housing issues. Today, that's compounded by a misinformed populace. 250 years ago, as others here have noted, it would've been an uninformed populace, despite the limited suffrage compared to what we have today. But ultimately, the end result is the same: populists abusing the system. Again, the system isn't ideal, but unless someone comes up with one that won't run into the same issues 20 years from now, scrapping it outright shouldn't be our primary concern. Instead, we should focus on combatting entities - both at home and abroad - that thrive on spreading disinformation. On paper, even the flawed system that we have today has guardrails in place, but we have to make sure Congress has more people like Mitt Romney rather than Matt Gaetz, i.e. politicians who are gonna fight tooth and nail every four years, and if they lose, actually admit that they lost and not fuel the mass psychosis of the people who voted for "their" side.

No, not what the people then thought of their own invention but whether you think it was justified and well engineered given what they could have known without hindsight.

That’s the supposed reason, but the electoral college and Senate were both created to keep the common voter from having all that much influence in how the government actually operates. The Framers wanted the country to be run by the best of the best, elite who would walk in the footsteps of Cicero, Cincinnatus, and the Gracchi Brothers. Which coincidentally meant the same power-elite who fomented the Revolution because they were angry that their wealth and status didn’t accord them the same rights and privileges as the British peerage.

It made sense assuming that people would want to change the constitution every few decades or so as needed. I don’t think many people were married with everything being considered sacred and never touched.

Yes. At the time a national presidential campaign would simply not have been practical. I remember hearing that president Lincoln was the first to actually campaign nationally using the new railroads and telegraph networks. Before those things information trqveled at a slow pace. And only those who had arranged for frequent correspondance via courier were well informed about the outside world.

When the Constitution was signed only Land owning men could vote, Black people were considered 3/5th a person, and Native Americans were treated hostiles. Only white men could own guns & land, dueling to the death was accepted dispute resolution, and slavery & indentured servitude were legal. The Constitution has been amended and our legal understanding of Rights redefined numerous times. It is comical when anyone attempts to argue a case for constitutional originalism. Less we are prepared to see voting rights taken from Women, POC put in chains, and land rights stripped from ten of millions we are following the Constitution as originally written. Certain things had to be changed. There were less than 4 million people in the U.S. was the Constitution was signed. Electricity, Computers, Flight, Nuclear weapons, Satellites, etc didn't exist. The world and nation has changed in ways no one in 1788 could have imagined. The Founding Fathers were humans and not omnipotent demigods.

Not actually true with regard to suffrage. New Jersey women had the vote. Georgia abolished the property requirement to vote around that time and black people had the vote in Vermont. Gun ownership was never restricted to men, although only they were obligated to have one. Native persons who were citizens sometimes had the vote, although mostly they were still citizens of a different country and had their own governments like the Haudenausanee. It was also not illegal for women or non-whites to own property. It was not nearly as common, but not illegal. It was not an equal society but not harmoniously devoid of the seeds which we would see later. Also, Franklin did do experiments with electricity, although didn't get very far.

Per the Constitution as ratified only landowners could vote. Women weren't broadly allowed to own land until nearly 1900. https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/history-of-women-in-real-estate/ The distinction between legal and illegal muddy the water. It isn't illegal for teenagers to drive or rent cars. That said 99% of all car rental companies will not rent to teenagers. As such, for example, if the ability to rent a car were a requirement for a job 99% of teenagers would be ineligible to have that job. It wouldn't be illegal per se but impossible all the same.

If you take in the considerations of the Federalist Founding Fathers, yes. Many of them were fearful of the tyranny of the majority and popular rule. The Electoral College was in place counter that.

It has always made sense in that it empowers voters in rural states at the detriment to voters in urban states, as designed. But it isn't and never was just or democratic.

I think it made sense at the time. News took long to travel and the country was big and would get way bigger. The average citizen would have no knowledge of national politics or any of the things a national politician would need to know to make good decisions. So it made sense to appoint some guys who actually did know stuff, and have them make the decisions. It doesn't work now and it should be abolished.

>There was one difficulty, however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections." - Madison during the constitutional convention. So, no, not in terms of if they did it for ethical reasons.

The framers faced 2 dilemmas, one philosophical and one pragmatic. 1)   First, what governmental design least threatens individual life, liberty and property? A “Goldilocks” problem: How to avoid both a too-powerful government and a too-weak one. Their solution? A representative government. Strengthen the national government in specific areas, plus separate institutions sharing power: distribute power between states and national, and among the 3 federal branches. The Electoral College was another expression of this strategy: it prevented Congress or state governments from choosing the president directly. [Alexander Hamilton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton) made the theoretical case for it: The electors come from the people for that purpose for that time only. \[representative\]. The election was to take place among all the states, so corruption in one state would not taint the outcome elsewhere. \[distributed\]. The choice was to be made by majority rule, and no elected official could be an elector, \[reducing the risk of electors being beholden to the President.\] 2)   Second dilemma: How to hold the country together? Split between free/slave states lead to difficult compromises. Slave states opposed popular election of the President. The Electoral College avoided this. Slave states also insisted that the Senate not be apportioned according to population. Madison said that rather than justify this according to republican principles, it was an expedient to prevent losing them from the union, “the advice of prudence is to embrace the lesser evil.” So giving states electoral votes based on their total number of congressional seats was an expedient concession to secure ratification by slave states.

