robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

"We the people..." established the fact that power came from the people and the Constitution and the government it established was being set up by the people.
The Electoral College was the method "The People" chose to elect the President to ensure that a few large population states could not over ride or nullify the wishes/interests of the people in the rest of the states. It isn't perfect, but it has worked so far. And of course Popular Vote would not be perfect either. At present over half the population lives in just 9 states. Those nine by voting together could control all presidential elections. The residents of the other 41 states would just be out of luck and helpless.
And yes it is possible to win the Electoral College by winning 11 states. It has never even come close to being done, every elected president had at least half of the states, but it is possible. Lincoln was elected by 18 of 32 states in a 4 way election (56% of the states). And once no one won the electoral college and the incoming House of Representatives had decided the winner - as per the Constitution. Five presidents have won the Electoral College and lost the Popular Vote.

N4646W

Well that is your problem, you free to leave at any time, please! I was also embarrassed to be an American under the last administration, but I sure didn't get my panties in a bunch by it.

Try Argentina. CNN says socalism is working great there. If you decide to stay here, I would strongly recommend that you do a study of our Constitution. Oh, and by the way, it does allow people such as yourself to spew their uneducated crap.

Ron

mpawl

When the left falling over media does not tell the truth, what would you do????? Roll over and play dead? He is getting the truth out there the best that he can with the tools available to him.

He is using technology brilliantly.

phcaan Loc: Willow Springs, MO

I guess you carefully avoided the fact that he was elected despite the unqualified votes counted in blue state totals, not that it makes any difference that presidents are not elected by popular vote results.

Keenan Loc: Central Coast California

There you go again with your silly delusional right wing rantings and re-writing of history that you just can't restrain yourself from doing, constantly. I'll just pull out one of your more blatantly twisted distortions and give you a little history lesson:

"The Electoral College was designed to keep large population states that disagreed with/had different interests from the rest of the country from dominating all elections as they could have done if Popular Vote was used."

Mr. "I'm such a great and honorable history teacher that can never be questioned", there is NOTHING in the writings of the founding fathers that agrees with your little statement of fiction here. Of all the reasons the founding fathers gave for the Electoral College, intentionally diluting the votes of large population states to give thinly populated areas supremacy in elections was not one of them. In fact, you might want to go back to school and learn some history. If you actually knew your stuff as the 'great history scholar' you constantly insist you are, you would know that the Electoral College was created for the purpose of creating a buffer between direct voting and the selection of a President.

The Electoral College system ... was created by the founding fathers for the new Republic not as a direct outgrowth of eighteenth-century political principles but rather as an ad hoc compromise between those who believed in election of the president by Congress and those who believed in popular election.
- political scientist William Keech, 1978

The founding fathers were afraid of direct election to the Presidency. They feared a tyrant could manipulate public opinion and come to power. (Gosh, kind of like what happened in 2016, when the most blatantly unqualified, corrupt, destructive demagogue ever was elected by mostly ignorant, uneducated, and gullible morons, isn't it?)

Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers:

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.
(See All of the Federalist 68)

Hamilton and the other founders believed that the electors would be able to insure that only a qualified person becomes President. They believed that with the Electoral College no one would be able to manipulate the citizenry. It would act as check on an electorate that might be duped. Hamilton and the other founders did not trust the population to make the right choice. The founders also believed that the Electoral College had the advantage of being a group that met only once and thus could not be manipulated over time by foreign governments or others.

Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representatives in Congress, thus no state could have less then 3. Back in the 1770s, there were not such huge differences between the states' populations as there are today, and the number of popular votes per elector in various states was very little. But the urbanization of the country since then has created distortions in this electoral system that the founders did not anticipate. The result of this system is that in this election the state of Wyoming cast about 210,000 votes, and thus each elector represented 70,000 votes, while in California approximately 9,700,000 votes were cast for 54 votes, thus representing 179,000 votes per electorate. Obviously this creates an unfair advantage to voters in the small states whose votes actually count more then those people living in medium and large states.

One aspect of the electoral system that is not mandated in the constitution is the fact that the winner takes all the votes in the state, which causes much of the increasingly extreme mismatches we've seen between results of the popular vote and results of the electoral vote for president.

