Quote:
Originally Posted by Braden
I'd be interested to know what you think of people who find the electoral college outdated? A lot of people demand for the popular vote to be the ideal system, but that seems to be the answer when people are unhappy with the final result and the popular vote puts one of the candidates ahead despite the other winning. The electoral college does seem the fairest way to structure it, though.
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My experience in my short life...
There's still a lot of people here even who don't know or don't understand how a lot of our political system works. So when they form an opinion on it, it's because they've recently heard their candidate or representative had lost and so they may want to blame it when they look into what states were lost/won, etc... so they may only just form that opinion in the moment, without knowing why it works the way it does. I think most people who do the reading and learn why we still use it, they either become less bitter or they appreciate it... whether they're for it or not then is a matter of personal preference I guess.
I think objectively, most people can argue that it's inconsistent to allow states to decide how their electoral votes are automatically decided. However, because our system is based strongly on Federalism (most laws/regulations, etc are handled on a state/local level)... then they may take issue with the fact that one state may go by a count-by-county popular vote, or they may just decide to go with the popular vote of the entire state... and because that's inconsistent, they may think there's a political prejudice there by those authorities.
The way I see it, the local populations choose their representatives by popular vote. So they are deciding which way they want the system to lean, how they want it to work... so if those representatives or those commissioners decide they want to handle the electoral votes a particular way, then it's the way the people have voted it should be.
Basically, every state does it's own thing and implements the laws/regulations very differently... and this is how people who support Federalism feel about the system.
However, someone who is not into federalism so much, aka a Democrat (see: name), they may prefer everything be handled by popular vote and that oversight should be at the highest level (national). They believe more strongly the majority should rule.
Whereas a Republican, supports the US remaining a Republic (i.e. supporting a constitution), and so they would be fine with it operating similar to a democracy, but they prefer that we have a system in place to protect minorities (smaller groups in the gen pop, like "lesser" states)... i.e. supports electoral college.
Here are the differences in a little bit more detail: (edit)