Reply #38: Abolishment is stupid

[laconicsax]

The electoral college isn't about giving more power to small states or less to big states. It's about equal representation.

If the college is abolished, then you wind up with the fact that major metropolitan areas will decide the winner, while rural areas won't count for crap because their vote is outweighed, and as beneficial as that scenario can be for the left, it isn't just.

The fact of the 2000 election is that Gore won the popular vote and was cheated out of the electoral college by vote fraud and the five Supremes. The only other time that the popular vote lost was when Samuel Tilden was cheated out of the electoral college (Florida again) by his own party when they voted against him in the legislature to settle the dispute over which candidate Florida's votes went to. Barring any foul play in the election, the popular vote winner has been, without exception, the electoral college winner.

The rethugs like to gloat about how many more states/legislative districts * won than Gore in 2000, and it's an example of how the electoral college equals representation--Gore's support was more localized than *, but because of population density, it was greater in numbers. Since *'s popularity was mainly in the much more numerous and larger (area-wise) areas, but a smaller number of high density districts had more votes, he lost the popular vote.

If it were known before the election that the winner is essentially decided by the high-density areas, then there's really no point for candidates to campaign anywhere else, or try to appeal to other areas or non-metropolitan interests, and we can have endless elections that are very close in the popular vote and about half the country not being represented in the results.

For example, you have a country with 1 million voters and 6 states. the 1st state has some large cities and has a high population density. The other are widely varied in make up and have much lower density. 1st state has 550,000 votes for candidate A with no support for candidate B, and states 2-5 vote for B with 450,000 votes and no support for A. You then have one state deciding the result with the remaining 5 not having their vote worth the paper it was cast on. 17% of the country has 55% of the voting power.

That sounds an awful lot like the fact that in the US, something like the top half of the top 1% has almost as much wealth as the 90-95% below.