In this winner take all system, which was not what the founding fathers intended, but which was implemented later by those trying to give their states an advantage, it makes no difference if you win a state by 50.1% or by 80% of the vote you receive the same number of electoral votes, this can be a recipe for one individual to win some states by large pluralities and lose others by small number of votes, and thus this is an easy scenario for one candidate winning the popular vote while another winning the electoral vote. This winner take all methods used in picking electors has been decided by the states themselves. This trend took place over the course of the 19th century. That system can distort the popular expression of the people that is at the heart of democratic government, as happened this year when one candidate received markedly more popular support while the other received markedly more electoral votes – not because electors exercised their independent judgment but because the system interposed itself. This is the worst of both worlds.

It's not that the founding fathers trusted rural voters, or voters from states with small populations, over urban voters, or voters from states with large populations. It's that the founding fathers did not trust direct democracy period, as evidenced by the way in which Senators were initially appointed and not elected, and by the way many of the founders thought that the President should be appointed by Congress, not elected by the people. The Electoral College was a buffer between direct democracy, and the appointment of the President by "men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station." Unfortunately, we now have a system that accomplishes neither.


Not Your Founding Fathers' Electoral College
Stop saying this is how the system was designed to work.

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-27/the-electoral-college-doesnt-work-the-way-the-founding-fathers-intended

REGARDLESS OF WHETHER you want to preserve the Electoral College as it is, tweak it (as I do) or scrap it entirely, you have to understand that it doesn't function today the way the Founding Fathers planned.

I think this is worth pointing out in light of the animated responses I've gotten from readers regarding my last column, which called for reform by adding a set of bonus electoral votes which would be rewarded to the winner of the national popular vote.

People seem to make a couple of errors in their reverence for the Electoral College. First, they misunderstand its purpose, and concomitantly they misunderstand what it does and doesn't constitutionally entail.

"The Electoral College system ... was created by the founding fathers for the new Republic not as a direct outgrowth of eighteenth-century political principles but rather as an ad hoc compromise between those who believed in election of the president by Congress and those who believed in popular election," the political scientist William Keech wrote in 1978. Some founders wanted direct election; others mistrusted average voters' "capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the candidates," as George Mason put it. This was especially true given the expectation – before the two-party system arose to winnow the number of contenders – that voters would be choosing among a host of candidates from far afield. How could some farmer from Virginia or New York know enough about all the candidates from other states and regions, the reasoning went.

So the compromise was the Electoral College, which per Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68 would allow the "sense of the people [to] operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided," while filtering that vox populi through "men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station." The original conception of the Electoral College, in other words, was a body of men who could serve as a check on the uninformed mass electorate. "This does not mean they were created as free agents authorized to ignore or invalidate the choice of the voters," the historian Arthur Schlesinger, my father, wrote in "War and the American Presidency" in 2004. "The framers, with their talent for ambiguity, were hazy on the question of the electors' freedom to choose." Certainly it was there to some extent. As Keech wrote, "the possibility of electors substituting their own judgments for those of their state's voters was not ruled out by the Constitution. Such a practice was not implausible or offensive by the political values of the day."

But things change. For one thing, electoral hiccups in 1796 (when John Adams' vice president ended up not being his running mate, Thomas Pinckney, but his opponent, Thomas Jefferson) and 1800 (when Jefferson's running mate, Aaron Burr, got as many electoral votes as he did, forcing the election into the House of Representatives) meant that the system almost immediately had to be revised, which the 12th Amendment did, clarifying the separate selection of the president and vice president. So the founders compromise had to be fixed within a handful of elections of its inception.

For another thing, the idea of electors, even in the most extreme circumstances, acting as independent agents occasionally overriding the will of the voters would certainly be seen as offensive under the political values of this day. Consider the recent calls for electors from states Donald Trump won to cast him aside. "Whether they like Trump or not, and some plainly don't, scores of the Republicans chosen to cast votes in the state-capital meetings told AP they feel bound by history, duty, party loyalty or the law to rubber-stamp their state's results and make him president," the Associated Press' Calvin Woodward and Rachel La Corte reported earlier this month.

The point isn't to suggest that the electors should have gone rogue or were correct in sticking with the man their state favored; the key thing is that the mere discussion was a nonstarter. And rightly so: Imagine the howls of outrage that would have emanated from many of the originalists currently defending the Electoral College most vociferously if a rogue group of electors had given the presidency to Hillary Clinton.

