[allknowingfrog]

Everyone acts like the electoral college was a blunder. The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy. You were supposed to be involved in local politics, where you could actually know and evaluate your representatives. Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.

I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.

This is, incidentally, how we massively screwed up the federal government. In the original design US Senators were elected by the state legislatures, the premise being that they would prevent federal overreach into the regulatory domain of the states because they would be directly accountable to the state governments.

Then populists who wanted to do everything at the federal level pushed for the 17th Amendment which eliminated the state governments' representation in the federal government and people stopped caring about local politics because it started feeling like an exercise in futility when federal law could preempt anything you wanted to do and the thing meant to keep that in check was deleted.

And the federal government was supposed to have enumerated (i.e. narrow, limited) powers. It doesn't have the scaffolding for people to hold it accountable. You can elect the local dogcatcher but the only elected office in the entire federal executive branch is the President of the United States. Which is fine when the main thing they're doing is negotiating treaties and running the Post Office but not fine if you're trying to do thousands of pages of federal regulations on everything from healthcare to banking to labor to energy.

[dkuntz2]

That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.

In a fifteen year period 46 senate elections were deadlocked in 20 states, at one point Delaware had an open senate seat for four years due to this.

That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force, not moving for senators to be elected by the people.

[DANmode]

> I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

Randomly-selected citizens would have outperformed what we’ve gotten in the last few elections at minimum.

Genuinely think we should consider that.

[deltoidmaximus]

Athens actually had part of the legislative body chosen by random lot. It makes some amount of sense as a check against entrenched power structures.

[shigawire]

>I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

I reject this premise. I'm not omniscient but I have a pretty good idea.

[FranklinJabar]

> The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy.

This doesn't make their decision good. It has consistently failed to produce politicians that represent the needs of the people who live here.

Democracy may be bad; but what we have is orders of magnitude worse.

[Marazan]

The Electoral College is part of the slavery compromise and the slavery compromise was a blunder.

[AnthonyMouse]

That doesn't really fit the math. At the time of the founding the largest colony was Virginia and of the original 13 colonies, 9 were in the North and only 4 were states that ended up in the Confederacy, i.e. it was the slave states that were underrepresented in the electoral college and the Senate.

[FireBeyond]

> Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.

Not for nothing, but the party that bangs on hardest about the sanctity and infallibility of the Electoral College is the one that is far and away the worst for "American Idol-type politicians". In recent times:

- Donald Trump

- Ronald Reagan

- Fred Thompson

Even at the state level:

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

- Jesse Ventura

- Sonny Bono

- Clint Eastwood

[mastax]

Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.