I did a search and still didn't find the answer was looking for so I'm starting a new question here. I'm sure this has been asked before but I still don't get it.
I'm not sure if this is right so PLEASE correct me and help me understand this. This is how I understand it.
The President of the US isn't really voted in by all of the votes of the United States.
Lets use VERY simple terms. Lets assume there was only 3 states with 100 people in them.
State #1 80 people vote Candidate A 20 people vote for Candidate B
The Electoral College votes for Candidate A
State #2 30 people vote for Candidate A 70 people vote for Candidate B
The Electoral College votes for Candidate B
State#3 49 people vote for Candidate A 51 people vote for Candidate B
The Electoral College votes for Candidate B
Now....
Since Candidate B "won" 2 states and Candidate A only won one state then Candidate B would be the new President right?
In actuality Candidate A received 159 total votes and Candidate B only received 141 votes yet Candidate B won by the "winner takes all" way.
I don't see why we need the electoral college at all. Why don't we just all vote and add them up. Whoever gets the most votes wins. Why isn't the winner the candidate who got the total votes of all citizens of the United States? All of people of the US should be voting for the president not state by state. How is this really fair?
Could you please help me understand?
Thanks. ****************************************************** 10-18-04, 06:18 PM teeceeum Relying solely on what I learned in my political science classes, the reason that I recall being given is that those who set up this system didn't want the larger states to be able to force their will on the smaller ones.
One example I can think of is: A little over 50% of the population of the United States lives within 600 miles of where I sit right now. If the election were based solely on the popular vote, theoretically all a candidate would have to do is convince the population of this one area to vote for him and he could completely ignore the rest of the country. But the electoral college ensures that the candidates must pay attention to a much larger constituency than this. I'm sure someone will come along and explain it better and at greater length than I just did.
Several times there have been rumblings about modifying or abolishing the electoral college. Nothing has ever come of it and it's likely that nothing ever will.
By the way, the number of electoral votes relates to the number of members in Congress.
10-18-04, 06:48 PM Jelp01 It would be hard to change the electoral system. It would take a Constitutional amendment to do so, and it is very likely to almost impossible for that to happen. As TC said, the number of electoral votes is related to the members in Congress of each state. Every state has two electoral votes, based on having two senators for each state, and one vote for every member of the House of Representatives that state has. For instance, my home state, Washington, has 11 electoral votes: Washington has 9 House of Representative members and of course two senators.
All that to explain this: Two states, Maine and Nebraska, determine their electoral votes not based on the voting result of the state as a whole, but on the voting within their congressional districts. In those states, a Presidential candidate gets an electoral vote for each congressional district they win, and the winner of the statewide vote gets the two electoral votes represented by the two senators from each state. I like that idea, personally. Eastern Washington is rural and conservative and Western Washington is urban and liberal. Unfortunately for us over here on the east, the western part of the state has most of the population, so it takes a lot for the Republicans to ever win the state of Washington. A system such as that of Maine and Nebraska might even things out a bit.
10-18-04, 07:30 PM aminator2002 It's real simple clare... look at how things are situated right now. New York, Illinois and California are sure things for the Democrats. Why? Because the Democratic agenda appeals to people who live in and around large metropolitan areas. It is the rural areas that would suffer if the popular vote dictated who we had in office at this point in time. The cities would essentially be able to set the political agendas and the people out in the middle of nowhere would have very little political power. States like Mississippi where there are only about 3 million total would get lost in the shuffle and no candidate would waste time even finding out what the issues in Mississippi are.
I think that this system has set up a polarized nation due to the very different view points on the world that rural states with small cities have compared to that of people living in large cities. It is the states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania that are swing states right now. These states have a more balanced rural versus small city population.
The politicians know this and you can see many ways that they play to their strongholds. For instance, what exactly does a Conservative President want with making a constitutional amendment? That sounds like government involvement in individual rights... a traditionally non-conservative ideology. BUT the nation is polarized by this issue - the cities are for gay marriage and the majority of less populace states are against it. It is a political ploy to make Bush supporters more solidly in his camp.
The other big reason for the electoral college is due to places like Chicago where dead people have been known to vote. It would be a real disaster if the popular vote in Illinois carried full weight because I guarantee we would be rolling out the dead to avoid another 4 years of Bush. Big Grin
10-18-04, 10:13 PM clarebear I understand that.
Is there a good unbiased website that explains the whole electoral college and the reasons for it? I did a search but all the sites have conflicting viewpoints. (many want it abolished) I just don't know which is which. Is the information I find going to be fact or is it all just a matter of opinion?
