Should the American Electoral College System be abolished?

[Nimzonia]

Cali and NY don't get to decide who is President.

Right, only Wisconsin and Arizona get to do that.

[Galiantus III]

I approach the electoral college discussion from a very different perspective than most. I think it should be reformed, but not abolished. My reasoning is thus:

1. The president needs to fairly mediate between the House and Senate

If the president were selected by the popular vote, he would tend to do whatever the House of Representatives wants. At the other extreme, if he were selected in a system where each state had equal power (like if the state legislatures or governors each had one vote), he would tend to side with the senate. This would represent a centralization of power, which is contrary to the whole point of having different branches of government. In a bicameral system such as ours, the head of state ought to be more of a mediator who will seriously consider the positions of both chambers.

2. The president is not your representative

Presidents deal with organizations at a very high level. They deal with states. They deal with the other branches of government. They deal with foreign affairs, and the military. As a nation, we made a mistake when we started treating the presidency as a post for addressing our personal problems, as opposed to the office where the practicality of congressional legislation is tested, and where high level conflict is addressed. In recent decades, presidential power has also been expanded far beyond where it ought to be - which also contributes to the desire for a popular vote. If the president had less power, a lot of these concerns would be alleviated.

Also, I think the selection of a person to fill a position ought to reflect the duties and intended interest of the position. While I definitely think the concerns of the people ought to be among the concerns of the president, that is far from the only relevant concern. On the other hand, that is the entire point of having elected representatives in Congress, so a simple popular election makes sense for that case.

3. Abolishing the Electoral College is a salient reason to initiate actual succession

I know people often throw out succession around various issues, but this is one issue that directly involves states and their relationship with the federal government. The thing is, the states joined the union, usually when they were small, with an understanding that they were ceding some control to the federal government of the U.S. The Electoral College was a part of that package. Removing it is like if your phone company changed a long-held term of your contract they used as a selling point - it is a detail that could motivate you to entirely stop using them.

4. The Electoral College is a fairly miniscule problem (if we consider it a problem)

If I ignore everything I've said up to this point, and take that direct democracy is indeed a better system than the electoral college, I still don't see an issue other than it's slightly more convoluted. It still approximates a popular vote, even if not 100% of the time. However, there are problems with considering the popular vote an actual "popular" vote...

5. There are far more serious issues with our elections

The bigger issue at play is our inability to select a generally well-liked president. Neither the electoral college nor a national popular vote has the power to overcome the polarization manifest in our incredibly dumb first-past-the-post electoral system. Every election cycle, we play an all-or-nothing game where we essentially pick the lesser of two evils presented by the two most distinct opposing factions. There is no compromise. There is no room for centrists. And you would be hard-pressed to find someone who would say our last two presidents have been particularly "popular".

If I had my way, we would keep the electoral college and proceed by implementing approval voting as the standard for presidential elections. For a given state, this would produce a list of presidential candidates by order of preference over the whole population of that state. Electors could then use this information when they meet at the electoral collage, in order to negotiate for a president that has relatively high approval within their state. (Alternatively, state results could be treated as ballots for an RCV election, proportional to Electoral College power). This means candidates with broader appeal could actually beat the polarizing candidates we are so used to.

[Ifreann]

I approach the electoral college discussion from a very different perspective than most. I think it should be reformed, but not abolished. My reasoning is thus:

1. The president needs to fairly mediate between the House and Senate

If the president were selected by the popular vote, he would tend to do whatever the House of Representatives wants. At the other extreme, if he were selected in a system where each state had equal power (like if the state legislatures or governors each had one vote), he would tend to side with the senate. This would represent a centralization of power, which is contrary to the whole point of having different branches of government. In a bicameral system such as ours, the head of state ought to be more of a mediator who will seriously consider the positions of both chambers.

How is power centralised by the President tending to be politically aligned with one of the two houses of the legislature? The President and one house can't do anything.

