"Mike McGuire" wrote in message
link.net...
Wolfgang wrote:
"Mike McGuire" 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


It ain't going happen.


What I wrote was not a discussion of the rightness or wrongness of
the
electoral college, but rather a discussion of the probabilities of a
change. The situation where change might seem most likely is when
there
is a difference between the electoral vote majority and the popular
vote
majority. That happened in 2000. Now the usual (but not the only
way) a
constitutional amendment is proposed is by a 2/3 vote of both houses
of
congress. Given the polarization that existed then, and continues,
that
would have been highly improbable. Any time that difference
situation
occurs in the forseeable future, I would expect a similar
polarization
to stand in the way, never mind the likelihood that there would be
at
least 13 states in opposition.

Note that I left the last line of your previous message
unchanged......and without comment.

The reason for the electoral college is the fundamental compromise
that
got the constitution ratified by the original 13 states, which were
all
but sovereign nations at the time. The less populous of them were
not
willing to be overwhelmed in a simple plebiscite arangement, so they
got
the electoral college and they got two senators per state regardless
of
population while the larger states got house representation based on
population.

Facinating.

This is all pretty basic stuff,

Um......so, I guess I should already have known it, huh?

and it's the context in
which a change would be considered.

Well, there's a great deal more to the context. For one thing (and,
content to leave the rest as an exercise for the reader, I'll mention
only the one), notwithstanding the sentiments of my friends in North
Carolina, the individual states in the U.S. do not in the least
resemble autonomous sovereign states some two hundreds years later
nor, in the opinion of the tyrannical majority, I believe, should
they.

So I'll stand by my expectation, it
ain't going to happen.

See above.

Wolfgang