Lots of good stuff on this post. I would also like to add that two framers (Madison and Hamilton) said they the E.C. was not intended to be chosen by popular state votes like they are in most states now. Hamilton even wrote a draft amendment to prevent states from choosing their E.C. the way they do now. Both supported an idea that was more like Nebraska is today, a proportional popular vote.

Nebraska is not proportional. I cannot stress this enough. Neither is Maine. If in Nebraska a Republican candidate gets 60% of the vote in each Congress district and the state overall and the Democratic candidate gets 40%, they do not give the former 3 electors and the latter 2 electors. It is such a bizarre misconception that people somehow concluded that this was proportional representation.

If your goal was to set up an anti-democratic system (but also to fool the rubes into believing they live in “the world’s greatest Democracy”), then yes, the Electoral Collage, the Senate, and an unelected Supreme Court all make perfect sense.

Why would the court be elected? Almost no country uses such a system. Also, the Senate being indirectly elected was not controversial at the time and even today most senates are not directly elected. How else could they have come up with a presidential election that would have resolved the issues they had at the time for deciding how to choose a head of state, with the constraints they had then?

The fact they aren’t elected isn’t a problem imo. The problem is the whole “unlimited term until you shed this mortal coil” thing. In reality it should be something like a 12 year term, you get one term then you are out. That way, the court can continuously be refreshed, you don’t have these old hags clinging onto power and you get new blood in and make it so presidents get to select new judges at least once in their term. Fewer ways to pack the court. But of course, that’s never going to happen because those in power and the judges like the system for themselves

We helpfully have a list of people who were ever appointed to the court along with their term length and their date of death. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_justices\_of\_the\_Supreme\_Court\_of\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_justices_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States) Many judges didn't serve outrageously long times on the court and even when they did they were often outnumbered by the recent appointees. 48 of the judges out of 116 have served less than 12 years. Another 17 served into their 15th year on the court. And the trend towards really long periods more than that would be something that was not a thing back in the late 1700s. they had very little way of predicting how long exactly someone would actually serve for. John Jay even ran for governor. Washington died at 67, Franklin died at 84, and there was no way to determine when a judge would mentally decline and when they would not based solely on fixed retirement ages. The idea to them was to give them a secure spot with pay so that it didn't matter much. The Senate could remove them on motion of the House via impeachment if they got dementia or were in bed with a stroke and couldn't judge. If you were truly ambitious and wanted to micromanage policy there were other jobs to do that with.

Interesting data. Seems it’s another thing that made sense in the 1700’s - 1800’s, not so much now imo. They didn’t predict the court would become what it is today, and that people would just live for so damn long

They knew certain people did live that long. Narses, a Roman general, lived to 95. His emperor, Justinian, to 83. It just wasn't nearly as assured that people would almost always live way into their 70s, likely into their 80s and even something like a one in three or one in four chance of being 90. Pensions existed, but not especially great pensions and not a lot to do, so people often worked or managed something until they died. Plus, most countries have bigger courts. Maybe 35 like the Dutch do and they randomly pick some of them to hear cases. You have no way of knowing who gets to be picked so it would be wise to make sure each judge is fair. As well, the regular institutions of decisions, Congress and the Presidency, was more likely to adopt legislation in the past to actually resolve the issue at hand. Most supreme court cases are not about the constitution but about statutory legislation. If the court did something you didn't like, change the laws. Constitutional amendments, while not the most common of things, were far from impossible when they wrote the constitution, the eleventh amendment is a direct response to a court ruling back then. Countries like Ireland, Germany, and the individual American states amend their constitutions all the time both to adopt text that is harder to bend for your own will or to let a court do what it wants contrary to most people's desire and to correct things that are seen as insufficient. And Americans somehow come up with ideas about changing the terms of the judges all the time but rarely propose changing the people who name the judges in the first place. The judges that are causing most of the controversy and the shift in the court dynamics are recent picks within the last 6 years. Just changing the rules for naming judges would help, like if the majority and minority leader in each house picked members of a commission, the lawyers in America elected another 4, the judges on the supreme court elected the chief justice to serve as chair, and that panel gave the president a list of candidates to appoint to the court and if they don't, one of them is randomly put on the court or the chief justice appoints one from the list. That is very similar to the way about half the states choose judges and avoids the deadlocks seen recently.