2. The president is not your representative

Presidents deal with organizations at a very high level. They deal with states. They deal with the other branches of government. They deal with foreign affairs, and the military. As a nation, we made a mistake when we started treating the presidency as a post for addressing our personal problems, as opposed to the office where the practicality of congressional legislation is tested, and where high level conflict is addressed. In recent decades, presidential power has also been expanded far beyond where it ought to be - which also contributes to the desire for a popular vote. If the president had less power, a lot of these concerns would be alleviated.

Also, I think the selection of a person to fill a position ought to reflect the duties and intended interest of the position. While I definitely think the concerns of the people ought to be among the concerns of the president, that is far from the only relevant concern. On the other hand, that is the entire point of having elected representatives in Congress, so a simple popular election makes sense for that case.

As the Head of State, the President absolutely is the representative of the people. On whose behalf do you propose they deal with organisations, and states, and other branches of government, and foreign affairs, and the military, if not on behalf of the people? For whom does the President work, if not the people?

3. Abolishing the Electoral College is a salient reason to initiate actual succession

I know people often throw out succession around various issues, but this is one issue that directly involves states and their relationship with the federal government. The thing is, the states joined the union, usually when they were small, with an understanding that they were ceding some control to the federal government of the U.S. The Electoral College was a part of that package. Removing it is like if your phone company changed a long-held term of your contract they used as a selling point - it is a detail that could motivate you to entirely stop using them.

The word is secession, and perhaps consider that the contract in question has been amended several times without this issue occurring.

4. The Electoral College is a fairly miniscule problem (if we consider it a problem)

If I ignore everything I've said up to this point, and take that direct democracy is indeed a better system than the electoral college, I still don't see an issue other than it's slightly more convoluted. It still approximates a popular vote, even if not 100% of the time. However, there are problems with considering the popular vote an actual "popular" vote...

5. There are far more serious issues with our elections

The bigger issue at play is our inability to select a generally well-liked president. Neither the electoral college nor a national popular vote has the power to overcome the polarization manifest in our incredibly dumb first-past-the-post electoral system. Every election cycle, we play an all-or-nothing game where we essentially pick the lesser of two evils presented by the two most distinct opposing factions. There is no compromise. There is no room for centrists. And you would be hard-pressed to find someone who would say our last two presidents have been particularly "popular".

Irrelevant comments.

If I had my way, we would keep the electoral college and proceed by implementing approval voting as the standard for presidential elections. For a given state, this would produce a list of presidential candidates by order of preference over the whole population of that state. Electors could then use this information when they meet at the electoral collage, in order to negotiate for a president that has relatively high approval within their state. (Alternatively, state results could be treated as ballots for an RCV election, proportional to Electoral College power). This means candidates with broader appeal could actually beat the polarizing candidates we are so used to.

Just directly elect your presidents, stop trying to outsmart democracy.

[Big Jim P]

Cali and NY don't get to decide who is President.

Right, only Wisconsin and Arizona get to do that.

Easiest places to commit fraud no doubt.

[San Lumen]

Right, only Wisconsin and Arizona get to do that.

Easiest places to commit fraud no doubt.

Show your proof.

[American Legionaries]

Cali and NY don't get to decide who is President.

Right, only Wisconsin and Arizona get to do that.

You'd be hard pressed to find an outcome worse than California and New York deciding.

[New haven america]

No. This is the United STATES of American. Cali and NY don't get to decide who is President.

Neither does Texas.

[Spirit of Hope]

Right, only Wisconsin and Arizona get to do that.

You'd be hard pressed to find an outcome worse than California and New York deciding.

How are California and New York going to be deciding the election? Combined they don't have half the population of the US and both have significant numbers of Republican voters. Texas and Florida both have a larger population than New York does.

[New haven america]

You'd be hard pressed to find an outcome worse than California and New York deciding.

How are California and New York going to be deciding the election? Combined they don't have half the population of the US and both have significant numbers of Republican voters. Texas and Florida both have a larger population than New York does.

