In the United States, an Electoral College is used to decide the president. Is it a good system, or would a direct democracy be better?
Share why if you wish.
Electoral College Or Direct Democracy?
Asking — and answering — life's interesting questions
In the United States, an Electoral College is used to decide the president. Is it a good system, or would a direct democracy be better?
Share why if you wish.
Many ways America operates are old, inadequate and not reflective of where things are headed in the future. We need to turn to the young people and get them in offices from the PTA to the White House. We need to get incredibly old, incredibly wrinkly good-old-boy white men out of our way in the Congress and so a removal of the Electoral College and the introduction of term limits would kind of go together. There are great individuals who are male and supportive but women in power are going to do increasingly and newly better than ever before and we need to lift them up. Male thinking can be linear and female thinking sometimes shows up as more of a collective thought process or with consensus or cooperation built in. This is not categorical. Or at least I don’t mean it that way whatsoever. Everyone is capable of everything but when you are in woman ~ only circles or woman ~ only therapies or women ~ only settingsdelete, the ground rules are just different and the feeling is more humane and more grounded in kindness. Women and girls need to be lifted up and honored for the leadership we bring so far and not held back by the good old ways that things used to be in the good old days. Those days turned out not to be so good for women and girls.
The Electoral College gives skewed representation and more power to individuals living in, for example, Wyoming and Alaska. Direct democracy would give more power (but unadulterated representation) to, for example, California and New York. There are winners and losers to either system. But at least direct democracy holds to what many attest is one of America’s goals: one person, one vote.
Besides that, the Electoral College was basically built to give slave-holding states increased power than they would if individual voters counted and only one house of Congress was formed based on those votes. The North had more people, a more dense population, and more diverse industries. Its economy was not as reliant on slavery. The South had fewer people and fewer centers of commerce. There were more slaves in the South than in the North and fewer citizens overall. The South was not about to join the Union without the Electoral College, having slaves count as three-fifths persons for Census-taking, and the formation of a Senate (in which they had equal power as Northern states).
I side with direct democracy.
There are technical and logistical reasons why direct democracy is difficult to administer. And I suppose that there is something to be said for the idea that “majority rule” will always disadvantage those in the minority.
However, it seems pretty clear that the current system is failing, and I’m not really sure how to fix it. I am not convinced that direct democracy is the solution, although it would definitely address some of the current problems.
From my knowledge, this is a pretty clear answer: Direct democracy is the only way one vote is of equal weight to all other votes. The Electoral College was a way of increasing (some would say simply “equalizing”) the power of less-populated states, keeping them from a tyranny of the more heavily populated states. However, that disadvantages a great mass of people who live in populated states. It’s time for the Electoral College to go the way of the Dodo. The less-populated states already have a great advantage in having just as many senators as populous states.
One person, one vote!
Is anyone in this day and age actually going to defend the Electoral College, after it gave us two of the worst presidents in history in defiance of the popular vote?
I saw a map by counties of the past presidential election. It was about 90% red and 10% blue, with the blue concentrated in heavily populated metropolitan areas. I wonder why that is?