I'm not sure if this is serious, but

If the purpose of the Presidential election is to choose a leader depending on the will of the people, then this is not the best system for it. It gives some people more voting power than others, in a country where "equal representation" is a national motto.

Some of the arguments in favor of the electoral college are valid, but it does not change the ultimate fact that it leads to an unequal system.

The 1960 NY Yankees sez hai!

Outscored the Pirates 55-27 over 7 games and lost 4-3. Broke this 8 yr. old's heart

For all baseball fans that weren't alive at the time , game #7 was a wild one punctuated by 3 bizarre/brilliant plays:

1... Yankee sure handed shortstop Tony Kubek got hit in the throat with a sure double play grounder that took a bad hop in the 8th inning with the Yankees leading 7-4. The inning ended 9-7 Pittsburgh.

2... Mickey Mantle made the greatest baserunning decision of all time diving back into 1st base on a grounder to firstbaseman Rocky Nelson, after he stepped on first base, allowing Gil Mcdougal to score the tying run from 3rd base with one out in the top of the 9th.

3... HOF catcher and 3 time MVP Yogi Berra was playing left field for the Yankees that day!

I'm sure its in this thread somewhere already, but Ross Perot got, what, 20% of the popular vote, 0% of the electoral college.

Also, the SC didn't stop recounts because they were only happening in some districts, it was because there was no uniform rule for saying what constituted a vote. Also, they (those who vote to stop the recounts) didn't feel there would be enough time to establish uniform rules, implement them, and then have more recounts before the soft deadline for states to have finished counting their votes. This, of course, went against the will of the state supreme court, but not a single conservative was pro-states rights on that day.

Interesting, might want to look into concepts like protection for the minority in America's history before you post further.

Please enlighten me on what those concepts have to do with some people having a more powerful vote than others.

THat may be true, but saying "they should just ban it" kinda misses a boatload of things.

U OLD

Really? Giving small states (the minority) more power than a straight population split to protect their interests goes back to the Connecticut Compromise.

And they still have it in the form of the US Senate. Getting rid of the electoral college would not affect this in any way. Is it fair or accurate to say that the PRESIDENT gives significantly more weight to the residents of Rhode Island or Wyoming or South Dakota because their votes count for as much as 6 times that of a Californian? Of course not; that would be silly, and so is a system that does not count one vote as one vote. The fact that we have direct elections of Senators (also not part of the "original" Constitution) should tell us that what a bunch of 18th-century politicians thought might not be the best model for a 21st-century modern democracy.

Interesting comparison, but I think voting and world series are still apples and oranges.

I think the world series is set up this way to add a randomizing element to give the worst team a chance to win and build viewer excitement. Just as poster says how Pirates beat Yanks but were totally outclassed. Was it fair the Pirates won?.... No, but luck makes sports more interesting to watch. (and same goes for making poker playable to bad players)

But in elections, the goal is to have the candidate desired by the will of the people to win. That should be very easy... whoever gets the most votes wins, period. To add this randomizing element of having the popular vote winner lose due to quirky electoral college is a travesty of justice.

obviously contradictory statement is contradictory. If you want to argue that the EC is unfair then ok, but your logic is just awful.

That's just, like, your opinion, man.

I mean, really?

The goal of the world series is to determine the most worthy champion. I mean, that's why they play more than one game in the first place, don't you think?

Yes, they play more than one game to try to give the best team a better chance to win. I was referring to your suggestion that whoever scores the most runs in 7 games should be the winner. That do not do it that way, but if they decided to, it certainly would favor the better team even more than a best of 7 series.

However, doing it by most runs scored would likley be very boring for the fans as the better team would usually get such a big lead, that there would no longer be any suspense.

The direct election of Senators was the single worst thing that's happened to this country.