Because it's a right-wing buzzword used in order to scare the masses into believing they'll be living in a Rule by Minority, as a lot of Reps believe that the only left-wing people in the country only live in those 2 states.

When in reality, they're detailing how they're the minority and whipping up said minority to act like the majority that's under attack.

[Spirit of Hope]

How are California and New York going to be deciding the election? Combined they don't have half the population of the US and both have significant numbers of Republican voters. Texas and Florida both have a larger population than New York does.

Because it's a right-wing buzzword used in order to scare the masses into believing they'll be living in a Rule by Minority, as a lot of Reps believe that the only left-wing people in the country only live in those 2 states.

When in reality, they're detailing how they're the minority and whipping up said minority to act like the majority that's under attack.

I realize that, but its just so divorced from reality. In 2020 Trump got more votes in California than he got in Texas and Biden got more votes in Texas than he got in New York. Further if one, or two, states did have enough of the vote to control the popular vote they would have enough electoral college votes to essentially be the deciding factor.

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

Because it's a right-wing buzzword used in order to scare the masses into believing they'll be living in a Rule by Minority, as a lot of Reps believe that the only left-wing people in the country only live in those 2 states.

When in reality, they're detailing how they're the minority and whipping up said minority to act like the majority that's under attack.

I realize that, but its just so divorced from reality. In 2020 Trump got more votes in California than he got in Texas and Biden got more votes in Texas than he got in New York. Further if one, or two, states did have enough of the vote to control the popular vote they would have enough electoral college votes to essentially be the deciding factor.

political storylines don't even need to related to reality beyond the most basic of truths anymore.

[American Legionaries]

I realize that, but its just so divorced from reality. In 2020 Trump got more votes in California than he got in Texas and Biden got more votes in Texas than he got in New York. Further if one, or two, states did have enough of the vote to control the popular vote they would have enough electoral college votes to essentially be the deciding factor.

political storylines don't even need to related to reality beyond the most basic of truths anymore.

I mean, no they don't.

[New haven america]

Because it's a right-wing buzzword used in order to scare the masses into believing they'll be living in a Rule by Minority, as a lot of Reps believe that the only left-wing people in the country only live in those 2 states.

When in reality, they're detailing how they're the minority and whipping up said minority to act like the majority that's under attack.

I realize that, but its just so divorced from reality. In 2020 Trump got more votes in California than he got in Texas and Biden got more votes in Texas than he got in New York. Further if one, or two, states did have enough of the vote to control the popular vote they would have enough electoral college votes to essentially be the deciding factor.

Are you trying to bring logic into the fascist propaganda of the GOP?

[Spirit of Hope]

I realize that, but its just so divorced from reality. In 2020 Trump got more votes in California than he got in Texas and Biden got more votes in Texas than he got in New York. Further if one, or two, states did have enough of the vote to control the popular vote they would have enough electoral college votes to essentially be the deciding factor.

Are you trying to bring logic into the fascist propaganda of the GOP?

I try to bring logic in general. Democrats aren't without their blind spots as well.

[Nimzonia]

Right, only Wisconsin and Arizona get to do that.

You'd be hard pressed to find an outcome worse than California and New York deciding.

Not really. We already saw it in 2016.

[Kowani]

One of the dumbest things about American civic religion is that it's saints (the Founding Fathers ) wrote, at length, about how what we take as holy writ was an ad hoc, hard-fought political compromise (we will come back to this) rather than something perfect and intentional. They were well aware that they could be wrong about things-unfortunately, what they were wrong about informed a lot of their decision-making. Take Senate apportionment, for example. The logic of states supporting equal senate representation was basically bad demographic priors following trends that didn't last, it was largely northern and mid-Atlantic small states at the middle of the pack who pushed hardest for an equal senate. They thought that the southern states like VA, NC, SC, and GA would keep rocketing in population (and those states thought that as well, which is why the coalition against equal state representation was led by Virginia and made up of GA/SC/NC, as well as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Part of the compromise to mollify those states was that in the initial House apportionment, the South got more seats, PA and MA got shafted), and they wanted to close that path in the future...except due to [events of history], that's not what ended up happening!

