Well first of all our government isn’t a pure democracy. It’s a constitutional republic and it was specifically designed that way to prevent tyranny. The founders decided that if you couldn’t manage greater than 50% of the electoral college that congress would decide the president.
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You’re going to have to explain to me how that last sentence relates to the first two sentences.
Yes, I get that our government isn’t a pure democracy. The world hasn’t seen one of those in thousands of years, if ever. I get that it’s a constitutional republic, where the people elect representatives.
How does that translate to, or lead to, or result in, “The founders decided that if you couldn’t manage greater than 50% of the electoral college that congress would decide the president.”
When I say, “it’s a travesty of democracy,” and you respond with, “our government isn’t pure democracy,” that’s missing the point. The point isn’t that our country is technically a democracy and this goes against that. The point is that about the will of the people. In a constitutional republic, our representatives should be elected by the people. And if you give equal vote to 600,000 Wyomingans and 40 million Californians (which is the best-case scenario – the house members are not obliged to cast their state’s vote for the candidate who won that state…worst case scenario, the house members pick whomever they want to pick out of the three), then our representatives are not being elected by the people.
[quote=livinincali]
Assume for a moment that you had 5 candidates running with 3 somewhere in the middle, 1 extremely left and 1 extremely right, what if the hard core right managed 30%, the hard left managed 25% and the rest in the middle split the vote of the majority of american’s core ideology. Would you want the hard core right to rule because they got the majority vote? In that case you probably want congress to elect the more middle 3rd place finisher.
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That’s what I, personally, would want in that particular case. But what I, personally want is not what’s important. Also, in your example, what makes you think congress would elect the middle-of-the-road, 3rd-place finisher?
Let’s use a different example. Let’s say it’s Sanders/Cruz/Bloomberg. Sanders and Bloomberg get 40% each, and Cruz gets 20%. The red states don’t count for many electoral votes because they don’t have many people. That’s why Cruz only got 20%. But, if nobody gets a majority of the electoral vote, each red state counts as much as each blue state in the house vote, despite the fact that Wyoming has 600,000 people and California has 40,000,000 people. Bloomberg and Sanders split the blue and purple states, and Cruz gets all the red states. Cruz gets “elected.”
[quote=livinincali]
Some countries solve that issue with a run off. But then again would you want to be forced to chose between the hard right and hard left of which neither really represents your core values because they ended up being the top 2.
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That’s kinda how it is now in most elections. And that’s preferable to a vote where a heavier vote is given to some citizens than others.
[quote=livinincali]
The system was designed to keep a weak majority from claiming the power of the executive branch and in the US the executive branch as a lot of power. It has some flaws but every system of elected government has it’s flaws.
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Better that the president is chosen by a weak majority of the people than not by the people at all.
