People talking of splitting USA (red-blue map)
Originally posted by Timmy G@Nov 9 2004, 07:41 PM
Many democracies around the world have copied the American system; none has copied the Electoral College.
For a quick history lesson, the Electoral College was designed by the Framers of the Constitution to give us a mechanism to elect the president by the people, at least indirectly. At the time, we were a population of approximately 4 million people scattered along the Atlantic coast with extremely limited communications and transportation. Direct election wasn't practical. A factor they considered was that direct election of the president by the popular vote gave the people too much power. The original Electoral College began with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.
In Afghanistan, the recent presidential election was determined by popular vote. The same will be true when elections are held in Iraq.
......... if this magical thing is so good for us, then why isn't anyone else doing it?
Ah, but you are forgetting why it was not done to give each state exactly equal say. The EC gives each state an EV for every Senator and Congressperson. Since every state has two Senators regardless of size and a number of congress people allotted per population this purposely give small states more weight in the EC. This was done to promote unity. If the EC was based entirely on population, the smaller states would be at the whim of the larger states. Even though 10 smaller states might be for one candidate, if Virginia (back then Virginia was the biggest and most populous state) wanted another candidate, Virginia would win. To give the smaller states a little extra say, it made everyone happy.
If you want a revolution, eliminate the EC, and after about 10 presidents in row are picked solely by California and New York, you might have one.
Actually an EC system in Iraq like the US one would make sense. One of the major contentions is that the Sunnis will be swallowed up by the other more populous factions, like the Shiites. Just use an EC and give the Sunnis a
little extra votes, not enough to make it 100% equal, but a
little more to make them feel better and not threaten the Shetites. This would promote unity in Iraq, and thus demonstrate the TRUE purpose of the EC.
To further brag of the genius of the EC, the UN, which most anti-American people seem to LOVE is also based on it, in a way. To get Russia to join when it was formed, Russia objected to one country one vote because Russia was so big it was afraid of being swallowed up by a bunch of little countries. In the general assembly, Russia gets more than on vote, I think it is 6 or 9 or something like that. Most other countries get one vote. Russia is lot bigger than nine times Haiti (which gets one vote). So even the in the UN the votes are weighted to the smaller countries almost EXACTLY like the USA EC weights its votes to the smaller states. I also believe the USA and China get more than one vote in the general assembly.
@);-
So you see, the EC is very good system. It is better than one vote per state or voting strictly on populations. It is truly a compromise that is designed to promote unity.
