Lets abolish the Electoral College |
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Andalus
Moderator Group Joined: 12 October 2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 1187 |
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Posted: 17 February 2008 at 9:21pm |
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insha'allah Br. |
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A feeling of discouragement when you slip up is a sure sign that you put your faith in deeds. -Ibn 'Ata'llah
http://www.sunnipath.com http://www.sunniforum.com/forum/ http://www.pt-go.com/ |
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abuayisha
Senior Member Muslim Joined: 05 October 1999 Location: Los Angeles Status: Offline Points: 5105 |
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Well that fear will indeed manifest. I remain hopeful. |
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Andalus
Moderator Group Joined: 12 October 2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 1187 |
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I agree that there might be a problem with the views of 98% of Americans, whom do not know the basics concerning the US constitution. In my opinion, the ideas of the framers have kept this place together, and it is when people have moved away from the constitution, such as the necons with their idotic foriegn policy, or the dems/liberals with their social engineering, that problems really come up. My fear is that any of the condidates make it into the white house, Obama included. Keep in mind that all of them have bowed to AIPAC and have worked for the blessing of the Israeli lobby.
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A feeling of discouragement when you slip up is a sure sign that you put your faith in deeds. -Ibn 'Ata'llah
http://www.sunnipath.com http://www.sunniforum.com/forum/ http://www.pt-go.com/ |
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abuayisha
Senior Member Muslim Joined: 05 October 1999 Location: Los Angeles Status: Offline Points: 5105 |
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I cringe at the possiblity of Obama winning the popular vote as Gore did in 2000 and having McCain as president due to the Electoral College. The fears that our Framers had in my opinion really no longer exist. However, you may well see "mob rules" if we have a repeat of 2000 election given the above mentioned hypothetical. |
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Andalus
Moderator Group Joined: 12 October 2005 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 1187 |
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Epps is an idiot. We are not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic. An actual democracy is "mob rules", which is what the author is implying, and is what the founding father argued against. Given that a large part of the population cannot find Iraq on a map, or a basic undertsanding of the constitution, I cringe at the idea that the US is in the hands of the worlds most ignorant. |
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A feeling of discouragement when you slip up is a sure sign that you put your faith in deeds. -Ibn 'Ata'llah
http://www.sunnipath.com http://www.sunniforum.com/forum/ http://www.pt-go.com/ |
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abuayisha
Senior Member Muslim Joined: 05 October 1999 Location: Los Angeles Status: Offline Points: 5105 |
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Let's abolish the Electoral College Created to protect the slave states, it is championed now by conservatives who fear the power of By Garrett Epps Oct. 12, 2007 | The California Electoral College Initiative has been exposed for what it is: a Republican plan to steal the 2008 presidential election. The idea was to divvy up the electoral votes of the nation's biggest state by congressional district rather than give all 55 to the statewide winner -- who would almost certainly be a Democrat. But a mysterious $175,000 contribution heightened suspicions that the Rudy Giuliani campaign was behind the initiative, and prompted two key staffers to leave their posts with the group pushing it. The collapse of the effort seems to represent a Florida-style cooked-election bullet dodged. But our democracy won't be safe until we disarm the weapon intended to fire such bullets. It's time to abolish the electoral vote system. We should do it now. Other nostrums only go halfway. Maine and Even in 1787, the electoral system was the Framers' single worst idea. As time has passed, it has become less and less defensible. It can't be reformed or tamed. It has to go. Americans revere their Constitution but don't understand it. Every year my students at the Consider the arguments most often advanced in the so-called "Electoral College"'s favor: The Framers distrusted democratic elections; the system prevents candidates from ignoring small states; it maintains the two-party system; it recognizes the vital role of the state governments; without it, we'd have to have a national voting system; it has served us well. These arguments are all sophisticated and sincere. But they're wrong. First, electing the president by popular vote would not make the Presidents, however, already claim a unique mandate from the people. Even Andrew Johnson, who had been elected by nobody, once told Congress to butt out of