Doc1
Gold Member
We have indeed had this discussion before, for two hundred years. Once the WTA ("winner take all") format started snowballing one of the Electoral College's champions, James Madison, called for a Constitutional Amendment that would ban that practice, even though it would have cost his home state of Virginia. So the discussion goes back at least that far.
The Electoral College was invented to act as a buffer between an electorate that was either uninformed about candidates due to the technological limitations of the time, or easily misled by a huckster, in order to subject the decision to better judgment. It was also tweaked to allot extra power to the slave states by counting their slave populations at the negotiated rate of 3/5 of a person (which persons received 0/5 of a vote), which was called "Slave Power".
Obviously technology has changed, slave states no longer exist, and various states have enacted clearly unConstitutional laws requiring their electors to vote WTA regardless of hucksters or better judgments. Today there's only one other country that elects its head of state which does so by indirect method, which is Pakistan.
The Electoral College needs to go literally yesterday. All it does is create the artificial bullshit divisive entities of "red states", "blue states" and "battleground states", none of which would exist without the WTA/EC; in so doing it perpetuates the Duopoly and ensures no third party will ever gain traction; it throws away the votes of millions as pointless, removing the incentive for most people to vote at all, resulting in abysmal turnout; and it ensures that "solid" states taken for granted will never see a candidate; and it makes the electorate dependent on polls to find out whether it's even worth getting out of bed on election day to vote at all. Because for most voters, it isn't.
"It was also tweaked to allot extra power to the slave states by counting their slave populations at the negotiated rate of 3/5 of a person (which persons received 0/5 of a vote), which was called "Slave Power".
Your lack of knowledge concerning the document is glaring.
Actually, the Constitution was tweaked to LIMIT the power of slave states by refusing to count their slave populations as though they were free citizens.
It's amazing what education can actually teach a person.
I know that, you know that but Pogo cannot unwrap his/her head from the propaganda.