Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

The electoral college is undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw.

The Senate is also undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw.

The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy. That difference is why we have the electoral college and the Senate.

View on HN

> The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy.

I see this repeated so much in online discussions, and it makes no sense to me. Is it enough to not have a monarchy? There's no actual reason why democracy and republic need to be distinguished, because we're almost always talking about a system where people get a say in how they are governed, not whether there's a monarch.

Nobody doubts whether Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands or Spain are democracies.

Now to the point about the constitutional issues. Why is it that it's fair for a minority to decide who gets to be leader? To people who've grown up in democratic systems, it certainly seems to be a flaw that it's possible for someone get less support than the loser.

To put it another way, what is having a senate and electoral college that isn't proportional to votes supposed to save you from? Is there a good argument or example of a situation where that made sense?

Fair, but the Senate was designed as a moderating influence to hedge against mob rule. That may be a good idea, but today it's also a joke.

Why is it a joke? Or, why do you think it's more of a joke than mob rule is?

Because congress represents lobbyist interest and not the interests of their constituents. It's not a democracy, it's not a republic. It's an oligarchy or corporatocracy. That's the joke. It's just that the mob is the few people who have most of the money.

A mob at least doesn't pretend to care about whomever it's bullying. The senate whose majority represents a minority has to make all sorts of contortions to act like they're doing the right thing, because they have to both justify what they're doing and their right to do it.

I think the US founding fathers somehow thought the senate would be populated by people who could put some sort of "good of the nation" ahead of their own interests.

The senate was originally elected by the states directly, the general population didn’t play any part of the process. This was abolished, in addition to many responsibilities of the senate - oversight of the executive, a leading voice in international relations - have been ceded to the executive branch. I wouldn’t say it’s more of a joke than mob rule, but it’s a thin veneer of respectability.

Yeah; it just means we have a non-representative mob. Good idea in theory; clearly not so much in practice.

Poppycock. For the first 50 years of the nation, only 6% of the population could vote. White, male, landowners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_t...

The founding of the nation was built on compromise. The direction ever since has been to greater equality. To more representation. To form a more perfect union. Senators used to be appointed by state legislatures until 1913. Would you advocate for a return to that? Neither party used to have primaries as we know them today. Would you advocate for a return to that?

https://www.cop.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/brie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pri...

A republic just means that we elect leaders who pass laws, instead of voting on those laws directly.

The EC was a compromise just as much as the 3/5ths compromise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...

The last two presidents elected by a minority of the vote have been an unmitigated disaster for America. The EC has enabled that. The EC serves no useful purpose anymore. We should abolish it or work-around it with the National Vote Compact.

As far as the Senate, 53 Senators currently represent 15 million fewer Americans that the other 47. I think that's that's a problem. It tilts in favor of the GOP today, but tomorrow it may tilt in favor of Democrats. I would still think it's a problem.

The 26 smallest states make up only 18 percent of the population.

We can mitigate it by adding DC and Puerto Rico (should they so chose) as states. DC and PR residents are Americans. They should be represented in the Senate.

But I suppose, if I were around at the nation's founding, I would have been a Federalist.

Relevant piece on the Senate with some astute observations about why it used to work (TL;DR: compromise) but no longer does, and the danger of minoritarian rule:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21450891/mitch-mccon...

... and also why we had so much injustice.

You can change the framing but not the core issue: why is this particular form of a Republic best?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com