Each state gets numbers by its population. Great. Forefathers intended it this way. I think that's fair.
It stops a giant mob from overpowering the system. Unless you take over the Post office and use it as a voting system, which dems clearly did here.
I don't think a direct democracy would work in the US. I like representative democracies.
This is false, and the core of the criticism of the EC. Each state gets 2 votes independent of its population, which is biased toward small population states, and for over a century the definition of states was constrained by a compromise to protect slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
The same approach (all states having two senators) biases the Senate in favor of low population states.
This appears to have been intentional on the part of the founders, but that doesn't make it right.
[ EDIT: s/two/three/ ]
So big states couldn't bully around small ones.
How is that not "bullying"?
How does that play any role in an actual democratic nation, as opposed to some pre-Lincoln concept of the US a series of independent states merely "unioned"? The answer is obvious: it doesn't.
39,510,000/55 = 718363.636364
In addition, there's 0 reason for the house to be as malapportioned as it is. 435 house members isn't written in the constitution.
Third, the entire concept of smaller states having an outsized voice in the federal government comes from the slave owners from the South in 1789. There's no rational basis for it any longer.
People like to pretend the founders were deities and the constitution is handed down from god. But they weren't and it wasn't. A lot of their ideas were really stupid. I mean JFC, we couldn't even get through 3 elections before they had to redo it.
Vermont has a lot more in common these days with California than it does North Dakota. The EC and Senate are outmoded relics from a stupider time that should be abolished.
No. It had to do with Connecticut, New Jersey and other small population states who wouldn't have ratified the Constitution unless there was state representation (as we have in the Senate) to balance out the representation by population (cf. The Connecticut Compromise[0]).
The southern states had (or expected to have) large populations, and as such, wanted representation by population.
History and facts matter.
The Southern States were underrepresented in the Senate compared to the House by the initial apportionment in the Constitution, represented at very close to the same ratio in each House in the apportionment for the 1790 Census (largely reflecting that they had been overrepresented relative to population, in the House, in the Constitutional apportionment), and substantially overrepresented in the Senate compared to the House after the 1800 Census.
They were well aware of the imminent demographic trends and acted accordingly.
> History and facts matter.
Indeed they do, but the history and facts aren't on the side of “the Southern States had large initial and expected future populations as counted for apportionment in the House and, so by-State representation in the Senate was contrary to, rather than designed to serve, their regional interest.”
That's orthogonal to the concerns of small population states, in 1787, when the Connecticut Compromise was adopted.
What's more, the results of 1790 and 1800 Censuses didn't impact support or opposition to that compromise, as they hadn't been performed yet.
>by-State representation in the Senate was contrary to, rather than designed to serve, their regional interest.”
Which is the flip-side of the coin to what I said.