a little math to explain why we want the electoral college
You can dispense with the formality of having "electors". But we need to keep the principle of electoral votes by state as apportioned by population.
Why?
Here's an example: In an election where the candidate with a majority of the votes in the country would be the winner...
If two-thirds of California voters supported candidate X, he could defeat candidate candidate Y who won every other state by 5%.
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 11:22 AM
10 Comments
10 Comments:
With modern technology available to accurately tally millions of votes, how come we can't just use the "popular vote"?
Is it possible to lose the popular vote and still win by electoral vote?
Sure, that's happened a few times. Play with the numbers and it's easy to imagine a range of possibilities.
Which makes me wonder why we don't do away with the electoral college altogether and just use the real numbers.
without the electoral college, the more populous states gain a lot of power and would pursue politicians and policies that are in their self-interests...
Maybe I'm completely missing something.
I thought their only purpose was to elect the Pres.?
If each vote, expressing each individual citizen's choice, can be counted accurately, why do we need the electoral college to vote for us?
Back to what I said, we don't need the electors to do what the electoral college does.
But moving from the current system of majority vote per state vs. majority vote in the country leads to what I discussed in the original post.
In addition, it probably increases the likelihood of vote fraud. For example, an extra million votes "found" in Illinois could tilt not just Illinois but the whole election.
I don't understand how the populous states gain power and influence if we do away with the electoral voting system.
I do understand your point about election fraud, though one million votes seems like quite a few to manufacture.
Actually, now that I think about it, voter fraud may be easier to accomplish under the current electoral system -- you need fewer fake votes to make a bigger difference in the grand scheme(swing the entire state's electoral vote).
It seems as though you would need many more fraudulent votes from more widespread locations to influence a national tally where each person's vote counted as one.
But assuming the reasoning that a we should keep the electoral system to prevent some type of voting fraud, you're open to another type of potential fraud - where the winner of the popular vote loses to the electoral.
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