Quote Originally Posted by EzraTank View Post
Oh heck while I'm here let's talk about the Electoral College since I brought it up ... and apparently a lot of people have NO clue why the founding fathers and states put it into place so here it is:

Watching John Heilemann on Real Time With Bill Maher this past Friday say, "One day we'll have an election that is decided by the most votes" with yet another uneducated viewpoint completely lacking in civics and how a Republic works is just so tiring.


First off, we do have elections decided by the most votes every Presidential election. But what people like John Heilemann always misunderstand when they blindly attack the electoral college is the fact that the founding fathers realized that for a union of states to survive that power needed to be shared amongst these states in a fair and balanced way to scale states powers and autonomy.


Every election the most votes in each state go to the presidential candidate that wins the popular vote of that state … PERIOD. Then the balance of power is shared, based on that’s states population, and added to the electoral college totals. This is why a state like California gets fifty-four electoral votes and a state like Wyoming gets three electoral votes. So, when you hear people say, the “popular vote” should determine the winner, you need to take pause and realize which popular vote they are talking about. The national popular vote has NEVER determined our presidential winner nor should it ever.

In John Heilemann's perfect world only the top 9 states could decide each election. If you look at state population totals, the top nine states are CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL, OH, GA, and NC. If you add the population of those 9 states, they make up more than half the country’s population. So essentially that could leave 41 other states with basically NO say in who their president is going to be.


When the Constitution was ratified and put in place in 1790 the smaller states demanded a balanced election system for the president so the larger more populated ex-colonies like Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York didn’t decide every election. Hence the electoral college was baked into the Constitution. States would be given equal representation based on each having two Senators and the population would be represented in the House. This was brilliance on their part, but most of them knew that true democracies always failed in history because of the tyranny of the majority issue. The founding fathers realized they needed a system that shared the power in our REPUBLIC instead of blindly giving it to the tyranny of the majority. We are a Republic NOT a Democracy!


Our problem lays in the fact that people like John Heilemann can go on television and spew this unchecked nonsense in his comfortable echo chamber with no one to dispute him. If John Heilemann ever gets his way the United States will dissolve as we know it. Why would any citizen in a fly over state with a small population want to remain in a union where their voice isn't heard or determined by someone in a city far away?
I agree with everything you've posted here. Fun fact...there have been 700+ formal proposals in Congress and whatnot to restrict, reform, or eliminate the Electoral College since its inception. I had to Google who the heck John Heilemann was though!

What is really (to me) interesting is that the biggest reason aside from the representation issue you have identified the Founding Fathers wanted the Electoral College, was they did not trust "regular" folks (well, land owning men) to decide who got to be in charge. They wanted to make sure that there was a smaller group of trustworthy folks to make the final call. And while it has rarely happened and it usually involves a messy court challenge, the so-called "Faithless Elector" scenario has happened before. Can you imagine what would happen now if a state's electors decided to go rogue? Whoooooo boy!

Also, to your post about the popular vote....I read some stats/projections that laid out that the current gap in the total votes cast between 2020 and 2024 will close over the next days/weeks as all the votes across the country are tallied. I think they indicated that like around 90% were counted now and using math, you can add another 10% or so to the total and come up with highly similar vote totals between the two elections. Be interesting to see where the "gap" is in like a week or two.