What's wrong with a popular vote?

Answer 1

There is nothing to stop a majority of a population from being stupid or evil. True, a society is screwed no matter what if the vast majority are depraved. But popular elections lend unwarranted legitimacy when only a slight majority of those who bother to vote are so depraved.

Further, popular elections are subject to manipulation and voter apathy. So, even a society that is otherwise good may be led by a very few depraved people.

You cannot look at the activities of any major democratic government on earth and tell me that is not how popular elections work. We think that elections are the "voice of the people". In reality, they are the will of the few motivated enough and smart enough to fool just enough of the rest of the population.

Answer 2

There are actually a couple of features to the popular vote that can kind of cause some minor issues, but the same can be said for using an elctoral system. In the electoral system it is easy for the votes to go in a different direction than the public really wants them to go, this can be both a good thing and a bad thing because in a way it acts as a check against the people.

However, the popular vote can cause some major problems as well. One of the biggest of these is a fact already stated by another individual, that it places the weight of voting on high population areas, in otherwords, the cities of Chicago, New York and LA all have the largest percentage of the vote therefore there is no way to avoid getting someone that those three cities do not aprrove of.

The other problem is that there are a lot of people out there who are uneducated about how to vote. Some of these people do not have the slightest clue what a particular person might stand for or anything, but yet they look good on television, therefore they must be the right person to vote for. So rather than voting on what a person has said they have based it solely on looks. I think that is the biggest sticking point in politics right now, we are exposed to politicians on an every day basis. The people who voted to elect many of the early Presidents were not able to tell you what these men looked like, so they spent more time reading about their view on particular issues, this made them a great deal more informed as to what was taking place in the world around them.

So more than anything, if you want to go with strictly a popular vote, you might as well make it more and more like American Idol every single day, just call in and vote, as many times as you would like.

However, I am not saying that the current electoral system is all tat great, mostly because the elections can be rigged through it, I am saying that tying the two systems together, making the electors in the electoral college vote according to the votes of their state would actually make the system work a little better, especially in states where there are not high population barriers to skew the reults. (Sorry if you live in Illinois, California and New York those states will almost always run according to the whims and wishes of the large cities within their borders.)

Answer 3

The popular vote is the best way to elect. It means your vote counts as one vote and not just a vote for an Electoral College delegate. For example, if you voted for Bush in California in 2000, your vote did not go to Bush. Because Gore got the majority of the popular vote, he got ALL the electoral college votes. So how is that a guy voting for Bush ends up electing Gore? Conversely, Gore won the popular vote in the country by about 700,000 votes, but we still got W as president. So for a vote to count, it has to count as one vote, not a fraction of a vote ( which is the current EC system). And if the big states get more clout than the little ones, so be it. But One electoral college vote in Wyoming was worth 65,000 popular votes and one electoral college vote in California was worth 170,000 popular votes. Also, the Electoral College delegates are predicated on the last US Census - in the case of the 2000 election it was the 1990 census as the 2000 census was not complete. And the census by the way, counts everyone in a household, including illegal immigrants - 10-12 million of them now. One vote for one voter is the only way to avoid both of those things.

Answer 4

Nothing wrong with a popular vote!

Answer 5

It seems that arguments for the popular vote creep up when the electoral college yields a close loss to your opponent. When your candidate wins in the electoral college, the popular vote is meaningless

Answer 6

A popular vote, as the only method of selecting our leaders or getting anything done, would amount to mob rule. Which is the exact same thing the Founding Fathers didn't want. To them, the word "democracy" meant direct rule by undisciplined mobs, shouting and pushing each other out of the way to be heard.

Answer 7

I am all for junking the archaic electoral college system and replacing it with a more democratic system, the popular vote. We cannot allow another travesty where one candidate gets the most votes, and still loses the election. I am still steamed that Gore lost to the moron Bush in 2000. Change the damn system. Who cares about the little states?

And while we are at it, how about we revamp our presidential primary system and go to a system of revolving regional primaries. I am sick of Iowa and New Hampshire getting all the attention!

Answer 8

It concentrates power in high-population areas -- which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your perspective.

The problem is -- 5~10 states could effectively decide the election to the point where 20~25 other states need not even bother voting at all.

The point of the electoral college was to skew the balance -- so that smaller states had a slightly higher impact than their population alone would normally have allowed for.

Answer 9

I wish I knew. It seems everyone has forgotten that popular votes don't count in the end.

Answer 10

The electoral college was also supposed to prevent the populace from electing a TV celebrity or sports star to an office for which he was unqualified.