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Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

The same 51% will just vote for a populist candidate to push their agenda. You can’t escape it by playing games with required thresholds. Brexit happened because people wanted it to happen.

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That's not enough. You can vote for a populist, your 51% can get the populist elected, but they have to work through the regular system to get anything done, and the regular system has (very deliberate) checks and balances to keep one office holder from doing too much damage.

At that point you’re intentionally going against the will of the people and calling it a virtue.

Yes, I am, following the explicitly stated intent of the authors of the United States Constitution. They deliberately did not want direct democracy, fearing mob rule.

Then you must be in favor of institutions such as the electorate college.

First, I deplore the rhetorical trick you just used. You put words in someone else's mouth that are tangentially related to what they have said. It's a cheap and dishonest way of arguing.

What I said was that I was not in favor of direct democracy. In context, what that means is "rule by referendum". I'm against it, and so were the authors of the Constitution. And they had good historical reasons - they saw what happened to democracy in ancient Greece. That position is not directly related to the electoral [not electorate] college. I could be against the electoral college without that invalidating my position on referendums.

As it happens, I am in favor of the electoral college, but on different grounds - limiting the ability of the large states to run over the small ones. It's the same reason we have a Senate, not just a House of Representatives.

I didn’t mean to be snarky and I apologize for the comment out of hand. I actually agree with you that a representational government is much better than submitting to the whims and passions of the mob.

However in the case of things like brexit vote, it really does seem like it’s the elites versus the common folk battling out what their vision for what the country should look like.

I don't know enough about UK politics to say much intelligent here. Does it seem to you that the elites wanted to remain and the common folk wanted to leave?

I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case, but information from someone who knows more would be nice...

The thing about the Electoral College is that it's not really used these days to go against the will of the people in any real sense, but merely to distort the popular vote a little based on how the electoral votes are apportioned. As such, you get all of the downsides, i.e. going against the voters in close elections, effective disenfranchisement of voters in "non-swing" states, etc., without the purported benefit of saving the masses from themselves.

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