Petition to abolish the Electoral College

[The Grand Nudger]

I did mention hat I'm not convinced it was well intentioned - but being undemocratic in this sense is a nebulous claim. It would be just as undemocratic if the ec was invented to prevent the majority from asserting the validity of slavery, or if a small group of people decided that they didn't give a shit that the majority were in favor of slavery - which, fact check....we did exactly that once upon a time.

Being democratic is not interchangeable with being a good idea, or the right idea. The inherent weakness of democracy is that it's only as good as it's people...and whatever the ec (or any other lever like it) may have been created to do, it's an effective means by which we can reject and deny the worst impulses of the democratic body.

I get that, when The People are better (or at least we can convince ourselves that they seem better) than our current government, it seems like maybe we should do away with shit like this - but it should be just as easy to conceive of a time and of a people who do not live up to the premise of their governments. Perhaps the mistake, in the current moment, is recognizing that the government sucks, but not realizing that the majority of people like the way that it sucks and keep voting for it to keep sucking in precisely this way. We've got the worst of both worlds, and so we lash out and talk about breaking something that isn't broken, something that could help us fix the thing that is. We mistakenly declare that the ec is broken because it stymies what we believe to be the democratic mandate not recognizing that this is exactly what it was designed to do, and what it's good at doing - for better or for worse.

[Angrboda]

That's an awful lot of ass whistling that says absolutely nothing. When you can point to specifics, let me know. The fact is that "enlightened minorities" are a myth that elites have used throughout history to ram things down the throat of reluctant majorities. If the majority is biased and off, a minority is likely to be more so on average. It's a statistical fact. Smaller samples deviate further from the mean.

[The Grand Nudger]

Enlightened minorities. The members of the progressive left present as exactly this, at present, though they mistakenly believe themselves to be the majority. It is the gripe, in point of fact, of the not so enlightened right and the moderate left that this purportedly enlightened minority is ramming shit down their throat.

They didn't vote for the great replacement, after all.

I think that we need to clarify whether the disagreement is the current misuse, or with the underlying premise of a republic, or of any other measure meant to give some select or elect group a final pass over the will of the mob.

[HappySkeptic]

I think that we need to clarify whether the disagreement is the current misuse, or with the underlying premise of a republic, or of any other measure meant to give some select or elect group a final pass over the will of the mob.

The electoral college is a bad idea, period.  It has 2 flaws.  One is that its makeup does not represent popular vote.  The other is the flawed idea that some appointed elites are going to somehow "protect" the republic from a bad leader.

Elites cannot protect the republic.  To do so would invite civil war.  Only agreed procedure, such a impeachment should do that.  There is far more chance of electors being used to subvert the will of the public than to save the country.

There is now the real chance that governors will overturn election results in their state and send their own electors to the college.  Because the manner in which electors are decided are 100% up to the states, parties only have to win the state legislatures (and use gerrymandering to keep it) to potentially lock up federal power.

[The Grand Nudger]

There's no way around "elites" in a representative government. If that's the flaw, it's intractable from the form. We also think that it's the duty of "elites" to prevent or strike down any law that's unconstitutional...even if it has popular support. To impeach presidents...even if they have popular support. We've been doing this for some time. We hold these beliefs and have made them manifest in law and act about a great many aspects of our system.

This flaw, if we're running with that, is built into every level of our government.

It's not a requirement that our elites be completely and exclusively bad faith actors. When we describe the garbage that shitty people get up to as a consequence of abusing power or authority - remember that they'd abuse a light-bulb too. That might, more properly, be a function of having a bad vetting system - and not a function of having layers of elites with review over political decisions with metrics wholly apart from popular support. If you saw our current admin standing on your driveway holding cotton candy your mind would immediately wander to just how they managed to fuck it up. Maybe it's made from asbestos. Maybe it's your dead great grandmothers hair. Point is, you wonder how they managed to poison that cotton candy, not whether they did something to it. Everything the current crop touches turns to shit because it's on brand for them.