They were aware of population sizes in the broadest and most general terms — they knew Virginia was the largest and that Delaware was the smallest, for instance — but beyond that, there was no detailed knowledge of the respective populations of the states. But this is all besides the point, because “equal representation of states was a wise decision to keep the big states from dominating the small ones” is mostly a myth. It was generally understood at the time that the big states did not really share any interests as big states and the small states did not really share any interests as small states. (There was some concern about “consolidation” of the states, and of larger states grabbing territory, but that's not super relevant.) The principal divides between the states had more to do with slavery and commerce than they did population. The US in 1787 was mostly an agrarian society of small landowners and farmers, with some mercantile interests in the northeast. There were no real major cities to speak of, New York is probably the only exception). Equal state representation in the Senate exists less for any particular theoretical reason and more because it was part of the government under the Articles of Confederation and a number of small state delegates just did not want to give up the veto power that came with it. This notably frustrated Madison and the other nationalists to no end, he doesn’t even attempt to defend it in Federalist 62 (which were not really grand declarations of principle so much as they were a bunch of theorycasting and propaganda) he explicitly admits that the apportionment was a sectional power grab necessary for ratification, the paragraph is basically an apology. (Ironically, this is with Madison playing on easy mode, a ton of delegates left after Madison unveiled his plan for a whole new government. They didn’t sign up for regime change! “This whole thing was rigged” was the explicit position of many vocal anti-federalists and they weren’t really wrong!)

Why did I spend so much time talking about the Senate when the thread is about the EC? Because it's a good example of what I meant at the beginning. There's such disrespect for the founders in this fake veneration of what was a fairly grim political compromise. A lot of the worst parts of the Constitution-and yeah, the Senate is one of the worst surviving parts of it-are born from these conditions. The Senate was bad from inception. The states pushing for it had leverage, not arguments, and arguing from 240-year-old leverage is both dumb and meaningless.

But not every failure of the Constitution is like that. Now we get to the Electoral College. The idea that the EC is some sort of keystone of federalism instead of the thing the framers picked because they were tired of melting in Philadelphia is absolute nonsense. It didn't even work for this purpose (and to be fair, it wasn't supposed to), because the purpose of the EC wasn't even about federalism, it was because it allowed the constitutional convention to punt. If we measured it by the federalism metric, it was a complete failure, so good at it that it allowed sectional dominance by Virginian planters for...basically the entire Early Republic. And while they were fine with one state dominating, this wouldn't happen today-Virginia was ~20% of the country's population at the time of ratification, California is ~12% of the modern US'. In fact, it failed practically immediately and imploded so hard a constitutional amendment was needed.

The EC was chosen not because the framers liked it-they'd voted it down before-but because it punted the problem of "how to elect a president" to the states and they were tired of having of to be in stuffy rooms in Philadelphia heat in the summer. The actual way it was sold to the framers was that didn't lead to "ministerial government" (which they hated because of the British) and wasn't direct popular vote (which they hated because they blamed mass democracy for the crises of the 1780s).

Of course, this "get it done so we can escape the 90-degree heat in woolen britches and fake wigs" meant some things weren't going to turn out as planned, and that aforementioned implosion has resulted in a situation where the electoral college as described in the Constitution or intended by the Framers has not been in effect since 1804. The intent was not simply for electors to check populist demagogues, like you'd find in storybook history. The idea was for national (or local, depending on framer and circumstance) elites to pick one of their own, for the electors to be actual agents... and that really never materialized, because from 1800-1830, America just binned the entire original federalist conception of the Constitution because it was oligarchical wishcasting. The founding fathers were (mostly) structural reactionaries living in terror of the 1780s and the fear that the states would print paper currency, who successfully replaced the terrible Articles of Confederation...and then promptly lost the argument over the meaning of the Constitution, High Federalism embodied by the Convention got curb stomped by Jackson. The entire political tendency embodied by most of the framers got wrecked by the democratic-republicans so hard that they considered succeeding during a war. They were able to win a grand total of one election without the help of George Washington and their only institutional power after Adams' single term was a Supreme Court Chief Justice who happened to be a ruthless partisan and outlived his party by 30 years.
One of the fundamentally largest contradictions in American history is the difference between the original intent of the Constitution of 1787 (a pseudo-aristocratic Republic of Letters that would satisfy mutually exclusive elite interests to allow ratification) and what actually happened (the first modern mass democracy*)

