re: #220 Nyet

Em.

1. How exactly are least populated states trampled by the PV? With PV every vote counts. The candidates have to campaign everywhere.
2. Even if they were trampled, who cares? You don’t put your finger on the scale and make some votes weigh more just because of some fucked up sense of pseudofairness.
3. “It serves as a brake on rampant populism (mob rule)” - you did not write it with a straight face, did you?
4. How can EC prevent populism (we know it can’t) even theoretically? Populist-inspired voters elect populist electors who elect a populist candidate. Where’s the catch?

All seems like a bunch of hooey to me.

Don’t dump on me for what the Founding Fathers of the USA had in mind. I wasn’t defending the EC, and I resent your tone suggesting that I was. I was trying to recall the reasons for the creation of the EC, which other lizards for the most part have corroborated. If you don’t like those reasons, don’t be blaming me.

Historically speaking, the Articles of Confederation were a total disaster. In order to convince the individual states to ratify the Constitution and create a federal government, the Constitutional Convention had to offer the states some assurances that the small states (CT and DE back then) would not be overwhelmed by the more populous states. The infamous 3/5 rule for census apportionment, the Senate (each state gets two votes) and the Electoral College were the bones offered to placate the states, which largely wanted to be independent of each other as much as possible. The issue of slavery was a non-starter, since to abolish slavery in the Constitution would have divided the nascent USA in half, so it was not even addressed.

And yeah, all that sucks. We smart people in the 21st century can ask, why didn’t they do this or that? That those guys in the late 18th century managed to put together a nation out of a ragtag collection of contentious state governments was a miracle in itself. Without compromises, the USA would have never been created.