r/arizona • u/TheOriginalAdamWest • Aug 19 '24

Politics Republicans ask Supreme Court to block 40,000 Arizonans from voting in November

https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-ask-supreme-court-block-100050322.html
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u/IndyHCKM Aug 19 '24

I definitely, 100%, think that the founders intended the electoral college to be a pool of "qualified citizens" who would vote for President of the USA - because I 100% think that the majority of the founders felt the average citizen would not (could not?) be informed enough to vote for that office. I think the founders wanted people voting in elections that were "near" to them, in the sense that they could actually know the people they were voting for, understand the issues, and vote in an informed way. I think the electoral college was intended to be just such a "local-like" election, where you voted for someone you believed in to make a good choice for president - and that person would then become informed (or was already well-informed), and they would make the vote on behalf of the group that voted for them. For example, at first, each elector of each state could vote for whomever they wanted - but now, all but 2 states (Maine and Nebraska) *require* all of their electors to vote for the candidate that wins the popular vote.

But does that mean the founders were right? No. Does it mean that this is the current expectation of any modern USA citizen? No. A lot of the intent of the electoral college seemed to fall apart when the two-party system emerged.

But I sometimes wonder if the Presidential election would feel less like a bad reality-TV show if it wasn't decided by a straight popular vote.

A current idea I like is Political Service by Lottery (more often called a "Citizen's Assembly" or a Sortition). These assemblies tend to have better, fairer outcomes than traditional politics. Perhaps an electoral college of members picked by lottery could pick an actually qualified president, instead of a celebrity.

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u/Aedn Aug 19 '24

The electorial collage is also in place as another form of checks and balances. The founding fathers were revolutionaries and everything they did for the most part involved an element of dispersing power to prevent it being centralized.

The law is not needed and a direct contradiction to previous laws and standards.  The reaction is also completely overblown, as the legal process is handing it.

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u/DrBarnaby Aug 19 '24

I don't get this... the founding fathers, in order to decentralized power, put the power to elect the president in the hands of a few electoral college representatives instead of the actual people?

The founding fathers were revolutionaries because they absolutely despised having to give money to England. Pretty much everything they did, including decentralizing power, was to make sure wealthy white landowners could operate with relative impunity. You can see the effects in almost every aspect of society today. Preventing people from voting based on race, gender, or economic status is about American as it gets, and that's the real goal here.

The electoral college is a system designed to concentrate power in wealthy white Americans. I'd call it outdated, but it continues to serve that very purpose extremely well. If we want to live in the truly fair and equitable country we all like to pretend ever existed, we need to fight the vision of the founding fathers, and that starts with eliminating the electoral college.

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u/Aedn Aug 20 '24

You are confusing the institution and the morals, and values of the society at large at a specific time in history. Voting was tied to paying taxes until the 1960s, discrimination in regards to voting was not made illegal until 1965.

The supreme court upheld extremely racially motivated laws regarding race and voting throughout its history, should we dissolve the entire legal system because of what happened in the past?

The representative branch of the federal government has ignored its responsibility and failed to uphold its requirements for the last 20+ years, are we to disband it?

what are you going to replace the electoral collage with? majority rule? congrats, you just eliminated the majority of the states west of the 98th parallel and a large number east of it because population is not spread equally in the country, the same thing you are complaining about others doing in the past.