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Comment by tygorius | Hacker News Reader

The electoral college isn't a bug, it's a design feature. Cf The Federalist Papers.

A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances" mechanisms for a country that is, after all, a collection of individual states.

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In its current form, the electoral college does not perform its original role of preventing mob rule. Electors vote in accordance with the popular vote of their state (this is only required by some states; but still almost never happens, as the parties pick their electors).

What ends up happening is that the electoral college just turns into a weird way of counting the popular votes, where some votes count more then others (specifically, voters in less populace states have a bigger vote; and voters in more divided states are more likely to have a meaningful vote).

Many (including myself) would argue that Donald Trump is precisly the failure mode that the electoral collage was designed to prevent.

I disagree. The fact is that Trump convinced a lot of people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for him in what Democrats thought was their "firewall". Firewall appears to be political jargon for "we can take those people's votes for granted." Former President Bill Clinton thought that strategy was insane but his concerns were dismissed. Sic transit gloria pooheads.

Realistically, Clinton was always going to carry California. If she had made fewer fundraising trips to the west coast and more campaign visits to the Rust Belt states (without calling people there "deplorables") she might have won convincingly. Instead we got an electoral college message from the Rust Belt telling CA, MA, & NY that despite their population advantage they don't get to dictate for the rest of the country. That's pretty much the way it's supposed to work.

The Federalist Papers are propaganda; the design of the electoral college -- like the per-state representation in the Senate, and the 3/5 compromise in apportionment of House seats, on top of both of which the EC rested -- was to protect slavery by overrepresenting slave states. But that's not the kind of thing you put in the marketing material.

Insofar as it was to prevent "mob rule", it was to prevent the values of the majority of voting citizens from overwhelming the particular minority that was keeping humans as chattels.

It's funny that people who have no problem treating modern campaign ads as self-serving propaganda that needs to be examined critically treat the 18th century equivalent as if it were something more noble.

The Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter) were public attempts to persuade people it's true. At the time they were aimed at the people of New York on the issue of ratifying the Constitution -- arguably a moot issue given that by the time New York voted 9 other states had already settled the issue.

Casting the arguments as propaganda in favor of slavery seems a reach.

The Federalist papers were trying to sell the whole Constitution -- including bits like the Electoral College and the unequal representation in both houses of Congress that were sops to the slave stakes at the expense of states like New York -- to the people of New York. Needless to say, it would have been an extremely poor sales technique to advertise that the elements that were designed to advantage themail slave states at the expense of states like New York were designed for that purpose.

It just so happened that slave states were lower in population. As slavery waned in terms of population, a mechanism to equalize this was still seen as needed.

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