Your Thoughts Exactly

I reiterate my belief that our primary concern should be preventing a tyranny of the majority. The electoral college is not merely a vestige of a time when states were more autonomous; it was a compromise adopted by the framers of the constitution specifically to make it more difficult for

At a time when states were more autonomoous, the concern may be been to limit the power of large states. Now that states are less autonomous, the original rationale is still appropriate and valid - simply being the choise of a majority of voters is not adequate grounds for election.

To be elected a candidate must be he majority choice in a broader swath of the country. That forces candidates toward inclusiveness instead of divisiveness and blunts campaigns based on us vs. them.

All of that is good and healthy for a democracy.
 

Blogger mangled the end of my first paragraph - sorry.

Here's the reconstructed paragraph:

I reiterate my belief that our primary concern should be preventing a tyranny of the majority. The electoral college is not merely a vestige of a time when states were more autonomous; it was a compromise adopted by the framers of the constitution specifically to make it more difficult for one particular group to trample on another group.
 

I respect that you want to maintain safeguards against a tyranny of the majority. Two thoughts though, 1) isn't there a way to do that without skewing voter power as Derek originally pointed out? That's why my idea for a run-off as an alternative method. 2) Many many other countries, have national popular elections without the electoral system and seem to be doing quite fine, in terms of political fairness and avoiding a tryanny of the majority. Its hard for me to buy that the electoral college is the mechanism reponsible for this when so many other countries succeed without it.
 

in response to a couple of the comments from the few posts about the electoral college:

Stu, Maine and Nebraska already do your ideas about changing the college - i believe, but am too lazy to verify, that one does a proprotional allocation of electors and the other does the constant 2 electors by a winner take all method, while electing the others by congressional district. the problem is that it is more valuable for the states to go with a winner take all method, so these changes are impossible, as states set their method of electing electors. i guess you could constitutionally change the system to demand that states use a certain method, but that could never happen. still worth discussing in theory though.

and derek, yes, i know there are several parties. but we still call this a two party system. in a popular vote, those minority parties would get much more support because their votes wouldn't be wasted, just as you argue. all votes would count, and voting a third party just to help them reach the threshhold for federal funding would be worthwhile as a step in the slow progression of the party. i think it would be extremely likely that many candidates would win with well under 40% of the vote. This happens all across the globe in nations with direct popular votes, preferential voting, runoff voting, and many other systems.

the vote of 2000 is definitely an odd and unwelcome outcome - the winner gaining not simply less than 20% of the vote, but less than another candidate. This was only the 4th time this has happened though, and considering likelihood of irrational outcomes under other systems, this isn't so bad. Yes, in a popular vote you wouldn't have any outcome like this, because the winner would get more votes than anyone else, but, as i said, i believe the winner could very likely have close to a third of the vote. I think i'd prefer a winner who loses the popular vote 48-49 more than a winner who wins with 35%. on candidate had slightly more than half of the country vote for someone else, while the other has nearly 2/3 of the country vote for someone else. the good thing about popular voting and the likelihood that third parties getting more of the vote is that congressional seats would be filled by more third party candidates, as voters tend to vote along the party line of their presidential choice in a presidential year. i think this would be a good thing.

as for other voting systems, there are many. there are various forms of preferential/ranking systems, where the top 1, 2, 3, or more (usually no more than 3) choices are counted equally. also, a common system is a ranking system where the top vote is counted, but the ballots that have as their first choice the candidate who gets the least 1st place votes get dropped, and the second place votes on those ballots get used instead. this can create a perverse outcome in which a candidate could actually WIN under a certain set of ballots, while if more people prefered the candidate, the candidate would LOSE. This is called alternate voting, and continues (take the 2nd to last in the popular vote, find ballots ranking him/her first, and apply the 2nd choice, then 3rd to last, etc) until someone has a majority. France has a popular vote with a runoff between the top two in case of no majority winner. there are all sorts of election methods, each with its own advantages and flaws; they create potentially irrational and perverse outcomes, foster various forms of strategic voting, empower or harm minority parties, and grant certain voters more power than others. Our system has flaws, certainly, but also has its benefits - requiring widespread support, maintaining a 2-party balance that has kept this country stable for centuries, and generating very few outcomes in which the winner has less support than a loser. I would like a mixed system of proportional representation (based on a vote for a party's slate) and and single member district (what we have now) in congress, to generate a few more minority members, but for presidential elections, i'll stick with what we've got.