We have a horrible voter turnout for a country that calls itself the greatest democracy in the world....the electoral college should be changed...why would I vote if my vote doesn't count?
The idea of the electoral college was more prescient and wise than most people realize.
Money, or economic power, equals to many other expressions of power and influences. Remember the old saying made by Warren G Harding, 29th President, of the US:
The chief business of the American people is business.
Those were his actual words, by the way.
China's Mao Zedong said:
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Both Harding and Mao are correct, but Mao's method is more direct, overt, blunt, irrevocable, and always more preferable by those who seeks the shortest path to political power. On the other hand, since money, or capital, requires time and efforts to build, political power from money is not so much power as it is more influence, hence, influence is usually indirect, covert, subtle, variable, and not always the desirable mean to achieve a goal.
Think about this for a moment: Does it really matter if the barrel pressed in your back is from a pistol or a rifle ? From a platoon of soldiers or from a single tank ?
For a rich man, to get what he want, if he can get away with using a gun for one minute instead of spending hours to persuade someone, he will chose the gun.
Which lead up to this graphic...
The US Founders realized that economic inequality is inevitable in the new country they were seeking to build. The inequality will come, and did came, from differences in geography, personalities, and technologies. They were not endowed with supernatural powers to see the future. They were just observant and filled with common sense. Societies that lives near water will develop superior shipbuilding technologies and navies. Those that lives on rivers will develop superior knowledge and methods of bulk transportation. Those that lives on fertile land will develop superior farming techniques. And so on. It is inevitable that some will fail and some will succeed. Economic inequality at every level of human societies is inevitable.
Thankfully, we are neither Russian nor Chinese who are comfortable with the Stalin and Mao method of political persuasion. We may sneer at the influence of money in politics, but at the subconscious level, we know that it is easier to counter money with money than with gun vs gun. Everybody can make money, but not everybody can make guns.
The electoral college was devised to make all states the political equals of each other in a political union where economic inequality exists. The method forces the candidates to make themselves, or their proxies, available for the people to examine in terms of policies that could and would affect them at the local level. What would a city dweller know about farming and drought ? What would a sea going sailor know about deep underground mining ? What would a grocer in Queens know about data bases and data mining in San Francisco ?
Without the electoral college, looking at the economic output graphic above, which states would wield the most influence and set agendas for a country that literally spans a continent ? Your individual vote does count. The electors in your state needs those individual votes to guide them as to the popular sentiments unique to your state and your economy. One positive side effect of the electoral college is that voting irregularities or even corruption are contained to within a state.
We do not need to make our country the same as Asia or Europe, and least of all, the laughable Russia. Those who are not familiar with US may pretentiously exercise shallow cynicism but in doing so, they failed to realize the smaller scale of economic inequalities in their own countries that gives their politicians unequal influences among each other.