10-18-04, 11:02 PM methos Clare your analysis is pretty much right, except that different states get different numbers of votes. A candidate could win the most populous states (I think it's 11) by the slimmest of margins each, lose the other 39 by landslides, lose the popular vote by a landslide, and still get the victory.
The electoral college was set up the way it was for a few reasons, as far as we can tell, but the reasons aren't entirely clear. The people didn't get a chance to know the national candidates. Back then, they really voted for an electoral college, whose sole purpose was to vote for the president. We still technically do this (that's right, we're voting for an elector for Kerry or for Bush, and some ballots say as much in small print), but the electoral college candidate's name doesn't even appear on the ballot. The electors from a state did not have to vote as a block and actually got two votes. The logic of this was that one vote would go to some favored son of the state, and another to someone of national stature, that way the candidate of national stature would win instead of the favored son of the largest state.
In addition to what Jelp says about Maine and Nebraska - Colorado is currently considering a resolution to divvy up the electoral votes according to the percentage each candidate wins. We won't know whether they'll do this this year until the election results are tallied, though.
Ami's point about rural vs. urban is partly a good one, but leaves out a key problem. I don't know about IL and CA, but I know the situation in NY. By and large, Upstate NY votes Republican in presidential elections. Because NYC makes up nearly half the state's population, and because it votes more solidly Democratic than Upstate votes Republican, the state is pretty much guarranteed to go to the Democrat and no candidate bothers to come to NY to find out what the issues are (except a bit to the city for fundraising).
Interestingly, it is the Democrats who usually campaign for the sort of thing done in Nebraska and Maine (they're also the ones supporting it in Colorado), but working through the numbers, we find out that the elections that would have turned out differently if every state voted that way would have shifted the win from the Democrats to the Republicans.
10-18-04, 11:07 PM coldfuse Electoral College from the National Archives
10-18-04, 11:43 PM clarebear So the Electoral College is voting for us by proxy? Right?
10-18-04, 11:56 PM AMoore
quote:Originally posted by clarebear: So the Electoral College is voting for us by proxy? Right?
Strictly speaking, that is correct. Originally, people didn't vote for presidential candidates directly, but for electors who then met and elected a president.
This was a sensible system in the days of slow communications, when a candidate would have had a difficult time making his name known to a substantial fraction of voters. Instead, you voted for people that you had some personal knowledge of, that you could expect to represent your views, and to be well informed as to the positions and qualifications of the candidates.
The growth in influence of political parties, and improvements in communcations gave rise to a system of voting for electors committed to a particular candidate or party. This is really what we do now, but we no longer mention the electors specifically at all. The state committee of the party winning the election appoints the electors, in most cases, I believe.
Alan Moore 10-20-04, 10:29 PM
jusork I saw this questioni at the same day as it came up in my history class. We've been talking about representation and what the government did to have that work effectivly.
10-28-04, 09:37 AM clarebear Thanks for all of your replies. I get it now. Smile
10-28-04, 10:00 AM methos Interestingly, I caught a part of a argument in favor of the current system on NPR yesterday. Apparently there was one against it the day before. I only caught part of it, so maybe the arguments made more sense for the rest of it, but there was really only one offered while I listened and it made no sense.
The argument was, if the popular vote decided the election, the candidates would only need to pay attention to and campaign in the 9 most populous states because they contain half the population. That argument assumes a couple things One is that the states vote as some sort of massive blocks. If they don't, just winning them could give you as little as half the votes needed to win. Of course, they don't vote as massive blocks in the popular vote, but they do in one form... that's right... the electoral college. To get a majority ofd the electoral votes, I think you need to add on two more states, making it the 11 largest states instead of the 9 largest, but which is really more likely - 100% of the 9 largest states or a plurality of the 11 largest?
Of course, the candidates aren't just campaigning in the 9 or 11 largest states. It would be foolish becasue some of them are solidly one way and some are solidly the other - neither candidate can get them all and use that to win the election without other states.
So the argument was that candidates would only campaign in 9 states, which assumes things that aren't true, if the popular vote were used. But lets look at the way the current system works. How many states are the candidates seriously campaigning in?
10-28-04, 07:55 PM Jelp01 I'm not sure exactly of the numbers, but the candidates spent their time in the swing states almost exclusively. I think I read that 33 of the 50 states from the beginning were solidly in one camp or the other. So since the beginning of the campaign, the candidates spent their time in the 17 that have been very close from the beginning.
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