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Originally Posted by The Phenomenon
The Eloctoral college is a load of crap, and it gives the advantage to the Republicans.
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It does give an advantage to the republicans, but I think your statement needs some explication for those who may not know why:
The electoral college creates a weighted vote. In this sense, it's fair. One vote in Ohio counts as much, by weight, as mine in California. If it weren't for that, I suspect one candidate would go to New York and the other would come over here--and the nation would probably end up with a president from California that served our interests--time after time after time.
However, the less populous states are currently predominantly republican. It doesn't have to be that way, and the electoral college doesn't create that situation. In my view, it's a variety of factors that play into that--primarily cultural and socio-economics (lol, as if I should disentangle the two
).
One possible solution, I've read, is that we could have more people in the House which would bring the electoral votes more in line with the population. But we would need to elect on the order of more than a 1,000. I don't want to pay their salaries, truth be told.
Given these factors I've listed, I don't have a firm opinion on the electoral college. I really don't like one suggestion I've read, which was to punish errant electors. My concern is that errant electors will, with full legal approval, elect the person the elite want in office. That was the original intent of the provision--that the educated minority would make better informed decisions than the uneducated and ignorant mass of citizenry.
What I do see as greater cause for alarm (because really, there isn't
too much drastic difference between mainstream political candidates) is that some errant decisions might undermine the farce of presidential elections we believe in so deeply in this nation. We some residuals of that last election. There really was a legal and legitimate way to handle the situation but people became so enmeshed with our belief patterns that we ended up bumble-fucking the whole thing and calling it into question.
I actually suspect that part of the impetus to ensure the votes were counted was to legitimize what was going on. We needed to have those votes declare the winner--even though they don't. You'd think that all us US citizens surrounded by simulacra as we are, and southern californians to boot (and me, sitting next to disneyland--even baudrillard can't get to the bottom of these layers!) would just leave well enough alone. But we just kept picking and picking until we undermined our own political process!
So I don't know how to rectify these issues.