Still Free
Friday, February 14, 2020
About The Electoral College
For a long time, including at the beginning of this blog, I have been very down on the EC. It was, of course, for selfish reasons. I thought, as most people now clamoring for it to be abolished that the popular vote should decide things. I didn't consider that the population of the US was dense in some places and sparse in others. Really, I didn't. Because of this, I really didn't understand why the system had been set up the way it had been. Today's people saying that there should be a popular vote don't really care about those areas of the country that would essentially be shut out of presidential voting. For all the talk of voter disenfranchisement, the popular vote would essentially discard of all votes not in states with populous cities. And so I ask the question: What reason would those states (and indeed the people in them) have for remaining in the United States? Anyway, for those reading this over the extended weekend, here's a video on the subject:
I do want to address one thing mentioned in the video. Tara Ross says that the founders didn't foresee an uneducated (or uninformed) public and this is a part of the problem. I disagree. As we know, elections, and therefore real political power was meant to be in the hands of land owning [white] freemen. The very class of people likely to be "educated" and have "something to lose" by bad decisions made by government. Indeed it is the expansion of "voting rights" that has caused a lot of changes. There are a number of electoral maps out there that show how elections would likely turn out based on one particular group voting (white males, White females, blacks, etc). By the maps I saw, Trump sweeps the entire country if the only people able to vote were those allowed in the beginning of the republic. So the question can be made whether it is really about 'education" or the different interests of various groups currently inhabiting the US.