You cannot be serious. We are a divided country because of the EC?
Serious as a heart attack, and just as deadly.
Or are you simply out of touch with the reality of things?
Not "out of touch", the characterization would be "well versed".
Sure the EC does little, if anything to unite us, but it was never intended to unite us.
Damn straight. And it's done a helluva job at not-doing-that.
It was intended to ensure high population areas do not have "mob rule". It was intended to aid in "leveling" the playing field. If you have a better idea on how to avoid the pitfalls of "mob rule" let's hear it.
Sure. Again.
If a PV amounted to "mob rule" then how do the several states ---- which have diverse and urban and rural populations just as the country does ---- elect their governors and Senators -- or even their own state Legisltures? Do they construct a bizarre filter of "county electors" that cast their own vote on behalf of their residents, which may or may not match those residents' wishes?
No, they do not. Not a single one. Because it isn't an argument. A popular vote is in no way 'mob rule', no matter how many times you keep parroting the same tired meme.
There are a total of two countries on earth who elect their head of state via an indirect vote. One is us. The other is Pakistan. Go ahead and make the case that the Norways and Ecuadors and Israels are employing "mob rule". That meme cannot be justified or even explained. We've been inviting that in the EC thread for five hundred posts --- no one has done it.
As for the ways -- plural -- that the EC has created and perpetuated division, see the next segment.
PV would only PERPETUATE "mob rule" and thus division between high and low population density areas. Do you really not understand that? Are you really that blind to the truth? Do you really not understand that our framers, and statesmen that followed, studied and LEARNED from the failures of history?
I understand the history too well and I've been posting it to the unlistening, so I guess why not go through it again....
The EC was created in small part out of a regional concern, that a candidate from New Hamster might not be known at all in Georgia. But that was the 18th century when such a trek was a major undertaking and the sum of one's info, if one could get it, would be from a newspaper or handbill. Technology over two centuries has rendered that argument completely moot.
But the other concern was the balance of power, and the influential Southerners at the creation of the Constitution got the infamous "Three Fifths Compromise" that mandated their populations, for the purpose of determining how much representation they would get (and therefore how many Electoral Votes) would count their slaves as three-fifths of a person. Of course those slaves themselves had no representation; they could not vote. So in effect the South stacked the deck, taking the benefits of an artificially-enlarged population number while skipping out on the responsibilities (voting for slaves) that should have come with it. As a result of that biased Electoral College, six of our first seven Presidents were slaveholders from the South. Consequently the nagging elephant-in-the-room moral question of Slavery was left to fester.
That finally came to a head of course in the Civil War, which arguably could have been avoided had the country dealt with it sooner. But the EC certainly did its part to ensure that we did not.
But wait -- there's more.
We no longer have Slave Power of course (which was the name given to that three-fifths malarkey), or slave states. That all went away with the aftermath of the Civil War and the Constitutional Amendments --- one of the most important of which was the Fourteenth. 14 guaranteed that ex-slaves were now citizens and that no male citizen could be deprived of his rights.
Did you catch the gender? No
male citizen. Meaning females could still be so deprived.... yet they were still counted in a state's population for the purpose of determining representation. Here was another constituency being counted for the benefit of the state, yet itself deprived of a say in the matter. Again, the state takes the benefit while skipping out on the responsibilities. Sure, any state could have enfranchised women at any time before 1920 and had twice as many votes........ but with the Electoral College system, there was no point ---- they already HAD the population-based representation so that wouldn't change, and the popular vote didn't elect the President anyway. So the incentive for women voting was in effect made nonexistent because the EC *did* exist.
Today women can vote, and we pat ourselves on the collective back thinking we enfranchise everybody --- and yet everybody in California and New York who voted for Trump, their votes didn't even count -- over six million -- because their state's Electors will vote unanimously, as if every single person in California and New York voted for Hillary Clinton. They didn't.
So it's still dividing, creating a bizarre concept of a "red state" and "blue state" checkerboard country as if we're one giant city of Berlin that might as well have state-line fences and signs reading "You are entering the Democratic Sector". "Blue walls" and "flyover country" and "battleground state" ----- NONE of these terms should even exist. They're walls. And the Electoral College pays for that wall.
And it also makes us all dependent on polls, since that's the only way residents of a given state know whether their vote is going to count or not. I got a vote in the recent election, because I'm in what the
polls designated as "in play". But my friends and relatives in Mississippi and Louisiana and Washington and California --- did not. Their vote meant nothing. No matter what they did, voted this way or that way or stayed home --- their state was already decided for them and it will so vote unanimously.
So aside from its division, the EC dicourages voting at all unless one happens to be in a "battleground state". And it perpetuates that division, and the Duopoly, and it makes us dependent on polls, which are --- this just in ---- not always accurate anyway. No one should have to consult polls to determine whether they have a meaningful vote or whether they should just stay home.
So ----- yeah I imagine I do understand something about the "failures of history", thanks for asking.