One person.

[Beestie]

Originally posted by hot_pastrami

Excellent point, sir. The Electoral College is a bit of an antiquated idea... it makes the election power unevenly spread amongst the people. Should a voter in Arkansas have more influence than a voter in California? The Electoral College does just that, by proxy. The presidential election in America isn't really democratic.

CA has more electoral voters than does AR which mirrors the makeup of their respective congressional delegations. If the electoral representation is unfair, that sort of implies that the congressional representation is also unfair. Since no one is making that argument, I'm suspicious (in an "I smell partisanship" kind of way) of the calls to re-examine the electoral college. I don't understand how one can be fair and the other not. CA gets 10 congressmen and AR gets 3. CA gets 10 electoral votes and AR gets 3. I don't see a problem (I made up the numbers made up to illustrate the point - I assume the ratio to be a Constant).

The only issue not really addressed is that congress people from a given state do not have to vote as a block as do their electoral counterparts. But in matters which pit the interests of AR directly against the interests of CA (i.e., the distribution of Federal funds), one may assume that each state's respective congressional delegation would, in fact, vote as a block.

I honestly don't recall anyone bringing up any issues with the electoral system prior to the 2000 election and wonder how much of the debate is really sour grapes (not directed at anyone participating in this thread, but in general).