What you say is true, but it's not obvious Rhode Island and Wyoming are using their extra leverage in any meaningful way. The voters that seem to get the most out of the electoral college are voters from swing states -- Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, for instance, get constant attention to their issues every 4 years, while California, New York and Texas get comparatively less, and Presidents eying re-election can also have strategic imperatives in paying closer attention to 'swing state voters' needs over others. It would seem to me that designing an ideal electoral system would forgo having arbitrary internal political boundaries influencing how governance happens. But I think any practical and empirical view of the Electoral College would bear that out, random bozos in the Rust Belt get more attention from Presidential candidates and campaigns than random bozos in California or Texas for no other reason than their state is more 'contested' due to the rules of the system.

I had an interesting problem in a statistics class that attempted to look at the power an individual voter has in a large swing state versus a small swing state (assuming voting outcomes are normally distributed around a mean of 50% for each candidate).

It turns out the voter in a larger swing state has a substantially larger chance of affecting the election outcome (in terms of expected electoral votes his candidate gains as a result of him voting). The voter is less likely to affect the outcome of his larger state, but the fewer times that he manages to affect the outcome he generates far more electoral votes. I believe the discrepancy was threefold in expected number of electoral votes, but I'd have to look at this as it was years ago.

In light of this, it would make sense to invest significantly more money in a larger swing state than it would several smaller swing states, even if the sum of the votes of the small swing states is the same as the votes of the larger swing state.

Yeah. I wouldn't hazard a confident guess as to whether Presidential campaign managers and staffs know this either through empiricism or just intuitively, and I've never proved it out myself, but I'm pretty confident a study of Presidential campaign spending in the last two decades reflects this conclusion -- that a whole lots of money gets dumped in Ohio and Florida, and relatively less (even controlling for population size) gets spent in New Mexico or Iowa.

I think pointing out the holes in the Electoral College works best working backwards -- put yourself behind the uhh, Electoral Circumstance Veil of Ignorance and look at the Electoral College and try to guess see where all the resources and candidate political capital should get spent if you knew NOTHING about the political allegiance of voters or anything about the real world, and JUST knew about the rules of the game. Logically, you'd assume California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania/Illinois get the would get alot of money and attention, in that order.

Instead the top 5 ad spend states in 2008 were Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Now, I won't ardently claim that ad spending = parochial local interests used their (probable) political leverage effectively, but it's probably a good proxy as to which states the candidates tried most to appease both during the campaign and potentially after. Follow the money imo.

Why that happened -- why the difference between the two lists -- should given you an answer as to who the EC 'unnaturally' harms and benefits, and why. I share your conclusion: big swing states get the most 'artificial' leverage. Big non-swing states lose the most.

Cool story bro. The fact there's precedent for something doesn't make it just.

States aren't people and therefore can't be minorities or have interests. They represent people who can have their interests thwarted by the tyranny of the majority, but I see no evidence that this would actually occur in correlation to the size of one's state, at least in today's world. Look at other countries or counties with respect to state government. The populous political entities don't screw over the small ones, in fact the reverse is usually true.

Your conclusion isn't supported by your fact, and is obviously wrong. States obviously have interests, and it's pretty absurd to say otherwise. In a group of states, the smaller ones definitely represent a minority as well.

I see it the other way around. Detroit screws over the rest of Michigan, Chicago screws over the rest of Illinois. That's admittedly anecdotal evidence, but it's all that I have. I have a feeling not much has really been done in that area.

States are just legal creations. Legal creations don't have interests, they only represent people who have interests. "Illinois" can't think "Wow, this deal really makes me happy". Politicans representing Illinois might say "this deal is good for Illinois", but they really mean something along the lines of "this makes a number of Illiosans better off than it makes some of them worse off", if that. In any case, being a small state doesn't put you in a minority by definition, because political coalitions are almost always built around other factors than the sheer population of the political entity you live in.

I haven't found any evidence with respect to Chicago, but I do know that New York City pays much more to the state and federal governments than it gets in services. In general, governments favour rural areas: see farm subsidies, more expensive government services.

jacknodding.gif

now, keep going...

Electoral college isn't going anywhere. It's the only fair way. We don't want NY and CA picking our presidents.

Having Florida and Ohio picking presidents is much better.