KaiserJeep wrote:Don't go promoting any false history here, either. The electoral college was created when there were but 13 colonies, and the purpose was to prevent the twelve smaller states from being overwhelmed by the larger one (Virginia) via the popular vote.
Virginians won 8 of the first 9 presidencies due to the 3/5s compromise and the electoral college. Without the scheme it would have been outvoted by the other states because of course slaves can't vote but counted at 3/5s in apportionment they added the winning margin. So even in your inverse telling it was a failure.
Don't "invite me to read." If you have a point, cite it.
Here are a couple of examples of how to do that.
Madison wrote in #10 of his fear of "factions" which are groups
united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
Madison was of course referring to mobs (factions) who protested against the economic policies passed by wealthy legislators that forced farmers into poverty and foreclosure. See Shay's Rebellion.
“A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,”
Considering they settled on a plan that only allowed white men of property to vote, and even these to only vote for "electors" and not directly, it is pretty easy to see the "interest of the community" centered even higher up the food chain.
In more recent history, in Gray v. Sanders SCOTUS held that every person should have approximately equal representation: one person one vote
The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits a State from denying or abridging a Negro’s right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment does the same for women. If a State in a statewide election weighed the male vote more heavily than the female vote or the white vote more heavily than the Negro vote, none could successfully contend that that discrimination was allowable…. How then can one person be given twice or 10 times the voting power of another…because he lives in a rural area or because he lives in the smallest rural county?
In 2015 in Evenwel_v._Abbott SCOTUS found essentially the same, that states can only define districts based on total population, limiting it one way or another would have the effect of making some votes worth more than others.
The electoral college gives some votes more weight that other,
up to 3 to 1, which is obviously unconstitutional in light of just two precedents.
Sorry, I knew this would send the thread off track... split it if you want.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)