Letters to the Editor
-
Well, I Still Like It...
I was hoping for a strong, factually intense, and contextual argument in favor of abolishing the Electoral College, and I got an awful lot less. Half the discussion seems to have been missed.
To begin an argument with the rather blunt assertion that everything your opponent thinks about the Constitution is WRONG, one should follow up with some crippling blows. There was nothing.
I like the Electoral College. The distribution of political power over simple landmass is NOT, in itself, a bad idea. There are two components which have to be considered, as they are quite separate issues.
I lived in a rural part of New York State (most extended family from central PA) until my 20's, college in New England, then moved to Soho (Manhattan), then Brooklyn. The "hicks" I knew in my youth were no worse qualified to pick a President than some of the lifelong locals in NYC, certainly.
As for protecting small states...
You got this SO wrong. The protection of the small states isn't with regard to the "election." It's with regard to the actions of the winning candidate AFTER the elections.
Individuals raised solely in _either_ a high-population urban area OR a low-population rural area tend to have really fucked-up views of the world. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Importantly--the INTERESTS of the people living in sparse population states are vastly different from those of the (relatively wealthy) people-packed urban areas. Population density in the US means the elimination of the electoral college would allow the wealthy and liberal on the coasts to pillage the "remote" and "empty" states for their benefit. I'd call that a catastrophic threat. Considering the disparity in natural resources and simple territory, the risk of an "elite" population raping the "backwards" locals is too great here.
Couple that with the fact that the greatest disparities in wealth on the micro-level occur in the same population-dense coastal cities: the elimination of the delegate system increases the problem of "marketing candidates" to limited regions and ignoring the people who populate the vast territory of the country. Why appear to 1500 in Oklahoma when it's only 10% the number of voters as you get speaking in NY or Boston or Houston?
Something else just occurred to me about this, too: the truly disenfranchised in the urban areas are far more easily controlled than the disenfranchised of the rural states--there's much more direct dependence on others for survival, and the maintenance of huge industries which are controlled by local goverment and private business.
It would simply assure to each president the legitimacy that the Framers were eager to grant to each member of the House, the certainty that he or she had received more votes than any other candidate.
As the Framers had it, the members of the house are elected by tiny local districts of land-owning white men. That's not exactly a good example of social legitimacy to strive for. Note that because the house members are elected by people who all live together, the voters automatically share a great many common interests. A voter in a penthouse in the Northeast has little in common with a voter on 1200 acres in rural Minnesota in many ways which are of great importance CIVICALLY.
Majority rule was what Madison called "the republican principle," and was to be limited by granting enforceable rights to political minorities, not by creating loopholes that would allow those political minorities to win elections.
Why should we tolerate a system that lets state legislatures decide how states pick their electors, as Article II does?
I agree that the selection of electors by state-level government is inappropriate, and managing the voting process on the state level leaves it far easier to corrupt. Permitting electors to vote arbitrarily is a bad idea, too.
A federal system for transparent national elections is a terrific idea and should be implemented. Probably too hard to do immediately, but I think a large enough chunk of Americans are totally disillusioned with the current process (after two elections in a row that appeared horribly ineptly run) to start talking about how to address that.
By giving too much representation to small states, it skews the result toward conservative victory.
In the classic sense, definitely. But what the word "conservative" means these days is pretty up-for-grabs. Nothing conservative about the existing administration, which came close enough to winning the past two elections by direct plurality to make this whole issue fairly insignificant. When the elections are this close in terms of actual voter representation, it's clear that neither candidate has a lock on any great INSIGHT into the will of the people.
I guess I think the article sounds like the author is relying on a legal credential to establish authority on what's more a moral question.