@dezrtfish:
Well if you don’t understand the point I am trying to make it’s my fault for being unable to explain clearly enough. I do suggest you do a bit of research on pro=college view points so that perhaps someone else can explain better than I.
Dezrtfish, I am impressed that you know as much as you do about the Electoral College. John Kerry would be amazed to learn how ejumakated our citizen-soldiers are. You did good.
I find it truly ironic that the people arguing for the destruction of the electoral college are the ones who understand it least. You would think that before they try to change something, they would try to understand its function so they can be assured the replacement will be better. Maybe that is just engineer thinking…
For those who actually are interested in how it works, here is a link to a good initial resource.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
And here is a nice starting point in that resource for improving the level of discourse about why we have an electoral college.
The Electoral College dilutes the votes of population centers that might have different concerns from the rest of the country. The system is supposed to require presidential candidates to appeal to many different types of interests, rather than, say, the urban voter. The College enabled the Founding Fathers to deftly incorporate the Connecticut Compromise and three-fifths compromise into the system of choosing the President and Vice President, sparing the convention further acrimony over the issue of state representation.
In the Federalist Papers No. 39, James Madison argued that the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of federal (state-based) and national (population-based) government. The Congress would have two houses, one federal and one national in character, while the President would be elected by a mixture of the two modes, giving some electoral power to the states and some to the people in general. Both the Congress and the President would be elected by mixed federal and national means.
