2020 US Election Thread

[jwb]

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

I was taught that they were there in case the masses made an absolutely idiotic choice they could just say nope sorry.

I actually thought they were probably going to reject Trump. I thought that they were a safeguard.

That's the purpose of having electors who cast the votes for any given state. That's only one part of the electoral college, and a relatively irrelevant part in terms of how elections have historically been decided. Electors virtually always vote the way their state's population did.

The other part of the electoral college, and the truly relevant part to modern elections, is that states are given a certain number of electoral points based on population but scaled so that while more popular states have more electoral points, the difference between them and smaller states is less drastic than the difference in population. So in other words, it disproportionately gives smaller states more power relative to their population size.

The other aspect is most states use winner take all method of distributing their electoral points. So whichever party wins the popular vote in said state gets all of the electoral points, as opposed to the proportional method where if the Dems get 60% of the vote and the Reps get 40%, they split the electoral points 60/40. If every state adopted this proportional method then at the very least everyone's vote would count, though smaller state voters would still count more.

10th Amendment

I’m not really arguing anything in particular just that federalism isn’t working out very well these days.

No I get the states rights sentiment behind the logic of the electoral college - I just don't buy it

It applies specifically to federal elections which affect everyone equally. What the electoral college means is that basically your vote means less or even nothing in federal elections depending on which state you live in.

So this is priveledging the rights of some states over other states and some citizens over other citizens depending on which state they live in.