At 09:20 PM 7/1/04, Earl Dunbar wrote:
>And guess what, no Electoral "College" (haven't any of those clowns earned
>their degrees yet?) to ensconce a President that the people didn't vote for.
At the risk of starting something . . . I will state the caveat up
front. This is simply a statement of the arguments, not a defense for them.
The Electoral College is intended (by the Constitution) to have a balance
similar to that which is reflected by the two legislative houses. The
House of Representatives is based upon a "one man one vote" principle to
represent voters more directly. It's based on population and each
Congressional District is supposed to have approximately the same
population. OTOH, the Senate is intended to represent the states equally
without regard to population distribution or land area. Overtly, it was
intended to prevent the few largest, most populous states exerting complete
control unchecked, at least partially reining them in.
Largely unstated publicly when the Constitution was written, it was also
the Deep South's method for protecting slavery from being abolished by the
more populous North. The Constitution would never have been ratified
without these compromises that give some weight to each state and its
interest on an equal basis with all the other staes. Slavery was a hot
issue from the get-go.
Various compromises were made during the first 80+ years regarding state
admissions including Mason-Dixon and the Missouri Compromise . . . Kansas
"Free" and Missouri "Slave" notwithstanding the Mason-Dixon Line; for quite
a few years a northern state could not be admitted without a new Deep South
state also being admitted at the same time; the Deep South Senators would
block the admission.
In the original Constitution, Senators were elected to the Senate by the
state legislature. Whoever controlled the state legislature sent their boy
to the Senate when a seat was due to be filled for another 6-year
term. This changed to direct popular vote with the 17th Amendment in
1912. In the event of a vacancy before the end of the 6-year term (death,
resignation, etc.), the state's governor appoints a Senator to fill that
vacancy until an election is held for that seat (in accordance with the
state's method for doing so).
The number of Electors each state has for the Electoral College matches the
number of Congressmen *and* Senators the state has. This carries into it
the same overt purpose cited above for the U.S. Senate . . . to provide at
least some counterbalance to the few large and most populous states. Thus
the makeup of the Electoral College. Two additional nuances about having
an Electoral College versus simply gathering together the Congressmen and
Senators. Senate seats are 6-year terms with 1/3rd re-elected every two
years and both seats from a single state must be staggered. The Electoral
College is elected every four years allowing the state's voters to make a
decision that might be different from that which would be made by a Senator
(originally chosen by the state's legislature) who was seated four years
previously. In addition, from a practical political strategy the President
and Vice President will likely *never* be from the same state. The ballots
for President and Vice President are cast by the Electoral College
separately and the Electors *must* cast at least one of these ballots for
someone that is *not* from their own state (read the 12th Amendment).
Is it complex? Most certainly. The underlying reasons, right or wrong,
aren't understood very well by most voters, especially the basic philosophy
reaching back into the original Constitutional Convention that wrote it,
that the Federal Government should represent not only the individual
voters' interests, but the states' (and in some aspects the states' elected
governments) as a whole also. For Good or Ill, and all its warts and
imperfections, it does that with (oft imperfect) balance. The occasions in
which the popular vote has a majority for one "ticket" and the Electoral
College balloting results in a majority for the another are relatively
rare. If you study these "upside down" election results, you will find
they were close in popular vote and ended up that way due to the slight
extra weight given to the smaller, less populous states with fewer
Congressional seats that were carried in larger number by the winnning
"ticket." Again, right or wrong, I believe the Founding Fathers
deliberately set it up that way, so that in a very, very close popular
vote, the States' interests with each state having parity with all the
others without regard to population size, would prevail.
Again, I'm not trying to defend this one way or the other . . . simply to
explain *why* it's the way it is today. I have my opinions about the
matter but won't express them here.
BTW, if the U.S. Congress and Senate are set up in a manner that
individuals' intrests are at lest partially balanced by states' interests,
I belive there is a similar parallel in British Parliament's bicameral
structure. Its two houses are intended to strike a balance between the
individual Commoners' interests and that of the Crown and his/her landed
and titled "cronies" (a bad word for it but I'm going to leave it that
way). The difference is what the bicameral structures are intended to
better balance.
-- John Lind
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