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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I agree there are some issues with US voting but there also is a reason for their system. It allows lower populated areas to not bexome a minority and a bit more power over their future. I can understand the reason behind it to some degree.
Unless we voted in absolutely every issue, regardless if the size, democracy for practical reasons will never be perfect. That being said, your point is a completely different issue than being discussed. At minimum democracy should allow any person to run regardless of their status or how we feel about them. Ted Bundy should have been able to run but if he won, that would be very telling about the US voter.
See, this only works if you think everyone in the state is voting in lockstep. They aren't. Let's assume two choices. In a state with 100 people, 64 vote for A and 36 for B. In another state, with 1000 voters, 466 vote for A, 534 for B. A third state with 100 people, 53 vote for A and 47 for B.
That ends up, with an electoral college system, as 2 votes for A and 1 for B. A wins. HOWEVER, only 583 of 1200 people voted for A. 617 people voted for B. Not only are the wishes of the state with 1000 voters devalued, but the minority votes of the people in the smaller states are also devalued, because it is assumed that the STATE votes rather than the PERSON.
There is no reason to keep this system.
As someone in a lower populated state, my vote should not have more of an impact on the presidential election as that role represents the entire country like senators represent an entire state. Making each state a winner take all result makes it even worse, since voter suppression is far more effective in winner take all than if the electoral college votes were proportional to the state's vote.
While the concept of each state having equal standing is a reasonable approach, it has skewed so far from the initial implementation that it could be discarded from everything except the Senate and it would be a far better representation of the country as a whole while still giving small states a lot of power and influence.
At the risk of having an extended debate in the finer points of what some wigged weirdos were envisioning hundreds of years ago when they wrote this lauded document, I don't think that the founding fathers necessarily intended that...I think it's unlikely that they knew that some areas of the country would house as many people as multiple states in a single city in the long run.
Wanna know what the wigged weirdos thought?
Slavery.
Half the wigged weirdos had a bunch of people living in their states that they considered property and certainly weren't about to let them vote...but at the same time, they were doing the work of people who would have to live there if not for the slaves.
So they wanted to have their cake and eat it too: they wanted to have their slaves count as population when it came to representation but they weren't remotely considering those same people as population when it came to actual voters.
So you got the 3/5 compromise in it's appalling simplicity, and the electoral college which favored lower population (read: plantation) states by giving them outsized influence over national elections compared to what their actual population would normally warrant.
If that wasn't enough, the EC was also intended as an insurance policy for the elite: if the population ever overwhelmingly elected someone that the elites overwhelmingly opposed, the EC could serve as a last ditch firewall to protect their interests and simply ignore the will of the voters to choose their own leadership.
You'll notice that none of the purposes of the EC are in the interests of the people.
Except that "areas" don't vote.
People do.
And the electoral college does nothing but penalize those who live in certain areas while rewarding others who live in different areas with wildly variable power behind their votes.
There's no reason an American living in Wyoming should be able to vote 7 times, but if they move to California they only get one vote...yet that is the system were currently living with...except that instead of describing it as discrete votes, the one single vote is just weighed 7x more, so that the system can deceive people into thinking it's fair and reasonable.