Comment by decebalus1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by decebalus1 | Hacker News Reader

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Radicalized how? And where's the humor exactly?

It's no secret and it's a shared belief (shockingly, even among non-'radicalized' people, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_S...) that the electoral college is undemocratic, obsolete (quite stupid by today's standard), vulnerable to interference (like we saw in 2020 and we'll definitely see in 2024) and it led to the current SCOTUS anomaly. For a nation that prides itself with 'innovation', to never end up reforming its electoral process and amend the constitution is just mind boggling to me. The electoral college was supposed to protect the country against people like Trump. We all know how well that worked out for everyone. And we'll find out again in 2024, as fringe groups inside the republican party are quietly setting up their people in key places.

If your counterargument in favor of the electoral college is that 'the constitution says so', there are a lot of constitutional amendments which prove that it's possible 'it can no longer say so'.

I'm saying that if you actually believe that elections won in compliance with the legal rules at the time of the election are, in fact, stolen elections, you hold an incredibly radical opinion. The terms of the election in the US are to win the electoral college. Campaigns, money, candidates, all of the efforts involved are done with the shared understanding that that is the goal. If the goal was to win the popular vote, or any other metric, then the entire arc of polticians who have presidential aspirations would be different, and many who would have won the electoral college and lost the popular vote would in fact win the popular vote instead or whatever metric you have in mind.

You don't have to agree with the electoral college's system to understand that if someone wins an election based on the rules defined up front, they have won the election, and that those that achieved other measures of electoral support in that election have lost, since those measures were not the goal of the candidate to achieve. To think that not only is this not the case, but that the election was "stolen", goes even beyond being radical, it's entirely irrational, as it would be if you said a baseball game was "stolen" by the team with the most runs but failed to secure the most hits. It's very likely that if that winning team knew that hits was the goal, and not runs, that they'd have won under those rules as well.

Protecting us from crazy candidates due to an uninformed public was one of the arguments for the electoral college, but the main reason was simply to facilitate the ratification of the constitution by slave owning states that wanted to get more representation due to having more enslaved people without actually having to give them the right to vote and without having to consider them fully human.

The three fifths compromise would have been difficult to work out if you didn't use an electoral system.

> The electoral college was supposed to protect the country against people like Trump.

As I understand it, this is incorrect. IIUC, the electoral college still exists in order for the mega-cities not to outvote the countryside every single time. Otherwise, it would be like two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner; the cities would always vote for policies only good for cities, and completely ignore any bad effects on the countryside.

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