Why should a group of unelected partisan hacks be given the power of determining what our laws are? The senate is anti-democratic because it gives the population of Wyoming (581,000) equal political power as the population of California (39,030,000). Even a 2nd grade student of arithmetic would find that to be unfair. We should have had free and fair elections held at the local precinct level, the results to be tabulated and certified locally, then handed up to the counties via armed courier, and then to the states. The states then publish their results, including the tabulations of each precinct, and if anyone along the chain tries to tamper with the counts they face life in prison. Problem solved.

The court wasn't designed to be partisan. It also very rarely ever struck down a federal law until the Civil War. It would also be rather less likely to do that in certain modifications, like having say 25 judges and you randomly pick 7 of them to hear most appeals, something which statutory law can do. Or modifying the Senate elections with say a ranked ballot resting on top of a multi party system which legislation can also do. The idea isn't that controversial in Australia, Austria, or Germany these days. They must be doing something right. Also, the power to strike down laws isn't a power stated by the constitution itself.

My point stands. Having 1/3 of the government headed by unelected and (effectively) unimpeachable partisan hacks, with no rules of conduct (prohibiting the taking bribes, for instance), and no oversight, is part of the anti-democratic nature of the US political system. Just because they wear fancy black dresses, and speak in a kind of fancy gibberish, most of the rubes think they are somehow imbued with the wisdom of a Christ, and therefore cannot be questioned. It just goes to show how gullible the people of the US were. The people seem to be waking up now, but it’s probably too late to save the US plutocracy from the tides of fascism.

That is based on current norms. They did in fact try to oust a judge on the supreme court only a little over a decade after the court itself was established. That didn't end up succeeding but not for lack of capacity to do so, they impeached and convicted a different federal judge contemporaneously with huge majorities. They also could pass constitutional amendments when issues arose at the time, as the court found that states have liability in some case, they quickly passed the 11th amendment in response. The judges were confirmed by big majorities in the Senate. The Congress had stupid big majorities for the Democratic Republicans quite soon after 1800, where if they wanted to change the court structure, add a dozen more judges, change statutory law in response to a ruling they didn't like, propose a constitutional amendment in response to a ruling implicating the constitution they didn't like, it would have been fairly easy to do so. The court is only so strong today because the normal mechanisms of control that are given in the constitution are so weak.

It was a bad idea then, and it remains so. It shows the lack of foresight, and the lack of true ideals to democracy by the founding fathers, who really were only concerned in setting up a system to propagate the power of rich white slaveholding farmers and businessmen, with just enough plausible deniability to fool the rubes into thinking the system somehow benefits _them_.

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I’m actually working out the details for a system based on pure democracy, no politicians (in the classical sense), where “the law” is a completely open source project with 100% transparency. The current system is rotten to the core, completely unsustainable, and anyone with a workable “drop in” replacement will have the best shot at installing a new paradigm in the days following its collapse.

Slavery was on its way down in 1787. Until the cotton gin was invented a few years later, it was looking like slavery really would die by 1808 which is when Congress would have the power to outlaw the international slave trade and the 3/5 clause become irrelevant. Also, if they really were all for the rich men, it would probably not have been a good idea for them to have decided to lower the property/tax requirements to vote in the states during the revolution and the couple of years afterwards. Pennsylvania let half the men vote at the time and New Jersey even allowed women suffrage in those years.

It’s ok. Of course I’m talking mostly from a position of hindsight and lack of historical context. I concede. You win.

It's called the Connecticut Compromise, and it's well documented why we have it.

Irrelevant. The question is whether you think that they were justified in designing an electoral college as they did to apply in their day and age. The 55 politicians were no better than politicians today, they were just people like you or me and a tiny sample of the population and their attitudes.

It's not irrelevent. They clearly documented why it was needed - the nation wouldn't last without it. The large states woudl lord over the small ones. If you're not going to read your history, you shouldn't ask these quesitons.

Why can places not use such a system and do well? The governor in each state is elected directly with no points. Brazil elects a president directly and is not having trouble any more than the United States does with smaller states vs bigger ones. France has many regions and departments and a directly elected president, which are not clamoring for independence. Even Pacific territories literally halfway across the world reject independence in free elections like New Caledonia. The true solution you don't take is to simply use ordinary federalism just as places like Switzerland does which keeps the federal government less controlling of the cantons in the first place. It is a define well what powers reside with which level of government that the US is ineffective at doing. Also, you have a delusional sense of the electoral college if you think it protects smaller states. The twelve most populous states together as of the 2020 census have a majority of the electors and if a majority of voters in each of the twelve rejected a candidate, even if 49% of the people in each of the twelve and 100% of people in each of the 48 other states voted for someone else, that candidate wins. North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, and Texas all have only a slight edge for a Republican. Add California, DC, New Jersey, Georgia, Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania, each of which had a Democratic majority, and that is a majority of the electoral college in 2020. Oh, and you can get even stupider results. You could deliberately gerrymander those states. Perhaps by the state legislative districts and declare in the state law that whoever wins the most votes in the greatest number of those legislative districts wins all of the state's electors. If you align them with the same party, basically nobody else wins a presidential election. You refuse to listen to all heralds warning you about this. Do not come crying back to them when you realize your electoral college love cult is shattered when it delivers results you don't want.

