Electoral College or Popular Vote?

[minionofmidas]

It would require an end to the bizarre hodgepodge of state regulations about ballot access, vote counting, etc - one of the few remaining provinces of meaningful state legislation.

[minionofmidas]

Well, for one I'm not an American, and for another if asked my honest-to-God most personal opinion, I wouldn't agree that any position as powerful as the current American presidency ought to exist, and that direct popular vote would be an improvement on the situation but not a great one.

But Americans do tend to answer your question with stuff like "imagine the chaos and controversies of a nationwide recount" which, really, presupposes that rules remain odd and at variance even under direct popular vote - most don't tend to imagine that that might be changed. As it would need to be. So it's sort of a major psychological barrier.

And the other one's of course that the US Constitution is just so ridiculously hard to amend and the issue just doesn't seem worth fighting such an epic battle over to most people.

[minionofmidas]

The United States government is based off of the concept of federalism--that is a sharing of powers between the national and more local forms of government.

Is it? Historically and to an extent rhetorically, the US is indeed based on a concept of Federalism, but in practice it only has a sharing of powers between the national and more local forms of government, much like virtually every other major country in the world (the UK being the most important excemption, though a but partial one since Devolution). It's not the same thing at all really.

[minionofmidas]

I think the debate is breaking down over the semantics of what it means for a vote to count.

It is a fairly meaningless term. If you define it as "make an actual difference", obviously in a single-position election a vote does so only if the election is decided by a single vote, but in that case every vote for that candidate did (or, under the EC, if one state's election is decided by a single vote and that state happened to be decisive as well; and even then it's only the votes from that state that did.)