(01-28-2020 10:51 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(01-28-2020 10:49 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(01-28-2020 10:39 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(01-28-2020 10:13 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(01-28-2020 09:18 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  If you notice, Fountains said that preferring the EC as a voting method BECAUSE of this fact was stupid. Not that believing that the EC helps to reduce the impact of voter fraud is stupid.

I probably fall closer to Fountains in thinking that favoring the EC for this particular reason is fairly superficial and misses the major, foundational reasons for the EC existing.

And Big still has a very valid point, which you seem to want to minimize or skirt, which is that the nation place multiple million more votes for Clinton, than Trump. So saying that the nation made their will known is a step too far. It was not a clearly landslide election in either popular vote or EC vote.

Well, the foundational reason still exist, even without me enumerating them. Somehow, an "only" has crept into this conversation, as in "Favoring the EC only for its firewall properties..."

If the voters did not elect Trump, who did?

The electoral college.

That is literally how we have a situation where the plurality of voters, in a first past the pole process, voted for the losing candidate.

And if the voters did not elect the electors, who did?

The weighted voting you guys want could easily defeat a candidate who led on the first ballot.

There is no method that is is perfect for everybody, everywhere, in all circumstances.

But again, if you don't like the system, change it. But it is the system we have now. It is the system we had 1876. It is the system in the Constitution. Stop whining about the rules of the game. You want a little cheese with that whine?

" In 1876 the Electoral College made Hayes president in the course of one of the most contentious elections in national history. He lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, but he won an intensely disputed electoral-college vote after a Congressional commission awarded him twenty contested electoral votes. There resulted the Compromise of 1877, in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election on the condition that he withdraw remaining U.S. troops protecting Republican office-holders in the South, thus officially ending the Reconstruction era."

Democrats had only 140 years after that to change the rules.