| Posted: 30 October 2024 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | 4
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Yeah, it's important to remember the founding fathers didn't really want any Tom, Dick or Harry to have any power over them that would actually affect their lives....
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It is always curious to me when anyone describe the "founders fathers" as though they were some monolith that all shared the same set of ideas and designs for the country.
In truth, they strongly disagreed on a lot of stuff, including whether the president should be elected by popular vote of the citizens or chosen by Congress. The electoral college, and the decision to let states decide how to chose their electors, was a compromise between those factions. (No country used a populate vote to elect their chief executive at the time; and the Founders also strongly disagreed on how much power the chief executive should wield).
Many of the arguments against using a popular vote have simply expired due to the passage of time and development. For example, a legitimate concern was the lack of access to information that rural citizens had the time. Another concern (obviously illegitimate!) was that the southern states favored using electors because it gave them a mechanism to obtain the votes of their slaves (through the 3/5 compromise) and preserve slavery.
I don't think it is accurate to say the electoral college works is "accomplishing exactly what it was designed to do." The largest problem with the system, in modern times, is that instead of allocating electors in proportion to the popular vote in each state, most states allocate all electors to the winner. This was not contemplated by the founders who didn't foresee the rise of political parties and believed each elector would cast his vote independently. If states allocated their electors proportional to the popular, the potential for a split between the popular vote and EC vote would be far less likely to occur (not impossible because each state receives 2 electors in addition to those allocated by population--which is why the Senate is actually far less representative than the EC).
In fact, the founders likely anticipated that most presidents would be chosen by the House of Representatives because there would be so many candidates for President none would receive a majority of the electors.
Discussion of the history here. |