KY would bypass Electoral College under House plan
- Thread starter uscitizen
- Start date
T
TRGLDTE
Guest
Are they going to go with "winner takes all" or an apportionment?
Agnosticus_Caesar
Fuck You Too
People need to think a wee bit about the reason why the Electoral College was instituted.
FUCK THE POLICE
911 EVERY DAY
The only time in history I can think of small states being pushed around and voting in large droves for a candidate was the election of 1896 with William Bryant. Bryant would've won under a scheme to proportional distribute electoral votes, but the winner take all system largely negated any advantage small states would've had from their overweighting. So McKinley won, the big state guy.
uscitizen
Villified User
Why is small states getting pushed areound an issue in a opresidential election ? It is supposed to be a demoncratic national vote. If balance problems happen, that is what the senate and judicial system is for.
Do we support a nationally deocratically elected president or not ?
Do we support a nationally deocratically elected president or not ?
The founders avoided forming a Democracy because they knew that democracies would become the tyrrany of the majority. Once again, people need to look again at why the founders created the electoral process they way that they did. It wasn't because they couldn't get word to DC the numbers of the vote...
Well, and they also considered the majority "rabble" Damo. Hamilton especially, was an elitist. (top would have loved hanging with him). The electoral process was also not birthed intact...there were compromises made, and some of those were made to get the Southern states on board. The so-called "anti-federalists".
There were compromises made throughout. That was the beauty of it.
But as I stated, they didn't do this because they were unable to count all those ballots... They needed to count them regardless to find out who they elected to become electors who then traveled to NYC at first, then to DC when that became the capital to elect the President. The creation of the Electoral college protected against the total tyranny of the majority.
It's been the norm for large parts of our history I think. Look at McCarthyism. It's always been driven by fear.
Yes, and today, we have they tyranny of the less populous Southern states. Don't forget, as I'm sure you haven't, the founders made a few glaring mistakes. We've gone back and revisted them, and corrected them when need be.
Not everybody has to agree that the two Senators per state rule, is a good one. After all, originally, the founders had the Senators selected not by the people, but by the state legislature. We amended the constitution to correct that. I'd like to go back and take a look at this too. And, I'm not alone in that.
I'd prefer we repealed the 17th Amendment and returned the State Legislators selection of Senators. Even with the fact that it would mean that the current D government of Colorado would select the state's representatives.
The Congress was supposed to represent the people, the Senate the States. Instead we now have two houses representing the people and the states almost totally unrepresented in government. It becomes closer to the tyranny of the majority in such a case.
uscitizen
Villified User
Absolutely, I relate McCarthyism to Bushism.
Damo, I'm going to bookmark this and come back to it. It might take me a couple of days. I want to find the part in the Federalist papers, wherein Hamilton discusses this, and get the exact terminology. His explanation for leaving the selection of senators out of the people's hands, was the most striking example of out and out elitism I have seen by any of the founders. I remember stopping and rereading it, I was so amazed. I'm 90% certain it is in the actual papers, but if it's not, then it would be in the Library of America collection of Hamilton writings that I have. It's going to take me some time to locate it. But I'd like to really delve into this further.
Even though his personal argument may have been elitist it would not change my opinion of this. States were supposed to have representation in the Federal government, this was that representation.