I think a good example of what the electoral college is: you have a sports tournament. The winner isn't the person who gets the most points in all the games. It's the person who wins the most games.
Also, the founding fathers weren't all supporters of the electoral college. Appealing to their ultimate compromise is a strange argument, especially since the original political motivations have largely become either irrelevant or reprehensible.
> It's the person who wins the most games.
That's the senate, and is not at all an accurate analogy for the way the electoral college works.
This begs for a source. Where is it stated exactly what the purpose of the electoral college was, in the Founding Fathers' own words?
Furthermore, you have to keep in mind that at the time the U.S. was founded, the individual states were essentially their own countries with individual governments and leadership. The only way they could make the deal work with all of them was to ensure that no one state could "overrule" the others. If smaller states could be bullied by larger states, the term "united states" loses a quite a bit of its meaning.
The debate over the scope of the federal government dates back to before the end of the revolutionary war, and was a central topic of debate in the drafting and ratification process for the Constitution.
Remember that our first attempt at forming a country erred toward a weaker federal government, and was more-or-less an abject failure.
> Where is it stated exactly what the purpose of the electoral college was, in the Founding Fathers' own words?
Federalist 68, in which almost every argument makes literally no sense when compared to direct democracy.
That paper is mostly arguing for the electoral college over e.g. the "Governors" or "congressional" plans, leaving the infeasibility of direct election as a foregone conclusion.
A lot of founding fathers would've preferred a direct vote. See for example Anti Federalist 72. Using google you can also find quotes from Madison, for example, arguing that a direct vote would obviously be best.
Which begs the question: why not just do the obvious thing?
> The only way they could make the deal work with all of them was to ensure that no one state could "overrule" the others
Why don't we come out and be explicit about it -- the only way to make it work was the make sure that slave states were comfortable that they'd be able to retain political power while continuing to subjugate a huge portion of their population.
> If smaller states could be bullied by larger states, the term "united states" loses a quite a bit of its meaning.
Larger by what measure?
The slave states that were opposed to direct election and are today characterized as "rural" weren't actually significantly less populous than the northern states. Virginia -- a slave state -- was the most populous.
It's just that a huge number of their men were black, and so didn't count in a direct election.
So, the whole "rural / less populous states need a voice in presidential elections" thing is complete and utter horse shit. The actual issue was that "very populous states that choose to treat a big portion of the population as sub-humans need a vote controlled by whites but with power proportional to their entire population".
The electoral college was there to prevent demagogues. That way, if one person managed to convince the populace with empty rhetoric, there would still be a reasonable body to meet, to discuss, and to choose somebody else.
Worded another way: The states backing the college were some of the least populous UNLESS you counted slaves, who did not themselves enjoy rights of citizenship but were included in population counts to boost the political power of slaveholders.
One of the mistakes they made that we're all still suffering from was in how difficult it is in practice to amend the US constitution. Even the late great Antonin Scalia felt this way--in some interview he gave somewhere, he said that, if given a magic wand and the ability to change the constitution, he'd simply make it easier to amend.
Happily, there are people working on the electoral college problem, e.g. http://nationalpopularvote.com.
(I am, by the way, one of those coastal liberals who's pretty frustrated at how much less my vote matters than the vote of some dude in Wyoming.)
Completely disagree. It keeps us from screwing it up. Don't mess with something that isn't broken. And no, it isn't broken.
There's a reason the US government is one of the oldest in the world. They got quite a few things right from the start.
After all, it's a legal document, not a religious text.
There's also dodgy and ambiguous language that keeps causing arguments and problems, in part because it wasn't written super clearly to begin with, and in part because centuries have passed since the people wrote it.
(Some of my big ones: clarifying the 2nd amendment one way or the other, addressing abortion rights directly, and adding something to strengthen every citizen's access to voting, e.g. national voting holiday, felon enfranchisement, whatever.)
I'd make it easier to amend, and trust in my fellow citizens to do the right thing.
(he had given a talk mostly criticizing the idea of enshrining rights in the constitution as an attempt to remove certain ideas from democracy)
