Ah, I see how that would have been confusing. The false premise was your quote which immediately followed the semicolon. Your quote read:

"If the voting system did accurately represents the vote of the people then there will be a lot more performance and results from candidates."

That belief is where I think you are flawed. As it stands, with only two presidents, the person of those two that the people end up supporting is as likely to be the right choice as it is to be the wrong choice. The people, despite their good intentions, do not know what makes good government, and they tend to think only of their own desires.

You're right. And the problem is that we're allowing only bad presidents to rise to the top, to have a chance at winning. Our goal should be to make some change which allows good presidents to get a chance.

The problem is that our society supports and elects the person who lies the most. They don't know the difference between a lie and the truth, and they don't pay attention to the issues, nor would they tend to support the right issues even if they did pay attention. Society means well, but people are not informed enough, tolerant enough, or sometimes even smart enough to make the right decision.

I do think he did a good job embarassing both parties, and I do believe that's how he got so many votes. But that's just the problem. It shouldn't be the person who embarasses his opponents the most who gains popularity. Yet that's the kind of people we elect.

Democrats and Republicans won't be forced to do a better job at governing with more competition. They will be forced to do a better job at spinning things, embarassing their opponents, and playing the political game. So long as the people don't understand what makes good government, so long as they blame the actions of a single person on an entire party, and so long as they accept a politician's attempt to embarass the opposing party, we aren't going to get good candidates.

This is true, remember I do think runoff voting might be a good change. But it doesn't address the core problem.

The real problem is that people are voting for the wrong reasons. Society doesn't understand what makes good government, so they're voting for the candidate who embarasses his or her opponent the best. Or they're just using the wrong beliefs about what makes a good government to choose who they vote for.

So what difference does it make if we have two or ten candidates? You're right that more candidates means our politicians have to do better, but it only means they have to do better at embarassing their opponent, or it means they have to do better at supporting the wrong principles, because the wrong principles are what our people believe.

Runoff voting brings more voices into the arena, which means more opinions, this is true. But so long as the people don't recognize a good opinion, a good candidate, from a bad one, they're going to vote for the wrong people, and they're going to allow the wrong candidates to rise to the top. So instead of having two bad choices, we'll have ten bad ones. And even if a few of those ten are good, there's as good a chance they'll get voted down as there is that they'll be elected.

First, let me say that the electoral college did not originate in the 1800's. It was an original part of the Constitution created by the authors of the Constitution in the late 1700's.

You are close to correct about the reasons for the electoral college. It isn't that the people we elected were supposed to know more about the candidates, it was that they were supposed to know more and understand what makes good government.

Today, although our population knows a lot about the presidents, they tend not to know the right things. I'll bet that the vast majority of the population knew all of Kerry's family members, his religion, his military history, and the opinion that he "was always changing his stances on the issues". And I'll bet the vast majority of people knew Bush's family members, his religion, his military history, and the opinion that he is "a warmongering oil-grabber."

But could the average person ramble off a list of the issues those people support? Maybe they could name two or three. But if you asked them to explain why those issues are right or wrong, the justification for that would almost certainly be untrue or worthless. People just don't understand what makes a good government; they act based on their feelings and emotions, not on their understanding of good government and what is actually in the best interest of the people.

So instead of allowing the majority, who is ill-qualified to choose a good president, to do so, the founders wanted the people to have more informed people make the decisions. So they created the electoral college.

The electoral college today is nothing more than "whichever party the majority votes for gets to choose the electoral college candidates." This isn't what the founders hoped for: candidates still campaign to the people instead of to informed electoral college members, which means their campaigns are based on embarassing the other candidates and avoiding the real issues.

Still, even today the electoral college prevents candidates from having to completely campaign to the majority; they only need to campaign in a few states. And because of this, they do a different sort of campaigning, and different candidates are able to win. As for 2000, it is true that I think Gore would have been a better choice than Bush, but it is just as likely that the reverse could have happened; it almost happened in 2004, where Kerry might have won without the majority. And I feel Kerry would have been a far better choice.

Yet without the electoral college, the sort of campaigns the candidates run would have been vastly different, more focused on appeasing the majority everywhere, and because of this, we'd get even worse candidates overall.

This is often said, it's true. But it is false, or at least, it is sort of false. While some may have suggested that the electoral college protected the smaller states, I charge that such statements were made in an attempt to appease the Anti-Federalists, the opponents of the Constitution who held the powers of the state on such a high pedastal.

But the real reasons for the electoral college were recorded, and they were explained in completeness in the Federalist Papers: the document written by the supporters of the Constitution explaining why they put in each part of it. The reasons for the electoral college are listed in the Federalist Papers #68. Here is a link: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed68.htm

Here we can see a full description, but the most important quote may be this:

"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."

Looking what this quote says. The Federalists didn't want the majority electing the president, they wanted a group of people "most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations." Or put more simply: they understood that the majority of the people are not qualified to choose the president. The average person doesn't know good government from a hole in the wall. Instead, the Federalists wanted a small group of people who know a lot about government to choose the president.

But they didn't want it to be like our system is today: in our current system, it isn't people who know a lot about government who are elected to the college, it is just extremely devout party members. This is because states just allow whichever party gets the most votes to pick random zealots from its ranks to go cast their votes for their president. The systems our states have chosen for electing the electoral college don't allow for educated groups of people to get together and deliberate over who is the best choice for president. But they should!

I urge you all to read Federalist Papers #68; the one that I linked to above, and read it understanding what I explained above. That should give you a good idea of why the electoral college was really created.