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cadenas -> RE: President Guilty of Identify Theft? (2/19/2010 3:51:36 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DomKen
quote:
ORIGINAL: servantforuse
One third of the people in the US live in just 5 states. CA, 35 mil, TX, 22 mil, NY,17 mil, FL, 16 mil and Il, 13 mil...We never want to have a few states electing the president...
Which would be a valid point if every person in those states voted the same way. In reality the system today allows the voters in about 5 states to determine who is President because those are the only states "in play."
Doing away with the electoral college would make every voter valuable no matter what state he/she lives in. It would no longer be sufficient to determine what states a candidate was safely ahead in and ignore them. Every regions concerns would have to be addressed by all the candidates.
No, it's the other way round. CA, NY and TX in particular vote fairly predictably (in Presidential elections), so candidates don't bother even paying much attention to them. Most of the time it's one of the smaller states where the crucial votes come from. In 2004, it was Ohio who ended up determining the Presidential election. In 2000, it was Florida, but the other four "big states" still didn't make much difference.
And this is actually not a weakness of the electoral college, but it's strength. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: no one large state (or a few large states) should be able to dominate the Presidential election.
It may make sense to rethink this idea, but we really can't call it a "weakness" if the electoral college achieves exactly what it was designed to achieve.
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