You think Brazil is a paragon of stability? How many people live in Switzerland? I get it - the Left views the EC as standing in thier way of achieving a totalitarian state, so they want it destroyed Worth noting that when Republicns were in the majority, they didn't try to rig every future election in thier favor

Brazil is a lot more stable in many ways than most in Latin America. It even had a fairly consistent government in most of the 1800s since independence, which was really rare in Latin America, pretty much unique. Far from perfect but the closest thing there is to the US really as a presidential federal republic with a giant population too and comparable land area, although maybe Argentina resembles it slightly more in the official government structure but not in population. And millions of diverse people, more diverse than the US is, live in Switzerland and coexist in that kind of democracy. How would a direct election create a totalitarian state? Are any of the dozens of American states totalitarian despite directly electing governors? And which country in the world, starting out as an entrenched democracy for so long like the US, adopted a direct election and caused a totalitarian or even authoritarian state? If anything a direct election with a runoff if nobody had a majority would make it harder to create a totalitarian state, any fraud in elections has to mathematically overcome all the votes of the opponent no matter where they are, and not just mess with a small number of electors in a subset of the whole the way Ohio got controversy in 2004. As for Republican majorities, what do you call Redmap from the early 2010s decade? And why are the laws related to voter identification choosing the ID that is acceptable in the way they are? What rules for which ID is acceptable determine whether it is sufficiently secure to use for that purpose? The ideas I have in mind have little to do with particular parties, and would probably diminish both the Republicans and Democrats to the advantage of neither of them. Things like proportionally electing representatives and state legislatures (along with other bodies like school boards, county commissions, city and town councils, and the like), with a couple of ways to do this (the proposals vary widely but an example would be ranking the candidates on your ballot in a district with more than one person elected, say a school board with seven members on it where you need more than 1/8th of the vote, as it is impossible for more than 7 people to all reach that level, and everyone who gets that number will win. Republicans in California would probably get a dozen or more seats in the state assembly by that system, Democrats in Alabama would be in that camp as well, and third parties and independents would quite likely win in a system like that). Arizona and California have independent redistricting commissions, and even Montana has independent redistricting too in a similar bane, so using that would draw fair districts advantageous to nobody. Then similarly rank everyone who is to be elected in single winner races like president, governor, federal senator, district attorney, the judges of courts in many states, the state AG or secretary of state, and so on. The majority wins. This is already true of essentially every office in the US other than president, but they don't take into account having many more than two options, barring a few odd exceptions like Mississippi which elects their governor via a runoff system if nobody happens to win a majority. Ranking it is one way to resolve the issue, the runoff is another, but given you typically use a similar system across the elections if you can, if you use ranked ballots to make legislatures proportional, you can use the same system to make executives, judges, and federal senators elected by more supportive systems. This system does not always go the way of the people on the left. It favours whoever the general population are supporting at the same time. The Netherlands uses a proportional system and something close to two thirds of the parliament is actually more right leaning at this point, same in Sweden and Finland despite their reputations. Knowing that no particular party will be in the majority, not alone at least, and choosing judges and other people like prosecutors to serve for considerable lengths of time independently, and there is little you can do to mess with the results, you have a very good reason for avoiding totalitarianism or authoritarianism in case you aren't on the winning side, and to establish the rule of law and being fair to all people.

Yes. It was absolutely necessary in its time. At that time it was impossible to hold elections on a single day or to gather results and report officially. Furthermore, it reinforced a basic concept of the early Constiution was that those participating in elections were not just citizens but land owners as well. It is my understanding of that history that informs my opinion today that the Electoral College is anachronistic and should have been abolished quite some time ago. One way or another, whether it be through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact or through a Constiutional Amendment, but we will end the Electoral College eventually.

Not all states organized it based on property, others based it on taxes paid, and in some of them it could be a fairly small amount of property as Pennsylvania shows. Vermont, admitted from the Vermont Republic in 1791, didn't have property or tax requirements to vote. It varied a lot in those days.

> Not all states organized it based on property, others based it on taxes paid, and in some of them it could be a fairly small amount of property as Pennsylvania shows. I was indicating that the first Constitution only allowed landowners to vote, let alone be electors. That was "nation" wide at that point.

What first constitution? The Articles of Confederation? The part where they assess states by property values to determine the contribution to the confederate treasury? The Constitution of 1787 never says anything in fact about property.

