Should the Electoral College Be Abolished?

[Coyotl]

Dec 8, 2016

The Nation’s John Nichols says neither our mayors, governors, nor school boards are elected this way

[ZoomBubba]

1. The question depends ...

... on who's winning any given year. A couple of weeks before the election, there were Clinton supporters chiding Trump's Tweet about how the electoral college was crooked because some recent poll suggested he might win the popular vote and lose the electoral college (forgot which one it was). Now, since the opposite happened, everyone is taking the contrary stance to before.

I saw Kos try to say it should be abolished and replaced with the candidate that wins a "plurality" which means not a majority, but the most. Which is how we have gotten a fourth of our presidents ... they didn't win a majority, but they won most.

Most functional democracies go by the 50 percent plus one majority. If no one achieves that, they have a runoff between the top two vote getters ... something that is pretty much done for every US office aside from president.

[brush]

2. No question. It's an antiquated system put in place to appease slave states

Now it results in votes in small states having more weight than votes in larger states — for instance, one vote in Wyoming equals three votes in California.

We need to ditch this unfair system asap as it has put a loser in the White House twice since 2000.