On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> plus [abolishing the electoral college would] contravene the sacred wishes
> of the Founders.
BTW, just to pile on: the EC we've got already completely contravenes the wishes of the Founders. In the first place, the founders' intentions were for this to be an truly indirect system, whereby we vote for the electors -- our betters -- and they vote for president. No one's for that anymore, so no one can say they are standing for the founders' intentions.
But more interesting, the founders' second main intention was that the EC's main function would kick in when there were multiple candidates so that no one got a majority -- a case they thought would be the norm rather than the exception, so they specifically needed to make a mechanism to deal with it. (They had no conception of a two party system because they were against parties on principle, which is part of why there is no provision or place for them in the constitution, unlike with parliamentary systems.)
So not only does the actually existing EC of bound electors have no relation to the founders' intentions -- it could be argued with only some streching that the abolition of the EC and the introduction of IRV would bring the system closer to their intentions than what we've got.
Michael