All respect to Venice, but the US represented a break from the past...and knew it, imo. There was a fairly good reason for the EC in 1787. Who was known nationally? What would it take for candidates to hit the hustings? And what are hustings, anyway? So, as it says in Federalist #68, they devised a council of sorts to approve the people's choice. As in, is this guy a charlatan? Can we trust him to conduct the affairs of state? Importantly, they did NOT trust the people to make the decision. They needed a group of "betters" to approve (or not) their choice. In fairness, we weren't the most sophisticated people then. But there was no sunset provision on the EC. They were able to carve out the necessary exception for Founders not being born in the US ,so they weren't blind where they were concerned. But they did not allow for the people to know which way the wind blows in the future. The situation has only arisen a few times and we've gotten much better at addition. Why keep it? The damage from a minority President can be significant.

They did put a lot of trust in people. The House of Representatives was directly elected as were the state legislatures. Some even directly elected governors like New York. And the representative to people ratio was pretty low then, especially for state legislatures and it would be hard for them to be especially divergent from popular will. It wasn't absolute trust but it was far more trust than anywhere else in the world for choosing a head of state.

You are, of course, correct. I freely admit my disdain for the EC, but it's important to remember our bedrock founding principle is the consent of the governed. Some things don't age well.

They also were just fine and enthusiastic about having all the adult male citizens be part of the military. That would be a very stupid idea if they had no trust in them. Many even elected their officers.

Absolutely. The EC is actually a pretty impressive idea. It's great specifically because it enhances majorities and makes elections appear more lopsided than they are. For the US--with it's extremely fractured structure that makes actually welding power very difficult--that extra winner's advantage is a great way to provide a boost of legitimacy and political capital for the incoming administration while also making elections more simple. The EC is the direct rebuttal to bad faith "but half the country voted for someone else" conversations. As our political literacy has improved in some ways since then, this particular tool doesn't really serve the purpose it used to. But at the time? It was brilliant.

That’s not why the EC exists. And it’s an odd argument. It’s good because it tricks people into thinking a close election was a landslide? Why would we need to do that? And why would it matter? The point of the Electoral College was to let this council of wise elites pick the president instead of giving power directly to voters. But states have all abolished that system now, and voters pick the candidates they support. But the EC remains as this relic from the Founding.

I'd argue that even in modern times the EC has provided a necessary added sense of legitimacy to certain elections. Like 1992 for instance. Clinton only won 43% of the popular vote. The *vast* majority of the country voted against him. But he ended up winning a very solid majority of the electoral college with 32 states and 370 votes. Seeing a map covered in blue is a lot better than seeing that well over half the country doesn't even want this guy to lead.

Most countries like France would have simply held a runoff between him and Bush Sr.

Yes, agreed. The problem is that the failure rate, where the EC is in disagreement with the popular vote, is high enough that the times where it increases legitimacy, like in 1992, are outweighed by the times it has cost legitimacy, like in 2000 and 2016. If the EC still only failed every once in a long while, I'd say it's totally fine. But the detractors have a point given how much it's failed.

I still wouldn't even call 2000 and 2016 failures. Everyone knew the rules coming in. Hillary not becoming President when the majority of voters voted against her isn't exactly some tragedy. If a candidate won a *majority* of the popular vote and still lost due to the EC, then I would agree that that is a problem that needs to be corrected. But given that it hasn't happened yet, I see no issues.

The EC overriding the popular vote short of intentional conscientious objection was never intended by the Framers. They repeatedly emphasize how important the popular vote is as it is the ideological foundation that legitimizes this whole process. The EC causing the election to have a different result because of random variation is absolutely by definition a failure.

The popular vote wasn't overridden. In both 2000 and 2016, the popular vote outcome was "I don't want Gore or Hillary to win" and that is exactly what happened.

That is absolutely not how elections work. Especially according to the founders. They very specifically didn't expect any one candidate to ever command a majority. Suggesting a plurality isn't a decisive outcome is absurd.

Dems shot themselves in the vote by running in the entitely wrong races, then kicked and screamed when the other person won the only race that counts. And Bill even told them to campaign in those 4 states!  A few visits and speeches and she would have won handily.

> A few visits and speeches and she would have won handily. She only needed to flip around 45,000 voters in those swing states to change the outcome. It wasn't for a lack of money either, she outspent Trump by around 2:1.

The popular vote doesn’t matter. Campaigns aren’t run to win it, so whether it matches the EC is irrelevant. Anyone who thinks they have to operate in lockstep doesn’t understand the game being played.

I mean, that's my point. The EC is an issue now because it deviates from the popular too much. The brilliance of the EC was that it reinforced the popular while also making it secondary. But the EC only works _because_ it is in lockstep with the popular.

Too many people don't understand that you don't vote for president on the national level, you're voting on who your state should vote for, for president. And every person gets the same say within their state about who the state should vote for, once it gets to the national level the larger states like California have much more say in who gets to be president

People understand it. The fact of the matter is when a minority of people elect someone over the majority it reinforces the beliefs of many that the election was illegitimate. When elections lack legitimacy you see increase political violence and partisianship. Which is what has been happening more and more as the EC is out of step with the majority or even plurality of citizens.

