"Bob Weinberger" wrote in message
news:x_Bjd.3491$DB.1319@trnddc04...

"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...

Good God, you people will swallow anything. The abolition of the
Electoral
College doesn't "favor" anyone but individual voters. With or
without the
electoral college, places where there are more people have more
votes.
With
or without the electoral college, states with larger populations
exert
more
influence becasue there are more people voting.

The underlying principle behind democratic elections is that
everyone who
is
eligible to vote gets one vote, and whichever candidate gets the
majority
of
the votes wins the election. Insofar as the Electoral College
supports
that
fundamental tenet, it is entirely superfluous. We just don't need
it. If
it does anything other than facilitate the democratic electoral
process,
it
subverts the very core of Democracy. And that is EXACTLY what it
does.

Wolfgang

While all of the above is true with regard to a Democracy, our
system is
not a Democracy and never has been. Our system of government is a
republic,
with all the "subversions" of democracy that that entails.

Hm.....

Well, China is a republic.....as a matter of fact, it's a "Peoples'
Republic" and, if I remember my Greek roots, that makes China more
democratic than the U.S. I'm not at all sure you're right about
that......um......though I will concede that China is inexorably (if
rather slowly) inching ever further toward democracy while the U.S. is
rushing headlong in the opposite direction.

It would take a
major re-write of our constitition to change our system to a true
Democracy.

Abolishing the Electoral College would be a step in the right
direction. If the American electorate can be sold on the patently
absurd proposition that Bush is good for them, they'll buy anything.
Why not try something that IS good for them?

I suspect nothing short of a revolution would accomplish that.

Well, there are revolutions and then there are revolutions. What if I
were to tell you, for instance, that it might be possible for a
significant fraction of the population of a major western
industrialized nation, a fraction that seems to genuinely believe that
a really big invisible guy with questionable morals wants them to kill
everybody who isn't like them, to become a major political force
within that nation....AND that the titular leader of that nation
actually courted the support of such a group and told them that he
agrees with them! Given that rationality has been around for a long
time and that it has played a large role in the development of the
political and philosophical underpinnings all major western
industrialized nations, such a scenario would be sort of
revolutionary......wouldn't you say?

Not that
such a revolution is necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of people would get hurt. However, it ain't gonna
happen......so, I guess it's moot.

By the way, in one of your replies to Stevie, you mentioned a
situation in which ballot initiatives in your state have gone awry in
that the urban majority who passed them were unaffected while the
rural minority who lost sufferred as a consequence. This is an
interesting problem, but neither the presence nor the abolition of the
Electoral College will have any effect on it.

Wolfgang