Interesting (electoral college)

DD Pennsylvania is too small. Should be same size as IL and Bigger than OH!!!

Not that I have a dog in this fight, but the Electoral College system is not well balanced. Smaller states have more influence than larger states. For example, Wyoming has an electorate for every 194,000 voters, while California an electorate for every 697,000 voters.

I've never understood why small states think they benefit from the EC. Even in this election, did either candidate spend much, if any time in Wyoming? Montana? The Dakotas? Idaho?
Utah? Oklahoma? Maine? Vermont?Maryland? Even states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama are ignored.
I would think if the popular votes in it, candidates would be criss crossing the country trying to squeeze every last vote. As it is, a Democrat in Wyoming has as much shot of his vote counting as a Republican in California., and both candidates end up concentrating on the same few states each election.
Our Founding Fathers didn't trust the people to elect either the President or our Senators.
I wonder why we have changed one but not the other.

I don't think the EC should be circumvented. Either it exists or it doesn't. If the people have the political will to change it, so be it. If not, it stays. I don't like Maine and Nebraska using a different method than the others.

The Electoral College has the power to give this election to Hillary if they so decide in majority. I most certainly am not predicting that. But I imagine many of the opinions on this board would change if they did.

Raise your hand if you think that scenario would represent an attribute of Democracy.

Sounds more like anarchy to me......

What is scary is that three dozen unelected people even have the potential to completely disrupt our election and throw the process into the House. That must not ever be allowed to happen.

And that is precisely the intent of the Founding Fathers.

Each state has a number of electors equal to its number of Senators and Representatives. Thus each California Senator represents almost 20-million citizens, whereas each Wyoming Senator represents a little under 300,000 citizens.

DonDiego doesn't know if the authors of the Constitution ever thought a state would ever contain 40,000,000 citizens, but they could've done the math, and their intention was to limit the power of the larger States.

This is not a settled fact although some suggest it as DonDiego does. There were many reasons why a popular vote was rejected in the late 1700's - a big one being the fact that people had no internet.

Candidates were severely limited in their ability to travel the country and contact the public. This was a true dynamic throughout most of the 19th century as well. Abraham Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot of several states the year he was elected. Putting the vote into the hands of the common public would likely result in a slew of local candidates from each state - none of which would have a majority in the final results. Remember the 16 Republicans standing on stage in the primary debates? Multiply that by 10.

Middle Men of the Electoral College were entrusted to meet with national candidates and pick the one they thought best could serve the people of their districts. It made for a smaller and simpler field of candidates to keep track of.

Perhaps this made sense in 1790 with most of the population educated under a 5th grade level and having no means by which to learn the platforms of the candidates directly..or even knowing who they were.. But in 2016 it seems incredibly obsolete. Any voter with a smartphone or access to the local library can inform themselves about the issues and the candidates who opine on them.

For the record - the founders also said women should not vote - and black people should only count as a fraction of whites. SO people who rest their case on "its what the founders wanted" should understand the founders lived in a world that is very different from the one we are in today and we've changed their living document many times since their passing.

Those who wrote the Constitution had lots of reasons for lots of things included in that document, . . . some less noble than others.

And lots of compromises, . . . some less noble than others. Two of great significance with respect to the issue of States' representation within the United States are:
i. The Great Compromise of 1787 which retained the bicameral legislature as proposed by Roger Sherman, along with proportional representation in the lower house [The House of Representatives], but required the upper house [The Senate] to be weighted equally between the states. Each state would have two representatives in the upper house.
ii. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise reached between delegates from Southern States and those from Northern States addressing how slaves would be counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes, . . . essentially counting slaves a 3/5 of a person.

[There are those who argue that one result of the Three-Fifths compromise was that the Southern States had more significant political clout; one reason that Virginia's nickname is the "Mother of Presidents" may be the Three-Fifths Compromise as opposed to the superior character of the candidates which they produced.
In any case the three-fifths rule no longer applies.]

And there were several different reasons specifically pertinent to the establishment of the Electoral College. F'rinstance, the idea of the present-day two-party system wasn't really foreseen; the Electoral College provided a means by which an election, including say 4 or 5 competitive candidates, could be sorted out before Innauguration Day.

However, the primary point at issue nowadays addresses the disproportionate representation within the Electoral College which can, and occasionally has, resulted in one candidate receiving a majority of the popular vote and another candidate receiving a majority of the Electoral College votes.
The Great Compromise of 1787 establishing a House based upon representation by population AND a Senate based upon equal representation is carried over into the Electoral College intentionally. It is, in fact, a check, . . . however minor, . . . on possible domination of an election by large States.

That this representation has kept The Hillary out of the White House once again demonstrates the remarkable foresight of the Founding Fathers.

*A quibble
The reason that Mr. Lincoln was not on the ballot in several states in 1860 was that in ten Southern slave states, no citizens would publicly pledge support for Lincoln, and thus there were no Electors available. It was not because the Southern voters did not have internet access. Although The South did, in fact, not achieve access to the internets for more than another century.
Between Election Day and Lincoln's inauguration, seven slave-holding Southern states declared their secession from the Union and formed the Confederacy. This eventually resulted in The War of Northern Aggression.
Ref: wikipedia