Electoral College

[minionofmidas]

The EC should have been scrapped after the civil war as far as the federal/national argument goes...That's when Americans started talking of the Nation rather than the Union.
Then again so few Germans are really interested in who actually won where (outside their immediate home area), maybe the fact that this forum and atlas exist should be considered a valid argument for the preservation of the Electoral College...

[minionofmidas]

No nineteenth century election results can be taken exactly at face value, not only in the US. "Vote Early and Often" was meant entirely seriously...
But the Electoral College as functioning now is not what the Framers had in mind.
They never heard of well-organised national parties.
They never heard of the revolutions in transport technology that made proportional elections and all that came after feasible.
Electors were never supposed to be elected en bloc, and electing them by popular vote was merely one option open to the states.
The framers were quite certain that after Washington nobody would receive a majority of electoral votes, and the presidency was supposed to be decided by the House, with the states, via the electors, effectively drawing up a shortlist of five candidates. The candidate to get the highest total of electors was to be vice-president, a post invented purely for the purpose of enabling this compromise with those who wanted the states to chose.
Given the many defacto changes (and one major official change in 1808) to constitutional reality, "the framers made it like this with a reason" is not an argument to be taken quite seriously.

[minionofmidas]

[They never heard of well-organised national parties.]

During Washingtons' administration this is true. Washington was firmly against political parties. But as soon as he left office the Federalist and Anti-Federalist parties formed and the members were framers of the Constitution.

Even before he left office, actually, though they took a few years to consolidate. It's beside the point though, as they only heard of organized national parties after the constitution was framed.

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True. At that time, of course, three states, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, held almost 50% of the US population, a situation that has never occurred again.

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No...The majority of the US population does not live in large scities and has never done so. If it went strictly by Popular Vote, everybody's vote has the same weight. It doesn't matter one bit whether you're in the majority in your area or not, so it doesn' teven make any sense (except for us statistics freaks) of talking about a city or state or region voting for a certain candidate.

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They were humans. They did a remarkable job, an absolutely extraordinary one given how little examples from elsewhere they could draw on, but not a perfect one. Otherwise there wouldn't be any need for amendments, no clauses that are more or less ignored, no gigantic body of unofficial quasi-constitutional stuff in laws, court decisions and precedent.

I agree that the EC with the small states bonus is better than the EC without it. That would really give too much importance to the major states, and make the small states irrelevant.
But apart from that, we'll just have to agree to disagree on that last paragraph of yours.

[minionofmidas]

Andrew Jackson was born in South Carolina.

[minionofmidas]

Oh, and going purely by birth places, Eisenhower was born in Denison, TX, northeast of Dallas on the Red River.

He lived there for something like nine days though...