414
Young male voters are flocking to Trump – but he doesn’t have their interests at heart
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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I think the EC is an outdated system that needs to die, but it was explicitly created because they didn't want presidential elections to be one person, one vote. There is no ignoring here, it's by design.
It was explicitly created because they wanted presidents to be chosen by state legislators, not the general public at all.
Iirc, it was a compromise between those who wanted a direct election, and those who wanted Congress to choose the POTUS. Including concessions to the southern States because they were outnumbered when it came to free people.
I could be missing something about some wanting state legislatures to choose, but I'm pretty sure the bulk was what I said above.
I agree on the history, so "founded on" was wrong on my part.
But arguably the current "one person, one vote" standard controls. The Equal Protection clauses of the 5th and the 14th amendments are incommensurably in conflict with the electoral college. As between them, since the Equal Protection clauses (at least the 14th Amendment) are more recent, those arguably supersede in case of conflict.
That's my reasoning anyway.
At this point the US has massively diverged from the original intent. The original intent was that only wealthy male land owners would vote. Further the entire US government is just a very slightly modified version of what the UK used just with a President in place of a King, and states in place of noble houses.
There is unfortunately a massive sentiment in the US to uphold the founders as some kind of perfect ideal of democracy and that anything that differs from their original intent is somehow wrong. The reality of course is that they were flying by the seat of their pants and largely making it up as they went. In addition ideas and morals have changed greatly since that time. We should be far less concerned about what a bunch of people who died centuries ago would think about some law or ruling and far more concerned about what impact it would have today.
So yes, the Electoral College was intentionally set up as an attempt to prevent direct democracy, but so what? The question should not be what did they intend, the question should be do we still need/want it?