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Originally Posted by Truth Detector 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. |
Interesting.
Perhaps I should restate my agreement with
the makeout hobo. I agree that if you go by the numbers, it appears that a voter in Wyoming gets more of a vote. However, the above point made by
Truth Detector seems to indicate the reason for that inequality, which I agree with. Even with the current setup, a candidate for a national position has far less reason to campaign in Wyoming then in California (or any two states with a similar ratio of EC votes).
While this does indirectly give an individual resident of Wyoming more of a say in who our president is (the only nationally elected candidate in our system), it does give the
state of Wyoming a more equal position as compared to California.