[Mr 5 0]

Originally posted by Mach 1 :

Sounds to me like Colorado is on the right track. Might be a good compromise between popular vote and EC vote.

Well, it has to pass, first, and even if it does it will be challenged in court. This plan to apportion the EC votes according to the percentage of the popular vote would only be fair if every state did the same. That may be a long time coming.

I dont look at as "states" deciding the winner, but "people". If CA and NY have so many more peple, than the canfdidates should focus thier campaigning in those states.

I wasn't talking about geography but about the citizens of the respective states. 'States' are people. I assumed I had made that clear.

If most people are democratic in those states, then most people overall are democratic, and choose to vote that way, so how would that not be fair?

If most people in New York and California vote Democrat (which they do) then the Democrat candidate automatically receives the total Electoral College vote for those states. That is fair.

I can see your point to an extent, but cant seem to comprehend why it would be unfair to the smaller states? Its the peoples choice, not the states choice.

Again: 'states' consist of people. The unfairness comes in when a minority of people in a huge-population can elect a candidate for national office that a vast majority of voters in many other ststes may not want. If we elected candidates for president on a pure popular vote, all any presidential candidate would have to do is campaign relentlessly in New York and Califorinia and spend all of his campaign money on ads and events there to win. He could easily ignore every other state in the union in his campaign - and he could be elected by doing that. In that scenario, two big states would control who was elected president every time. 49 state's voters would be effectively disenfranchised - and it would be legal.

As I hope is now evident to you: the Electoral College was put in place 200 years ago to ensure that the voters of all the states, both large and small, had a voice in the election, not just those in two or three or four big states. The EC results generally reflect the popular vote, anyway, so little harm is done and this way, a handful of big-population states don't decide every single presidential election. The voters (citizens) of the other 41 states would never stand for that kind of situation, anyway.

Since the big states have the most EC votes, it still would seem like a "compromise" anyway. If all the smaller states went republican, wouldnt the lessser amount of EC votes from those states amount to them losing anyway? I guess it just tries to balance out the system the best way possible.

Assuming (hypothetically) that the top ten states all voted Democrat; if the other 41 states voted Republican, they could sway the election but it becomes much harder and usually doesn't happen that way. Excepting in so-called 'landslide' elections (such as Ronald Reagan in 1984 who won 50 out of 51 states) Most presidential candidates win by having a few big-population states, lots of medium-sized-population states and many small-population states voting for them. Few win by having nothing but small and medium-sized states in their 'win' column. The Electoral College does help balance things out and make the election more represenative of the nation's voters, as a whole.

Maybe Im not seeing where a person lives influencing their voting choice and I should, maybe the states local politics influence voters party choice more than I perceive, therefore maiking the EC system seem more sensible.

That's true. Some states always vote (in the majority) for one party in every election, making them predictable - and also avoided by a candidate of the opposing party who simply writes those states off as a dead loss. That's why you have 'Red' states (Republican) and 'Blue' states (Democrat) on the election map as well as 'battleground' states (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, for instance) which, historically, can go either way (Democrat or Republican) and have enough electoral votes to change the outcome of the election.

The Electoral College has been around for 200 years and has worked pretty well to ensure a fair represenation of the voters in all states. Every national election, people complain about the EC - yet it survives because no one has come up with anything better or, more importantly: fairer. With the new Colorado 'Apportionate EC' plan, the venerable Electoral College syystem just may be on the verge of changing - but I wouldn't hold my breath. American institutions that have stood the test of time will always be difficult to change and I think the EC is going to be one of them. We'll see.