Reconstruction because "each member of Congress is chosen from a single district or State," while "the President is chosen by the people of all the States." And democratic systems are rarely threatened because their elected officials have too much legitimacy. In addition, much of what we are told about the Framers' distrust of democracy is misleading. Majority rule was what Anyway, even if the Framers distrusted democracy in the 18th century, that's not a good reason for us to distrust it in the 21st. We scrapped the Framers' system more than a century ago. We no longer permit individuals to own slaves, for example (13th Amendment); we no longer permit states to maintain old-South-style semi-dictatorships or skew their legislative apportionment (14th Amendment) or to bar voting by racial minorities (15th) or by women (19th) or by those who don't pay their poll tax (24th) or by young adults (26th). Senators are elected by the people, not state legislatures (17th). Why should we tolerate a system that lets state legislatures decide how states pick their electors, as Article II does? (And remember, if Al Gore had won the recount, the Republican majority in the Florida Legislature planned to set that vote aside and choose the electors themselves.) In fact, the Framers' high-minded elite republic died at As for protecting small states, the argument reminds me of something a Greek Orthodox priest once told me: "There is an ancient Greek word meaning fantastic." (I won't say what word it was, but it appears somewhere in the bestselling work of philosophy by Harry G. Frankfurt, "On Bullshit.") As Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School points out, "Only three small-state men have ever been elected president," Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce and As for the two-party system, does it really need the electoral-vote system to protect it? In many state elections, a simple plurality is enough to elect a governor, a representative or a senator. Yet very few third-party candidates ever succeed. And if one does get more votes than major-party nominees, he or she should win. Then there's the claim that the electoral vote system honors our federal system by involving state governments in the election. But why should local officials have any role in picking federal officeholders? Elections belong to the people. In fact, the current system often rewards state officials for interfering in elections and preventing their citizens from voting. Take, to pick a state not entirely at random, Florida. It has 27 electoral votes. It has those 27 votes no matter how few people show up at the polls on Election Day. So a governor of It is true that if we go to direct election, we should probably also have the federal government running the election. So what? That's what every other industrial democracy I'm aware of does. A well-designed federal election process would have more integrity than the current politicized state-by-state mishmash, which empowers characters like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell. By comparison to our present system, Mexico is a model of clean elections. Finally, the argument that the electoral system has worked well is ridiculous. No part of the Constitution has failed more often, and brought us closer to disaster, than the election provisions of Article II. In 1800, when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives and Jefferson, the Democratic Republican candidate, was nearly robbed of the office, Jeffersonian state militia began assembling to march on Because of the electoral system, every presidential election is a moment of danger for the Republic. Not only is the voting system undemocratic, the electors are individual people, a fact that creates what constitutional scholars call the problem of the "faithless elector." Electors have sometimes refused to vote for the candidate they were pledged to. So far this hasn't switched the result of an election. But it could have, and it could in the future. In 1976, a recount in The fact is that the electoral system owes its creation to the worst possible source: chattel slavery. In After all is said and done, there's one overriding reason why many (not all) of the defenders of the existing system are so tenacious: By giving too much representation to small states, it skews the result toward conservative victory. Much of the talk about fear of democracy is really fear of the popular majorities that regularly show up on opinion polls for progressive measures like national healthcare and public financing of campaigns. John Samples of the Cato Institute wrote in 2000 (while In short, the wrong person would be apt to win, and the wrong voters -- urban, nonwhite, progressive -- would outvote the right ones. In 2004, Gary L. Gregg wrote in National Review Online that "it's the electoral college that keeps the values of traditional A voting system should be designed to determine the majority will, not to disguise it. No matter how many bullets we dodge, this system is a loaded gun pointed directly at the heart of our democracy. That we pointed it there and keep it there ourselves doesn't make it any less dangerous. The solution is not to fiddle with the bullets; we need to put the gun down, and make another vital step toward real democratic government, 21st century-style. -- By Garrett Epps |
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