A government composed of a single person (the President) is of course much more prone to tyranny, which wouldn't be ameliorated in the least by directly electing the tyrant. But the weakness of the winner-takes-all system is, as you say, that it is far less responsive to the voters. If there were a proportional system of electing the college, then some regard would have to be paid to the minorities in your "safe" states, because those minorities could make a difference. As it is, millions of voters in the larger states can be safely disregarded by both candidates for president, because their vote doesn't count for anything. If they don't pose any immediate danger of becoming a majority in their state they don't have to be listened to. Which means of course that even the majority in that state don't have to be listened to, because the other side can take them for granted.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
At 2:15 PM -0400 26/10/04, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>Electoral college as such is irrelevant - the bad part is the winner takes
>all system. If states had a proportional representation system i.e one
>allowing splitting their votes by according to popular preferences,
>electoral votes would simply reflect that split, e.g. if 60% voted
>Democratic, 60% of state electors would cast their vote on a Democratic
>candidates, and so on.
>
>The bad part is that 51% of the votes deliver 100% of the electoral votes.
>An interesting twist in the electoral college system is that electors are
>under no legal obligation to vote in any particular way they merely "pledge"
>voting a certain way to their parties, and are appointed only if "their"
>party wins that particular state. So it would be quite interesting if some
>of these electors reneged on their pledge and voted their conscience for
>example - that would not be very much different from representatives
>switching their party affiliations, which has been done numerous times.
>
>Getting rid of the winner takes all system and prohibiting gerrymandering
>(i,e by stipulating that congressional districts must correspond to
>administrative boundaries i.e. counties and cities) would make the electoral
>college system 9and congressional elections) basically mirror the popular
>preferences.
>
>Wojtek
>
>
>
>
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