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Originally Posted by the makeout hobo  Lets say the Electoral College was done by representatives only. Wyoming residents and Californians would be more or less equal, since congressional districts are about the same size (Yes, I know Wyoming's population is smaller than a standard CD, but lets ignore that for now.) If it was just by reps, everyone would have about the same vote. But since it's done by senators too, those few thousand people in Wyoming get two extra votes tacked onto their total, while the millions and millions of people in California get the same extra two votes tacked on. That means the people in Wyoming get more of a vote. Make sense now? |
Your entire argument is specious. The primary reason you are way off base, which seems to be the norm for you, is that the voters do not choose Presidential Candidates but electoral representatives. Thus it is actually the States who choose the Presidents and not the popular vote.
We are a Federation of States and the Executive is elected by the States. "The election of both the President and Vice President of the United States is indirect. The constitutional theory is that, while the Congress is popularly elected by the people, the President and Vice President are elected to be executives of a federation of independent states."
Electoral College (United States) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What makes this system work so well and so genius is that the founders recognized that some coastal states would have much larger populations than those say in the interior, and if Presidents were chosen JUST by popular vote, the candidates would merely have to appeal to those with larger cities and populations and would ignore the smaller agricultural states. Those smaller states would have no voice in our Politics and their interests would be unequally represented.
This is a much fairer form of electing a candidate than we would have if there was just a popular vote. The notion that voters in California have less of a vote is absurd in that the voters do not choose candidates, they choose electors. The argument that Wyoming with 3 electoral votes has more of a say than California with 55 is of course absurd, as is your whole premise.
The argument against the Electoral College can only be made by people who are ignorant of our electoral process and the genius behind it. It is also expressed by Liberals who do not want a more transparent and level playing field but desire to make their hold on power a monopoly as they know that the most populous cities in the nation tend to lean Democrat while most of the smaller cities and interior populations lean Conservative. Therefore the popular vote would tend to give Democrats a large advantage in deciding the Presidency. This is exactly what our founders wished to prevent and the genius of their design over 200 years ago.
If we threw out the Electoral College, the Presidency would be primarily decided by the large cities on the east coast and large cities on the west coast which traditionally vote Democrat. The interior would basically have no representation.