this is why the electoral college fucking sucks.
Without the electoral college, the determining factor of the elections would be California, Chicago and New York just because they have more people concentrated in one area. Our system is the best of the best and the people spoke. I’m hurt as well as most of America but the best thing we can do is keep an open mind, accept, and move on.
So what? Why does it matter if the majority of votes come from one area? If most of the people in the country want one person to be president, then that person should be president. Why should it matter where they’re from?
And that’s not even the reason the college was made in the first place. It was made for 2 reasons.
1. The founding fathers didn’t trust the citizens. They thought the citizens were too uneducated to make a good choice.
And 2. It’s easier to count the votes of a small group of people all in one place rather than millions across the country when there’s no cars or internet.
In today’s age, neither of those reasons are valid anymore. There is no good reason for the electoral college to exist. If the majority of people want someone as president, that person should be president.
Here is why the electoral college sucks:
Without the electoral college, every single vote would count exactly the same. No vote anywhere in the country would be worth more than any other vote. Now you may ask, but Raymond, isn’t it like this already?
Take Wyoming for example. Wyoming has a population of 584,000 people. They also have 3 electoral college votes. This means that each 194,667 votes is worth one electoral college vote in Wyoming. Now let’s look at California. California has a population of 38.8 million people and 55 electoral college votes. This means that it takes 705,455 votes for each electoral college vote.
A VOTE IN WYOMING IS WORTH 3.5X MORE THAN A VOTE IN CALIFORNIA.
It literally takes 3.5 times more votes to get 1 electoral vote in California than it does in Wyoming. How tf is that fair?
Don’t come in here and tell me how it’s the best system and without it the only determining factor would be certain cities. How does that even make sense? Without it, a vote in New York City is worth the exact same amount as a vote in any other city, or town, regardless of population. I personally would like my vote to count for exactly the same as anyone else. My vote shouldn’t count as less because I live in a more densely populated city.
What a good explanation! ^
you know what? no, i need to add something. a lot of something.
this is NOT just a vestige of the rural vs. populated issues, or even coastal vs. interior. the electoral college persists because of fucking racism, and exists because the southern states wanted an unfair advantage in 1800.
because see, smaller states DO get special privileges. every state gets two seats in the senate (whereas the number of house seats is determined by the population of your state), and congress was specifically designed that way so that less populated states wouldn’t be at a disadvantage, with giving them an overwhelming advantage either.
here’s a history lesson on why we have a bullshitty electoral college:
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority.As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.
slavery is over, but we just replaced that system with the prison industrial complex. did you know people incarcerated can’t vote (with the exception of two states)? did you know that in many states people with felonies also can’t vote, even after they’ve been out of prison for a while? DID YOU KNOW THAT THEY ARE STILL COUNTED AS PART OF THE POPULATION TOWARDS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. a prison is a HUGE boon in most areas. it’s not just a source of jobs. it’s a source of grant money (because oh look suddenly the town’s population is way blacker, and there are grants that those towns are suddenly eligible for, it doesn’t matter that those black people are in PRISON, and that they have no say in where they’re incarcerated, and WILL NOT BENEFIT FROM THAT GRANT MONEY), and the prison’s population will also empower that town politically. it is not a fair system. it has never been a fair system. it a system that thrives on stealing primarily people of color from their communities and manipulating population numbers in order to benefit largely wealthy white people.
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
