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Comment by stkdump | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on this? It is my understanding that electors are not allowed to change the vote based on anything like being more informed or something similar. Is this wrong? Or did the mechanics of the election change so much over time?

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Originally the idea was you would vote for people who would do the actual voting. A nice idea, but obviously not workable for many reasons, especially since communication rapidly improved so that candidates could be known widely enough that the actual voters could be somewhat informed. (However, I believe the electors still can change their vote from what they promised, but forget ever doing anything in politics again.)

Electors weren’t bound to a candidate. The founding fathers wanted democracy but were worried about “well-meaning but uninformed people” who may be vulnerable to charismatic populists, candidates with blatantly unfit characters, and influence by foreign propaganda. Electors were meant to be well-informed, exercise their judgment and prevent unfit candidates from being elected. That didn’t work in practice, and eventually states passed laws to pick partisan electors via popular vote. Then that gate keeping power shifted to party insiders, who chose the nominee and were meant to gatekeep bad/insane candidates. Then populists took that away too, because “people power” can never go wrong, right?

The current system, where you can vote in primaries, and where electors reflect their states’ vote, is just a few decades old.

Penalties for “faithless electors” are somewhat recent and only exist in states which passed laws to give themselves that power.

>Then populists took that away too, because “people power” can never go wrong, right?

the blatant, sneering disdain for lowly commoners that supposed proponents of "democracy" are continually unable to contain for even a few paragraphs at a time will somehow never fail to shock me

I’m not a proponent for anything except competent leadership. Your need to project another group’s ideas onto me, to reinforce your preexisting feeling against them, does slightly prove my point.

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