Let’s be explicitly clear.
The Electoral College exists because enslavers wanted to count their enslaved in their vote total without freeing them, much less giving them voting rights. That is the one purpose the Electoral College ever served.
Pro Electoral College is pro white supremacy. Abolish it.
@WheresMyWater @fonecokid @QasimRashid They already have a voice: their Senators. The point here is that the Electoral College gives them an outsized voice, and that’s still not stopping candidates from hitting the population centers, but it does mean there are states that are so solidly red/blue that millions don’t vote.
Why should protecting rural voices matter more than making every vote worth the same and giving incentives to every voter to vote?
@QasimRashid @fonecokid @WheresMyWater
“Direct democracy” does not entail casting ballots for representatives who then make decisions and impose them on us.
I do think it’s fascinating how thoroughly Americans have internalized the idea that some people deserve disproportionate political power on the basis of living in lower population densities.
@WheresMyWater @fonecokid @QasimRashid
How does a candidate physically visiting a place or not have anything at all to do with the "voice" of the voters living there?
@Jonstewartmill @WheresMyWater @QasimRashid
No reason at all, period, one person one vote!
@Efilroftsul @QasimRashid Here in #Minnesota , the MNGOP has publicly opposed abolishing the Electoral College because they know that without it, no GOP candidate would have been elected POTUS in the last 25 years.
But that simultaneously means that they are saying that their own supporters should have no say in electing POTUS, because Minnesota has not gone for the GOP in any presidential election in last 50 years.
Their racism extends to effectively denying their own supporters a vote.
@kerplunk Bush 43 did win the popular vote in 2004, but only because the Electoral College and voter suppression led to his initial election in 2000.
I tried to phrase my earlier post to include that. I guess I did not succeed.
Can but don’t for some reason
@Julie
By having the states that care about democracy do this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
No need to abolish the college when you can work around it.
@QasimRashid
I think it's a bit more complicated than that but the EC must go.
@QasimRashid kind of reminds me of that line in the first Pirates of the Caribbean..
In a population-based election, cities would overpower the voter count of smaller towns..
" Well, that doesn't give me much incentive to fight fair."
It's weird because you flip it around and you get gerrymandering for other political roles, but no, having all the people decide the vote is wrong because W Bush and Trump lost their first popular vote.
@QasimRashid
The electoral college has become only a tool to manipulate elections. An artificial barrier between voters and an open and fair election that represents the will of the people.
Or so methinks.
This is sort of right—the electoral college is inseparable from the divide over slavery at the time—but the electoral college was explicitly designed by Madison et al to ensure that poor and propertyless majorities could not simply vote the elite propertied class out of its property rights.
Federalist #10 presents Madison’s anti-democratic argument pretty explicitly.
That is certainly what we were taught in school way way back when I was a student. And it is wrong.
In Federalist 10, Madison is not arguing against a democratic republic in which all voters are represented equally.
He is also not arguing in favor of the electoral college as it exists now.
He argues against the notion that government by legislature should be abandoned in favor of townhall type gatherings of all citizens who showed up, a popular idea at the time.
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