*terms and conditions may apply

The constitution as written was intended to be an non-partisan non-mass democracy, but the entire system flipped to become a mass partisan democracy inside of 40 years. (Another blind spot, the Founders somehow didn't see political parties coming even though they all were part of them just a few years down the line! The primary author was a leader of the opposition!)

Reverend Norv mentioned that there is a school of historical thought that says the Reconstruction Amendments fundamentally remade the Constitution-which I do think is true-but I don't think that goes far enough.
We're on our second literal constitution but the constitution of 1787 itself has been fundamentally changed, at minimum, 3 times (Federalist>Jeffersonian, Antebellum>Reconstruction, Pre-New Deal>Post-New Deal)

---

that is, to answer the original question, yes, absolutely, arguments for the current constitutional status quo are wrong on both the merits and the history
the EC (and much of the original constitutional design) are either outright bad or following assumptions about power and voting that quite simply did not pan out how the framers expected them to

[Pinkacre]

Just for a little bit of historical context, the Electoral College is often seen as an institution unique to the United States, but in fact they were common in post-colonial Western Hemisphere nations in the immediate aftermath of independence, seen almost universally as a necessary means of offering a check on direct democracy.

The last Western Hemisphere country other than the United States to abolish its electoral college was Argentina, which last held a presidential election under an electoral college system in 1989.

So other Western Hemisphere countries have moved on, though conceding that post-independence instability in Latin America meant that their constitutional systems have been subject to rather more flux than in the United States.

Oh, interesting. Thanks for the historical context. So it was seen as necessary back then?

No. It was just used to benefit certain people

[Pinkacre]

Right, only Wisconsin and Arizona get to do that.

You'd be hard pressed to find an outcome worse than California and New York deciding.

All Getting rid of the electoral college does is make every vote count the same .

[The Archregimancy]

Oh, interesting. Thanks for the historical context. So it was seen as necessary back then?

No. It was just used to benefit certain people

These two points - that it was seen as necessary, and that it was also used to benefit certain people - are not mutually exclusive.

[Pinkacre]

No. It was just used to benefit certain people

These two points - that it was seen as necessary, and that it was also used to benefit certain people - are not mutually exclusive.

Yeah, that’s why i did not change my writing or use a semicolon

[Leonick]

Since I don't know too much about this topic I'll ask. I know that the president and the vice president is elected with Electoral College. But how are representatives and senators elected? Do they use the same system or are they proportional?

[San Lumen]

Since I don't know too much about this topic I'll ask. I know that the president and the vice president is elected with Electoral College. But how are representatives and senators elected? Do they use the same system or are they proportional?

No they are elected by popular vote. The United States does not have proportional representation.

[American Legionaries]

You'd be hard pressed to find an outcome worse than California and New York deciding.

All Getting rid of the electoral college does is make every vote count the same .

Yes, and?

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

All Getting rid of the electoral college does is make every vote count the same .

Yes, and?

you guys have to remember that AL doesn't care about anything but gun rights. as far as I know, he could be living in a revived nazi germany and he wouldn't care if it meant no gun restrictions.

[American Legionaries]

Yes, and?

you guys have to remember that AL doesn't care about anything but gun rights. as far as I know, he could be living in a revived nazi germany and he wouldn't care if it meant no gun restrictions.

Well if there weren't gun restrictions, how would it be a revived Nazi Germany?