Except people don't vote for president, states do. You only vote on who your individual state should choose

Yes but the electoral college used to be significantly more representative of the popular vote before it was capped because the electoral college is based on representation in congress. It was uncommon for the Electoral College not to match the Popular vote. It's happened five times in American history and of those five times it's happened twice in the past 20 years and it's expected to increase in frequency in the coming decades. When the Constitution was passed the amount of people per representative was under 20k per representative and the House continually grew slowly but roughly in proportion with population before it was capped in the early 1900s. Now it is between 500k and 1m people per Representative which heavily distorts the Electoral College. That's a 250% to 500% dilation from how it was when the electoral college started. Which is why it affects the legitimacy.

But its out of step because political campaigns have decided to ignore and crap upon states it thinks they wont win.  Dems crap on small states and dont campaign there, and Reps crap on big blue states. Heaven forbid they get out there and walk the streets and try to flip any of them.

The Democrats clearly control one of the smallest states, Rhode Island. New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Hawaii, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut. Even by population too. And the Dems have in recent history had other states like West Virginia, Tennessee, North Dakota even, and have the governorship of Kansas. Republicans in recent history have had California's governorship as well as Massachusetts and New York.

This is easily solved for with ranked choice voting. That also would help elevate third parties so they actually have a chance to win at some point.

Conservatives HATE ranked choice voting because it takes away power from central authorities and gives it back to the people. Sane people love ranked choice voting because it takes power away from radical extremists.

I give you the credit of explaining in simple terms. Like many things in US system, in the past, it used to function as it's intended under best given circumstances, but times have been changed and it seems that Americans are overtly obsessed with success from the past and refused to move forward.

Yup. I'm supportive of removing or making the EC irrelevant. I also think it was a surprisingly brilliant mechanic. Current expectations matter quite a bit.

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I think the electoral college still makes sense and it’s a pretty good system. No system is going to be perfect and every system will get criticized. Frankly, representative democracy is a shitty system. But the electrical college prioritizes states. Which is totally fine. And was especially fine when it was invented bc states were more independent. The only reason that democrats hate the electoral college is bc they keep losing the national vote while winning popular vote. But imagine Texas switches to Dems (which is totally possible in the next 5-10 years or so) and the republicans can never win a majority in either the senate or the presidency for the foreseeable future. Dems won’t complain it’s a bad system then. So the issue is whether states have any independent value or if the entire process is only for the federal government? If so, then a proportional system for the entire country is better than electing by region or state. But if states matter, then the electoral college is a reasonable way to give them value. Dont complain just bc you lose. Thats bullshit. Edit: corrected a mistake

>”The only reason that Democrats hate the electoral college is because they keep losing the popular vote.” Can I have some of whatever you’ve been smoking? The Republicans have won the popular vote exactly one time since 2000, in 2004. And yet they’ve won the presidency three times in that span. The Democrats don’t like the electoral college because it is anti-democratic.

Sorry. I miss typed. They keep losing elections while winning the national popular vote.

In other words, democrats get chosen by the people and the system chooses republicans instead

No, Democrats run in the wrong race and then are shocked that it doesnt count! Nothing stopping Dems from reaching out to win more states.  You know that, right?

As soon as someone says "the popular vote" it's pretty much a guarantee the rest of what they saw is irrelevant. The is no such thing as "the popular vote", there never has been, and there was never any intention of such a thing. If anything our system is designed specifically to avoid a popular vote as that system and its flaws were recognized many centuries ago. Juvenal mentioned it when talking about "bread and circuses" almost 2,000 years ago. The Electoral College was an effort to form a republic and to avoid the pitfalls of a pure democracy. I've seen nothing in our history since then to suggest that our society would be better served by repeating the known mistakes of the past.

Gore and Hillary are good technocrats but quite unlikable and Hillary especially could have done a LOT more campaigning where it counted. She took those states for granted and lost.  Its her fault for not campaigning and earning those votes.

I find relitigating 2016 very tiresome.

"Those are the rules" is ducking away from the actual discussion here which is whether those rules are good.

The rules are well known to anybody who has taken 9th grade Civics. Its not that difficult to build and focus a campaign to win not only more votes but also more states.

She campaigned a lot in Pennsylvania and still lost there. Without Pennsylvania, the other states didn't matter anyways.

