Shadow1980 said:
This. There are several things wrong with our electoral system that need fixing. Ending the Electoral College once and for all would be at the top of my list of proposed fixes because of how it violates "one person, one vote" by creating a huge asymmetry between how much any given citizen's vote is worth in any given state and how it basically makes most states largely irrelevant, instead encouraging candidates to focus on swing voters in the dozen or so competitive states. My home state is South Carolina, but as a liberal who votes Democratic, my vote may as well not exist. Same for the millions who voted Republican in deep blue states like California and New York. If you don't live in a competitive state and your not part of the dominant party in your state, your vote really doesn't count for much of anything. EDIT: And in regard to current events, I hope this creates enough of a Constitutional crisis to compel Congress to submit an amendment to abolish the EC to the states, and I hope it passes so we don't have to deal with this nonsense ever again. This has happened four times already, and 1968 could have been a huge mess had certain states shifted a few points away from Nixon (George Wallace's strategy was to keep Nixon and Humphrey from getting a majority). The 1876 election caused a crisis that resulted in a stalemate that resulted in some deal-making with southern states that in turn resulted in the immediate end of Reconstruction. And 2000 was one of the most painfully obvious examples of the spoiler effect in action; had just 1% of Nader supporters instead switched to Gore at the last moment after realizing that voting third-party is effectively helping the candidate you like least, George W. Bush would never have been President. |
Mechanically speaking, the EC worked as designed, but not as intended. There should be a move to adjust the number of electors, to reflect some proportionality. People in partisan, non-swing states vote at much lower rates: rates that would have pushed the Clinton lead up significantly. That is effective disenfranchisement that could not have been foreseen. Beyond that, we are rapidly moving past the states vs. federal government issue, as it has become the US vs. the global economy. The EC is an aging apparatus in a world that moves and is connected orders of magnitude greater than the late 1700s.
