Allegory wrote:
Well, you're right in that they were being realists, but their solution was a diplomatic one, not a scientific, mathematical, or philosophical one. They said "Fudge it, we'll go halfsies." A voting system shouldn't be designed based on negotiations anymore than you can negotiate the equations of gravity.
I think we're just going to have to completely disagree here. There is no "right" or "scientific" way to do this. There is only the way to do this that the folks deciding how to do it agree on. I guess I'm just baffled by your statement. It's like saying that when a group of people get together to decide where to go out to dinner, they shouldn't make this decision by having a discussion and figuring out which restaurant meets the approval (or at least acceptance) of the collective members of the group, but should be instead determined by some apparently completely undefined but utterly "correct" scientific process that, I guess, magically tell us the one and only best choice for dinner.
That's... strange. People don't make decisions that way. Ever. They do exactly what which you say they shouldn't. They negotiate and come to an agreement. There's nothing at all wrong about that.
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gbaji wrote:
The same exact "flaw" exists when you elect a member of your political party to congress. He could choose to vote in a way you don't like on a given issue, right?
Yes, but at least I elected him. I don't have the same control over an elector.
Huh? Of course you do. You have *exactly* the same amount of control over an elector that you have over an elected representative. Which is to say, none at all, except to the degree that said representative or elector wants to continue to have the future support of the party he is a member of in the future. You do understand that if a representative decided he didn't care at all about re-election, he's free to vote anyway he wants on anything he wants, right? You have no actual way to force him to vote in any specific way at all. You have to trust that if he's a member of party A, and party A has a platform that includes things you agree with, and he's personally stated while running that he'll support those specific positions if elected, that by voting for him, he's going to vote in congress in accordance with those platform positions as he promised.
But he's certainly free to not do that if he wants. Just as an elector is free to do this. I'm not sure why you think this is different at all.
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Moreover, when I'm electing a representative I'm electing not to simply be my helper monkey and push the voting button in Congress because I'm too lazy to do so. I'm electing a representative to make decisions on my behalf. Their votes are not my votes, they themselves are my vote.
Right. Which is exactly the same thing you do with an elector. You vote for him. In this case, he's got just one vote to do, so if anything you have a much greater expectation that he's going to do that one thing exactly as he promised. Again, I'm not really sure what the heck you're trying to argue here.
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With a faithless elector, and this may merely be opinion but I think it's a rather valid one most people would agree with, I'm not selecting them to make decisions on my behalf. If I vote Joe Plumber for president, then I want my elector to vote Joe Plumber for president. I don't want my elector to take that as a suggestion and ultimately do what they feels best.
I've already explained how the risk of this happening is a necessary requirement to providing sufficient flexibility in our election process to ensure that it can handle a handful of rare but possible events. I get that you don't like it, but you failed to actually address the arguments I've already made, and chose instead to just repeat the fact that you don't like it. I get that, but it's not terribly helpful to the discussion at hand.
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gbaji wrote:
Because it's better than every other system we've tried?
How trite. We haven't tried much at all. We're beginning to though. Maine just recently passed a measure to allow ranked voting, which I believe is an improvement.
What does that have to do with the EC though? Ranked voting is just a different method of deciding who got the "most votes" in the election. If you apply it to the presidential election, it's just another way to determine the state's electoral college delegation makeup. So, not really relevant to this discussion at all.
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Life is a race. You start to lose not because you began to head backwards, but also because you stand still. If the U.S. never tries to improve then we will fall behind other nations that do.
Sure. But one should actually make some kind of argument for an alternative actually being an improvement. You seem to want to just point at the flaws of the EC system and conclude that's enough to change it. Kinda missing the step in between where you come up with an alternative methodology and show that it solves the problems of the EC, while not introducing others that may be worse.
Argue for an alternative, not just against the existing method.