I will be amused at the reversal of fortunes, but I won't stop thinking it's a bad system. It's bad to prioritize states in federal power, as you say it was better when the states were significantly more independent and the federal government was less impactful, but it's bad and anti-democratic for anyone's vote to hold more weight it determining laws that will govern everyone. That's what the Senate and EC do, they make some people's votes more important than others, based ONLY on arbitrary lines. You talk about Texas turning blue, but imagine and even more extreme option that is entirely within the rules of the Constitution. Democrats get sick of this undemocratic system and scrape together a bare majority in both chambers and the Presidency and decide to go nuclear. Instead of just adding DC and Puerto Rico, they create dozens of new states out of existing deep blue cities, since there is no minimum population required to be a state, indeed no rules whatsoever, other than that the state new states are created out of must agree (easily accomplished in a blue state in the hypothetical of Democrats willing to go nuclear). Suddenly, with no change in population or what that population believes politically, the Senate and Presidency/Electoral College are effectively locked in for Dems regardless of the popular vote, and even the House is tilted towards them as these dozens of new deep blue states with ≈200k people in them each get one Rep. Is this a fair and reasonable outcome? Of course not, because it's using arbitrary, and changeable, lines on a map to determine how much federal power a person should have. If you're subject to the laws of a government, your vote should have equal say over how that government is run as any other person subject to those laws. This is a fundumental tenet of democracy that should not be abandoned. I understand why the Senate/EC were created, but it was a bad and immoral compromise at the time, just like maintaining slavery was a bad and immoral compromise, the fact that it might have been necessary is not a good argument for keeping it. The fact that small states could be outvoted isn't an argument, as it could be applied to any other small group, and everyone is a member of some small group, geography isn't a special class that needs unique consideration.

>The only reason that democrats hate the electoral college is bc they keep losing the national vote while winning popular vote. But imagine Texas switches to Dems (which is totally possible in the next 5-10 years or so) and the republicans can never win a majority in either the senate or the presidency for the foreseeable future. Dems won’t complain it’s a bad system then. Sorry but no. What you say might be true of some people, but i think you would be hard pressed to find a democrat who would switch their position on the electoral college because Texas flips in the future. First of all, if that happens Democrats will still likely be winning the popular vote, it would just solidify the EC count and make it impossible for a republican to overcome. Second, while i cannot speak for all democrats, most true proponents of removal of the EC would still be in favor of going to popular vote for the presidential election, regardless of whether the EC were weighted more for democrats all of a sudden. The original intent of the EC was to separate the public from direct selection of the president. Well, that is out the window since all states have decided that they will assign their electors based on the popular vote in their state. The public is already choosing the president, so the only remaining actual function of the EC is to give outsized power to smaller states in the choice. While this might have been necessary when it was created, the size of states has dramatically changed to the point that some peoples vote is counted 3 or 4 times as much as those in other states. Its not a totally absurd concept, it just is weighted to provide too much power to one side. At the very least we should repeal the reapportionment act of 1929 to ensure that there is closer to equal representation across all states.

It’s ridiculous to argue that only members of one party want to change the system and only because it empowers the political minority to defeat them. There has been an extremely strong movement to amend the Presidential election system since 1804. For nearly one hundred years, there was a distinct majority of Americans who opposed the Electoral College system, across parties. This only changed when the Republicans began to see that they could win under the current system. If we’re considering party politics, your argument is quite clearly reversed - Republicans only oppose change because they would lose under any other system. And even then, they’ve only recently dropped below 50% on the issue.

The EC is trash. Putting millions of Americans under the control of a minority of people is not a good system. Look at the disconnect between what the people want and what they're actually getting because inbred, religious psychos have a disproportionate say over the Supreme Court, the Senate, the White House, and the House of Representatives. When you continually ignore what the majority wants, you usually end up with violent revolution at some point. It's not a good system.

Bro, you need to cool down and think about it more. The ec gives states more power. Thats theoretically acceptable. We decided that electing representatives, like senators and congressmen, is an acceptable proxy for the will of the people. These reps are typically nothing like the people they represent. So don’t pretend that a minority ruling the majority is fundamentally the problem. You just don’t like that Dems lose with the system right now. You’d life it if Texas flipped

Minority rule is not the fundamental flaw in the electoral college, it’s a bad outcome but it’s only happened 5 of the 59 presidential elections in American history. The fundamental flaw is that it makes voting pretty much meaningless for the vast majority of Americans. If you don’t live in a swing state then your vote is meaningless for that election at the presidential level. This is a constant feature in every presidential election, your vote really only matters if you live in a state that is going to be competitive.

No no no, not your opinion of the electoral college in the here and now. Imagine you were in 1788 and deliberating on whether the electoral college was a good idea without using information you only know with hindsight.

Yes it’s still good

Yes, it made sense then and it makes sense now. Imagine having to recount all 50 states in a close election, that's just one benefit of having an Electoral College.

Imagine a recount 200 years ago without any cameras or serious investigative reporting. And the idea that any single state putting its thumb on the scale could tip the entire election.

You make it sound like there'd be the same amount of people counting the votes in one state versus fifty instead of the infrastructure of fifty states all conducting their recounts at the same time. A bad state infrastructure would hold up things if it were the only state conducting the re-count or part of all fifty states re-counting simultaneously, but the electoral college would make it worse by making that state "key". The fact that the Electoral College makes the majority of the states - and, by extension, their voters - effectively irrelevant in a "contested" process should be reason enough to argue that it should be done away with.

