This is infuriating

[Bustem' Down]

It's not a question of your vote counting for more or less. It's about the influence that your community has. When our country was formed, the concern was that more people lived in the cities than in the country, and that politicans would focus more on getting votes from city people because they could win an election by just getting city votes, so they wouldn't care about what the country folks wanted... hence the electoral college.

This is the reason that Democrats are losing. They've been focusing their attention on the areas of highest concentrations of their voters, like cities and south Florida, rather than running true national campaigns. I doubt a Republican will ever win a majority in places like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Miami, or Los Angeles, yet places like that are where a lot of the Dems focus is. They do very little campaigning to middle America and to smaller cities, which is why the vast majority of areas outside the urban areas is red.

That's why I said earlier that the electoral votes should be divided. Dems won't go to the country becuase that's not where thier following is. That would be like me preaching affirmative action in a white upper class neighborhood. Nobody is going to listen.

 

[SamSpade]

So just because you happen to live in a city your vote should count less?

It's one of the principle concerns of representative government - a *republic* - that has advantages over a true democracy. In a true democracy, the Sunnis in Iraq would absolutely never have any voice in the Iraqi government - they're a minority, and one that the other two ethnic groups - the Kurds and the Shiites - have a long history of strife and mayhem. They hate each other.

But in a representative government - they get a voice. Not a big one, but they get their chance. A republic can erase what has been termed "the tyranny of the majority". Everyone gets a shot.

But there's at least one area where representation is hard to balance - population ITSELF. It's one thing when you struggle to get ethnic, religious, gender and racial representation based on population demographics. It's just as difficult to get a proportional representation from large regions which are less populated. At first blush you might think "well, it's where most of the people are; isn't that 'democratic'?". Sure, it's democratic. Democracy would let Baltimore put all their jails, sewage and landfills in Southern Maryland. It's one thing to let the population determine policy for *themselves*, in their own back yard - but when you deal with a whole state or a whole nation, you need better representation for those in the more rural areas.

The MAIN reason originally expressed for the existence of the electoral college was this: Back in the day, you didn't have political parties, and there wasn't any mass communication. You couldn't flip on the tube and hear John Kerry drone on about Vietnam or Bush talk about the war on 'terrah'. A presidential race was highly likely to field MANY candidates, usually from every state, and very likely to have an agenda for that state above the others - after all, this was a time when people referred to their *STATE* as their 'nation'. With the electoral college, you didn't have Virginia vote in THEIR guys year after year, because they were the most populous state; the other states were less likely to vote for a Virginian, being more likely to divide their votes for their own candidates.

So if you had a straight popular vote, you could bet that in a field of several dozen candidates, the winner would always be the lead candidate from the largest state.

Enter the electoral college - in a winner take all contest, the lead candidate in the largest state just gets the same number of votes as representatives and Senators in Congress, a number that slightly favors less populous states (because every state gets two Senators, regardless of population). He'd still have a commanding lead - but without support OUTSIDE of his state, he can't win. The electoral college assures that the only way someone can win the Presidency is if they have broader support than just in a small but populous region.

Fast forward a few years.....

Political parties emerge. The VERY FIRST election where a 'popular' election takes place at all - and the electors weren't actually chosen by the vote itself - there was no majority and the vote went to the House, where they chose a man who did NOT get the most votes - John Quincy Adams. This sort of electoral peculiarity - apparently unknown to today's civics-course-challenged voters - happened often. And well it should - a straight popular vote in a field of five or six candidates would elect someone a vast majority did NOT want.

The REASON people gripe about the unfairness of the electoral college is, we're blessed or cursed with basically a two-party system. We just have two guys running, so it stands to reason that whoever gets 50.001% of the vote *should* win. But the election process has to be able to work fairly, even if there are a dozen people running with equal popularity. You have to be able to demonstrate broad support.

In other countries - say, Canada - a run for national office is most decidedly NOT a two-party choice, and winners of national office frequently must form a minority government, a coalition with former competitors, to remain in power. An electoral college would work well there, although they're not likely to adopt any such thing. In addition to broad diversity in parties at the national level - there's broad diversity elsewhere in their representatives. Try to imagine a Congress made up of Democrats, Republicans, Reforms, Greens and Libertarians, with a few Independents.