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Comment by AngrySkillzz | Hacker News Reader

No one is saying that campaigns and voting behavior wouldn't change. Just that the electoral college is a ridiculous system in the first place and should be gotten rid of.

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> Just that the electoral college is a ridiculous system in the first place and should be gotten rid of.

Chesterton's fence strikes again.[0]

The electoral college addresses a real issue, and "the electoral college is a ridiculous system" is not an argument for removing/replacing it.

If you want to see the electoral college replaced or reformed, you need to at least demonstrate that you understand why it exists in the first place.

Hint: it's not because they weren't aware of the simpler "winner takes all" approach with the popular vote.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

> The electoral college addresses a real issue

The real issue it (along with the 3/5 compromise, the structure of the Senate, and the limited term explicit protection of the slave trade in the original Constitution) addressed is that, in the early US, slavery wasn't all that popular in the states that were more urbanized and had economies and value systems that supported growth in the enfranchised population, so the system had to be skewed to protect the masters in the disenfranchising states for theme to feel secure in their "peculiar institution", even if that meant sacrificing the ideal of equality even among the enfranchised citizenry.

The electoral college had literally nothing to do with slavery, and everything to do with balancing population-based governance and state-based governance (i.e. the reason we have both a House and Senate).

The 3/5 compromise was used to calculate the population-based component of governance, and at any rate, is no longer used so completely irrelevant today.

I gave more details is this response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969671

Nice low-effort comment punk.

The electoral college was created as a part of the three fifths compromise. In order to get southern states on board, the framers needed to find a clever way to count slaves as population without letting them vote. Three-fifths plus the electoral college let them do that. It's an ugly hack that should be patched.

And don't give me any of that "republic" crap. As if anyone has any idea who their electors are, or cares. No voter honestly thinks they are selecting an elector qualified to relay popular opinion to the government. They're voting for the president.

The EC was imagined in an era where people thought the government would be more a federation of states than a central government. That is not what we have today. The system does not make sense in the current context.

Maybe you'll play the "regional interests" card. Sure. Is it any more fair that a minority candidate can be elected by the less populous states, rather than having a majority candidate elected by the more populous states? No. It's a facile argument that falls apart with any examination.

Given the poor modern justification for the EC, and all of the negative externalities it causes (election of less popular candidates, voter suppression and apathy in partisan states, etc.), it deserves to be abolished.

The problem with abandoning the electoral college is that it would violate the original principle[0], namely that the President should be elected by both a population-based and state-based mechanism. So unless we want to repudiate that founding principle, the electoral college is still the way to achieve that balance (then and now).

The electoral college is not racist, either. The 3/5 compromise of course came into any situation where population was considered (including the electoral college), as the country still had slavery at the time. We no longer have that compromise: blacks, women, men without land, etc. can all vote in 2016.

Abandoning the electoral college would just weaken the States, and if that's the plan, we might as well abolish the Senate too—it exists because of the exact same principle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...

> In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the president would be elected by a mixture of the two modes.

I feel like I'm in the minority these days, but I personally think the Electoral College is a clever system that should remain. As large, coastal cities like NYC & LA continue to grow, they risk becoming entirely self-serving at the expense of the rest of the US. Voters in fly-over states often deal with agricultural and manufacturing issues that aren't even on the radar for voters in urban centers, so it's important to ensure the voice of middle-America isn't totally drowned out.

Wouldn't that be better served by reducing federal government's in favor of more local systems (like states, or even cities)?

Some argue that was the original intent of the Founding Fathers by including the 10th amendment.

    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
    nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
    or to the people.

To what extent the Federal government has or has not encroached upon States' rights has become a partisan issue in its own right, these days.

Getting rid of the electoral college for the Presidential election would not affect representation in the House and Senate.

The larger the effect of disenfranchisement via the electoral college is (and therefore, the less effective democratic participation is I resolving the concerns of the people it underrepresents), the greater the likelihood that it causes a crisis which gets resolved by means other than peaceful democratic participation.

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