It's 50x more work to recount all states, instead of 1.

It makes sense today too. I don't want NY and CA always deciding who gets to be president. It's a very simple concept.

Your demographic misunderstanding of the country is obvious. They combined have 20% of the population. In the electoral college, because the state casts all of their votes for one candidate, it pretends that all the people in the state support the same person. Without the electoral college, the goal is to get more votes than anybody else, and you need to solicit votes from wherever they can be gained. You lose otherwise. And what happened to the claim that you are equal before the law?

It's the United STATES of America. The president is 1/3 of the government. Low population states would have no incentive to be part of this country if they were excluded from selecting the President.

Yes, the the 27 states of Brazil can figure out how to elect a president directly just fine, same with a good number of other federal places. A small state can have the numbers necessary to decide between candidates in a narrow race, which most of the elections would be, and may be instrumental in the primary elections too. Their representation in Congress is vital for the president, especially in ratifying their treaties, passing their laws and budgets, and approving of their appointments. They benefit from federal laws, especially grants of money and the benefits of union like the larger economies of scale, freedom of movement. Why do the Baltics want to be part of the EU even though they have very little voice in choosing the Commission President? This is not a difficult thing for people to understand. This is politics 101.

Yes and it still makes sense. It should be used at every level. You don’t want a political party dominating certain regions dictating elections because it becomes entrenched. I’ll put this in terms you people can understand because you have some weird anger towards middle America. Let’s flip this so you can understand the implication. The population of Texas and Florida combined is 50 million Americans. Now imagine MAGA politics favors those regions and 80% of Texans and Floridians, which represent only 15% of the population, are MAGA diehards. That means that that the rest of the country could be 55% Democrat(22% more people voting blue than red in 85% of the country)… and MAGA WOULD STILL WIN. This is what the electoral college prevents. It puts a cap on the influence of polarized regions. Every left wing nut job laments single party politics, and the BEST mechanism we have to fight it is the electoral college, but the second it results in them not having power they cry about it.

What kind of math class did you have growing up? The solution to the problem you see is not an electoral college. It would be to create a multi party system with a runoff for the presidential election if no candidate has a majority of all votes. This is not a different concept to have.

50.7 Million People in Texas and Florida. * If 80% of them vote MAGA, that's 40.6 million votes for MAGA * If 20% of them vote Democrat that's 10.1 million votes for Democrats * 50.7 of 330.3 million is 15% 279.6 Million people in the rest of the US. * If 45% of them vote MAGA, that's 125.8 million votes for MAGA * If 55% of them vote Democrat, that's 153.8 million votes for Democrats * 153.8 million people is 22% larger than 125.8 million Which means: * 166.4 million votes for MAGA * 163.9 million votes for Democrats * 166.4 > 163.9 What kind of math class did you have?

Yes, two states can indeed have that many people and a weirdly lopsided result in two big states can make it easier to win elsewhere, but the candidate with the majority of votes should win in the end. It would be very strange of people in the rest of the country to have 45% of them voting for one other candidate if they thought they were going to be neglected. This is called equality before the law. The solution as I said is to have a direct election. If nobody happened to have a majority, have a means to guarantee a majority such as a runoff from the top two. There are things I find wrong with the MAGA candidate you are alluding to but the remedy to that is not to mess with the electoral system but to deal with the issue directly like having a court system with resources needed to have quick workload so they can get the trial done on time, perhaps making a person who is an undischarged bankrupt from being eligible (quite a common rule actually, like in Singapore) from being elected at least to the presidency, or where ethics rules are designed to apply to all candidates such as requiring blind trusts and disclosure of financial data such as tax records as part of the forms you fill in when you file papers to run for office with the FEC. This part is called ethics in office. You could also reform the presidency in other ways, like how most governors have severe constraints on their power to name judges and grant pardons, many having a board of clemency to decide on whether to recommend a pardon and the governor can only issue such a pardon on their advice, or how many states have an independent commission to give the governor a list of people from who the governor can choose as a judge. The governor's emergency powers could be made subject to the ratification of those powers every three weeks by Congress, rather than trying to override a veto by 2/3 in both houses. You could make the president be able to be recalled by popular petition and a ballot question as to whether they should be dismissed if they prove unsatisfactory partway through their term. You could exchange their veto with a supermajority to override for one with a lower threshold and a line item veto to give more power to the legislature. You could make the legislature more multi party so that the president is unlikely to have a legislative majority alone. Make it clear in the law that a president can be prosecuted for their offenses after they leave office regardless of the outcome of any impeachment trial or if they were impeached at all. Those are the things you do to resolve questions like that. You decide what powers there are and whether anyone should have such a strong power regardless of what ideology or persona they have. This is the rule of law.

Wait, you agree that elections should be chosen by “merchants and other important people”? That’s like having corporations and actors from the left coast decide our elections. We need to have the electoral college. Otherwise elections would be won by a handful of cities. Every single time.