In the 21st century, electors are rubber-stamps rather than chaperones. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing, given how incredibly elitist that conception of the Electoral College is; but it's also not precisely what the founders envisioned. Instead of an elitist cabal substituting its wisdom for the judgment of the voters nationwide, the federal system does it instead.

That is in large part due to the unit rule – which awards all of a state's electoral votes to whomever gets the most in that state, regardless of their margin of victory – which obtains in 48 states and the District of Columbia (while Maine and Nebraska split their votes according to results in individual congressional districts). And while defenders of the Electoral College seem to think that the unit rule is an inherent part of the system, it's not. The Constitution says how many electoral votes each state gets but says nothing about how they're awarded.

Initially some states used the winner-take-all system we see today while some also allotted them, like Maine and Nebraska today, according to district as well as statewide results. But states soon realized that the unit rule augmented their power – would Florida today get so much presidential candidate attention, for example, if winning it meant getting 15 electoral votes as opposed to 14 for the loser rather than the whole 29? So by 1836, every state except South Carolina used a winner-take-all system.

That system can distort the popular expression of the people that is at the heart of democratic government, as happened this year when one candidate received markedly more popular support while the other received markedly more electoral votes – not because electors exercised their independent judgment but because the system interposed itself. This is, as E.J. Dionne put it in The Washington Post this past weekend, the worst of both worlds.

People can honestly disagree about the Electoral College system as it is currently implemented – and a startling number of people, though not necessarily Trump himself, seem genuinely opposed to the very idea of majority rule – but you can't suggest that what we have now is the founders' vision come to life.

Keenan Loc: Central Coast California

"despite the unqualified votes counted in blue state totals"



Riiiiight! Your Alternative Facts™ can create what ever make believe reality you so desire, huh? What color is the sky in your world?

nhastings Loc: Telluride, CO

"People can honestly disagree about the Electoral College system as it is currently implemented – and a startling number of people, though not necessarily Trump himself, seem genuinely opposed to the very idea of majority rule – but you can't suggest that what we have now is the founders' vision come to life."[/quote]

Thank you Keenan for an "intelligent" recitation about the Electoral College. I said it earlier, I will say it again. Time to evolve with the realities of the times. And in 200 years, it will be time to re-access and make appropriate changes again, assuming we still have a constitutional republic.

phcaan Loc: Willow Springs, MO

You of all people should talk of alternate facts? I think not.

jcboy3

If he did, he would realize he needed a comb instead of a phone.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

You have gotten even more long winded than ever.
It served both purposes. The electors would hopefully know the candidates. But the system also gave smaller states more power and kept the popular vote in large states from overpowering the smaller states. That purpose has become the most important, esp as mass news media (newspapers first then the others that came along) made it possible for the average person to know the major candidates for themselves.

phcaan Loc: Willow Springs, MO

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Look here:
https://www.historycentral.com/elections/Electoralcollgewhy.html

Paragraph 5 on this page:
The electoral college is also part of compromises made at the convention to satisfy the small states. Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representative in Congress, thus no state could have less then 3. The result of this system is that in this election the state of Wyoming cast about 210,000 votes, and thus each elector represented 70,000 votes, while in California approximately 9,700,000 votes were cast for 54 votes, thus representing 179,000 votes per electorate. Obviously this creates an unfair advantage to voters in the small states whose votes actually count more then those people living in medium and large states.

The original idea that voters could not know the candidates is almost null today with our mass media (that is if you believe them and actually pay attention). Although a huge number of people don't put out much effort to learn, they still have the chance today.
But the large state/small state compromise is very much alive and more important than ever to many people. Changing from the Electoral College to popular vote would need 3/4 of the states to amend the Constitution. And that is not likely to happen. As to getting rid of "winner take all" that is still not likely and would have to be done by amendment (3/4 of the states) or state by state - just about as unlikely.

This small state vs large state is also why the number of Representatives is by population (but minimum of one per state) and the Senate is 2 per state with all laws having to pass both houses.

EyeSawYou

Exactly what rights is Trump eroding?

FRENCHY Loc: Stone Mountain , Ga

Thank God for that, we are not a Democracy.

"popular Votes?" the law of the mob.

FRENCHY Loc: Stone Mountain , Ga

He's back with new BS Welcome clown.