Nightsintdreams, pet mage of Jabober wrote:
And that's the problem with it.
If you do away with the EC, you will then be able to virtually just ignore entire states, and focus only on the hi-pop ones that you can grab.
The EC overrepresents states such as Rhode Island and Montana, and it forces candidates to have to go out to those places and take those areas into consideration when you are building a national platform. You require in essence a diverse spread of popular support in order to win, which helps to add more legitimacy to a Presidency.
There have been many many attempts throughout history to remove the EC system (it would require a Constitutional Amendment), but all have failed so far.
So I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon.
Me either, which is a shame, because the EC is worthless garbage.
One of the arguments often used is that candidates would ignore everything except large urban areas...but our population is around half-rural, half-urban. According to the 2000 census:
http://www.demographia.com/db-uscity98.htm
There are about 100,000,000 living in all muncipalities of 50,000 pop or over. I suppose 20-50,000,000 should be added as suburbs, but that still leaves a ******** of rural rednecks, artichoke farmers, small cities, and quiet schemers living in the mountains.
Surely there are large regions of higher pop--northeast versus prarie states and such. And candidates would target the high pop areas. But I don't see anything in doing away with the EC which would worsen the practice of candidates ignoring certain states/regions and such.
There's also a potentially huge benefit by eliminating it--in that states such as California or Texas which almost always give all their electoral votes to Dems or GOPs respectively, would suddenly be open to millions of minority votes that would actually count towards a win.
As for the federalist vs. republic arguments--the President and his appointments and administration will create laws which apply to every American equally. It makes no reasonable sense for a North Dakotan's vote to count 1.4 towards a candidate, vs. a Texan's 0.8. As for states, they too will be subject to the same distribution metrics from federal funds, and each should get the same say in electing the Prez.
The states themselves don't practice an electoral system (unless there are some weird ones)--candidates for their houses receive one man-one vote, each county is not given a number of electors. The federal EC is an anomaly, archaic, worthless.
The other small lobby against it would be the media, who so belove creating their charts of the US and coloring it red and blue and doing their little EC vote math. Also might be some small resistance from idiot Americans who would want to keep the EC solely for that obvious, and exciting graphical representation on election nights.
