[quote=zk]
How is that not a travesty of democracy?
How would it not again be a travesty of democracy if Bloomberg or Sanders won a solid plurality of both popular and electoral votes, but republican nominee and third-place finisher in the general election Ted Cruz was elected president?[/quote]
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.
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.
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.
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.