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Originally Posted by sgtdmski Somehow you have this false idea that we are a democracy, we are not. We are a Constitutional Republic. Hence the Electoral College. The College exists to ensure that each state within the Republic has an equal say in the election of the President. Without the Electoral College, the smaller states within the union would lose their voice in the electing of the President. The electoral college ensures that a candidate for President pays attention to all the states. This enables the rural, suburban and urban to all have equal say in the election. Just look at the election maps, time and again, democrats win in the urban areas, while republicans win in the rural. The electoral college is often misunderstood, but it does ensure that everyone's vote counts equally.
dmk |
The truth is the electoral college was invented out of racism:
It's often said that the Founders chose the electoral college over direct election in order to balance the interests of big (high population) and small (low population) states. The key Philadelphia concession to small states was the Framers' back-up selection system: if no candidate emerged with a first-round electoral-vote majority, then the House of Representatives would choose among the top five finalists, with each state casting one vote, regardless of population. According to the standard story, although big states would predictably dominate the first round, small states could expect to loom large in the final selection.
But as James Madison insisted, the deepest political divisions in early America were not between big and small states as such; rather, the real fissures separated north from south, and east from west. Moreover, once the modern system of national presidential parties and winner-take-all state contests emerged-a system already visible, though not yet entrenched, at the time of the Twelfth Amendment-the big states obviously had the advantage.
With two national presidential parties, one candidate almost always had an electoral majority in the first round, rendering the Framers' pro-small-state back-up system irrelevant. (Three or four strong candidates, in contrast, might have split the vote so that no one garnered a majority.) And winner-take-all rules - under which a candidate who won a state got all of its electoral votes, not a number proportional to the extent of his win - compounded the advantage of big states.
Indeed, before the Civil War Amendments (which changed the electoral college yet again), only one of the sixteen presidents hailed from a small state-Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. And of the twenty-six men to hold the office since the Civil War, only Bill Clinton of Arkansas claimed residence in a small state.
In sum, if the Framers' true goal was to give small states a leg up, they did a rather bad job of it. (We shall suggest below, however, that their chief goal was something rather different.)
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/amar/20011130.html