F... US voting bureaucracy

[70Chip]

The electoral college makes it worth a candidate's time to go to places like South Dakota or Maine and campaign. With a straight popular vote, they would never have to leave Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. I can understand why some people, who view the middle part of the country as extraneous anyway, would not be bothered by that, but IMO, it would have the further, detrimental consequence of making politicians in Washington even more isolated from the people.

[mheisig]

Originally Posted by 70Chip

The electoral college makes it worth a candidate's time to go to places like South Dakota or Maine and campaign. With a straight popular vote, they would never have to leave Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. I can understand why some people, who view the middle part of the country as extraneous anyway, would not be bothered by that, but IMO, it would have the further, detrimental consequence of making politicians in Washington even more isolated from the people.

Very good point - the only places that would really matter would be the larger population centers. It wouldn't so much be a country-wide vote campaign as it would be candidates catering exclusively to densely populated urban areas.

[Monkeydad]

Originally Posted by 70Chip

The electoral college makes it worth a candidate's time to go to places like South Dakota or Maine and campaign. With a straight popular vote, they would never have to leave Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. I can understand why some people, who view the middle part of the country as extraneous anyway, would not be bothered by that, but IMO, it would have the further, detrimental consequence of making politicians in Washington even more isolated from the people.

EXACTLY. If we elected by the popular vote, the candidates would ignore the entire nation except New York City, L.A., Detroit and Chicago.

They'd also have to have agendas tailored more towards urban populations (aka welfare crowd) since they hold a lot of the population...

The MAJORITY of the nation would be screwed.

Take a look at the 2000 and 2004 election maps. The blue represents the votes for the Democrat candidate. Notice how the only places they really won individual county popular votes were concentrated mainly around large cities: New York, CA cities, Phoenix, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philly, Miami, St. Louis, Seattle, Pittsburgh. The remainder of the country voted the opposite way and under the electoral college system, the majority of the nation gets a candidate that represents them. If we elected by popular vote, you can see only a few miles of the thousands of miles of the nation would be represented by the winner, which would be a bad thing for the majority of the nation. Also, the winner of the electoral votes in nearly every election ALSO wins the popular vote, so the system DOES work for both the majority of AREA and POPULATION of the nation.

2000:


2004: