SUDDENLY 'The electoral college is a disaster for democracy' because Hillary won the Popular but not electoral...
And you would be saying the same if the situation were reversed. Don't be a hypocrite. And it isn't a sudden belief for me. I have believed this for 40 years.
I have too. It's indefensible.
It may have been kinda-sorta defensible when slavery -- the whole reason for its existence in the first place -- actually meant that without it the North (all dem blue states the other day) would have dominated over the South (all dem red states the other day) since slaves by definition could not vote. As your link notes:
>> If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves. <<
So when we think of the EC we should also think "three-fifths of a person". Because that, the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, was part of the same structure to attempt to balance the competing factions of North and South, where the latter was allowed to count its slaves as three-fifths people for the purpose of counting population ---- but of course that three-fifths had no vote and the whites voted FOR them, which was called Slave Power. That is the added power the South was alloted owing to its use of slaves.
This was a shaky band-aid slapped on the continuous tension of the slavery question until the Civil War ended it and forced the country to start over from a position far worse than when it started.
That's what the Electoral College should remind us of and should be mentioned every time the EC is. And that's how we get rid of it.
America rejected mob rule at its founding.....
Cool story bruh. But as just laid out -- what America rejected at its founding was its own precept that "all men are created equal". Which also excluded women.
And it wasn't "at its founding"; it was the 12th Amendment.