BF2S Forums The Electoral College and What It Means for American Society

The Electoral College was created in another time when people wasn't well informed and maybe there was the need to prevent some asshole getting to the office.  But today it represents an elitist barrier between the people and the politicians running for president.  I don't like the electoral college here in Argentina and I don't think it serves its original purpose anymore.  The best system is one person one vote.

Turquoise wrote:

CloakedStarship wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

In fact, if you look at the history of the Electoral College, the Founding Fathers seemed to have a similar distrust in the masses.

QFT

I'm not a fan of mob rule.  There would be a lot of prejudistic (is that even a word?) rulings going on if thats how things worked.

The electoral college, imo, is a good way of voting for the president.  There should be, however, a governmental system instituted that made it possible for any person within reason, to run for the presidency, and any other government office.  A system that made campaigning free, and gave each candidate EQUAL time to spread their views.  This would give the decent person a fair chance, and stop the rich from being the only ones who could effectively campaign.

Thats far fetched though.  As of right now, money makes the world go round, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

One system that I prefer over the Electoral College and over the Republic that we have is a parliamentary system.

In a typical parliament, you have two legislative houses just like our system, but instead of having a president, you have a Prime Minister.  The PM enters office according to whatever party has the most seats in the legislature.  So, before a given election, each party designates who its leader is, and then, the party that ends up with the most seats after an election puts this person into office as Prime Minister.

While this system still keeps the masses from directly electing the top leader of government, it seems like a more sensible way than having a separate indirect election for the position.  People then have two things to consider when voting for a local representative: first, the representative him/herself, and second, the possibility of having that party's leader as PM.  I personally think this is better because it encourages people to put more thought into the election than our current system.

Parliament... meh.  Designate a leader and then whichever party gets control of parliament gets control of the executive office?  I like our two party conflicts.  When different parties control different branches of the U.S. government, it forces compromise to make progress in legislation.  Another thing about the UK Parliament I'm not a fan of is, and correct me if I'm wrong, you only get to vote for the members of parliament, and thats it.  Here you get a direct vote for every position but the president from the senate and the house, down to your local town board members, and I feel like everyone here is forgetting that.

And if parliament itself chooses who will be their parties leader, then the people themselves are taken completely out of the vote.  The electoral college isn't as indirect as everyone thinks, at least not in my opinion.  Electoral votes are given to each state based on their size, and whatever presidential candidate wins in that state, wins their electoral vote's.  The electoral votes are handed out based on the popular vote in each state.