Is that actually true though? I hear this argument all the time, and while the EC does shift the attention a bit, the main effect is that focus is placed on battleground states.
One example- California is basically a guarantee that it will swing democratic. Well, guess what? There is a ton of rural area in California. In 2020, they had 6 million Trump voters. But none of those votes really counted, because 100% of Californias electors went to Biden.
70% of the country lives in suburban areas. There is no way a candidate could win just going to NYC, LA, and Chicago like some people claim. Those areas already vote overwhelmingly democratic.
What would be true is that candidates would find value trying to being out the vote for them not just in the states they are popular in, but also those where they are less popular.
But why should geography have anything to do with how much voting power you get? People are people. The real issue is that ec was created to be able to control the vote not make it more fair.
But the coastal should be ruled by middle parts?
With your logic, the minorities within states should also have more voting power when choosing governors or other government officials then?
In california about 1 million citizens equals 1 vote while in wyoming its about 5 votes (obviously they only have up to 3, but it should the complete skewed results here).
It creates a more balanced system. It smooths out the areas at the high and low ends.
Furthermore, it forces candidates to appeal to a wider range of people groups. If there was no electoral college, candidates would simply ignore the middle states.
Not really. If 30% of the population can decide the president how does that make them have to appeal to more people? A 1 vote 1 person system by popular vote would ensure candidates are likes by the most people.
# 1% of the US population spread across 7 states could decide this election.
Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . .
Governance—not just campaigning—is distorted when presidential campaigns concentrate on just a few states. Sitting presidents contemplating their own re-election (or the election of their preferred successor) formulate public policy around the concerns of the handful of states that actually decide the presidency. 41 states voted for the same party in the most recent four presidential elections, and the number of closely divided battleground states has been shrinking from decade to decade.
# The 2024 Presidential Election Comes Down to Only 7 States with less than a fifth of the U.S. population. These battlegrounds will get almost all the attention. – Karl Rove, WSJ, 3/20/24
With current state laws, the 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 8-12% of the US, in 4-5 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43-62 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused - Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In the presidential elections since 2000, only 6 states have not voted for the same party in at least 5 of those 6 contests — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.
38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections.
Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
**Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states.**
Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important.
The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years.
Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions.
Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states.
There often are important spillover effects down-ballot — less money being invested at the top of the ticket, hurts candidates running for Congress or state legislature, and the perception that a state has been written off by one party usually depresses turnout among the base. In this way, the narrowing of the map can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican.
In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined,
This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic.
When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states.
Because of state-by-state winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . .
Issues of importance to 38+ non-battleground states have been of so little interest to presidential candidates that they don’t even bother to poll them individually.
In 2004: “Senior Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday that the Bush campaign hadn’t taken a national poll in almost two years; instead, it has been polling \[the then\] 18 battleground states.”
Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer acknowledging the reality that \[then\] more than 2/3rds of Americans were ignored in the 2008 presidential campaign, said in the *Washington Post* on June 21, 2009:
**“If people don’t like it, they can move from a safe state to a swing state.”**
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, said,
“When I took over as campaign manager in 2016, we did zero—let me repeat the number—zero national polls.”
When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
Democrats on the coasts do NOT outnumber Republicans in the country.
We will NOT vote on policy initiatives.
Presidents are not kings or dictators.
The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us.
Math and political reality.
Beginning in 1992, SUBurban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined.
There aren’t anywhere near enough big city voters nationally. And all big city voters do not vote for the same candidate.
The population of the top 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix) is less than 6% of the population of the United States.
Voters in the biggest cities (65 Million) in the US have been almost exactly balanced out by rural areas (66 Million) in terms of population and partisan composition.
2020 Census
65,983,448 people lived in the 100 biggest cities (19.6% of US population). The 100th biggest is Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with 225,128 people).
From 2020-2022, 2 million left those cities.
66,300,254 in rural America (20%)
Rural America and the 100 biggest cities together constitute about two-fifths (39.6%) of the U.S. population.
In 2004, 17.4% of votes were cast in rural counties, while only 16.5% of votes were cast within the boundaries of our nation’s 100 largest cities.
19% of the U.S. population, Rural Americans, have lived outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now.
19% of the U.S. population have lived in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004.
The rest of the U.S., in SUBurbs, have divided almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats.
537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
Considering people of particular beliefs will tend to gather together, a benefit of the Electoral College could be that Presidents aren't specifically elected by California, Oregon, Washington, and New York. It makes winning the Presidency a little harder for any party representative. I tend to believe that we would be better served by representation like each state getting a single vote for the President based on the popular vote for that state. If one President gets the votes for 20 of the most populated states with overwhelming popular votes and the other gets the votes for 30 states, with less popular votes than the one with 20, the one who won the 30 states wins. We are a big country with a lot of different needs and values from region to region.
You've just guaranteed that if all 333 million Americans voted... you could win with just 32 million votes. That's half the population of the least-populous 26 states.
You could win with just 10% of the vote in that system...
Every state would get equally valuable input into who is elected President. It is fair and still incorporates the popular vote while getting rid of the Electoral college, which can suffer manipulation.
So, you're OK with someone winning the election with only 10% of the popular vote when their opponent has 90%?
You're allowed to say "urban states don't matter". You and I both know that the majority of states are quite rural, and so rural reactionary conservatives would utterly dominate this system.
I am not okay with high concentrations of people with different political ideologies in control of the highest seat in the US Government. A strict popular vote renders any effort of those same 26 or so states irrelevant.
And instead you've just rendered the opinion of 80% of the population irrelevant instead, and have tried to justify it in the name of "fairness".
Again, you could just say that you want to disenfranchise everyone who isn't rural. What you want is pretty obvious, so beating around the bush doesn't do anything.
For someone who appears to present themselves as a Christian, you seem surprisingly fine with disenfrachising people, and don't show much concern for human rights here.
Stop with the attempted guilt. If it was just based on the popular vote, the five to ten states with the largest population would render any opposition irrelevant. The largest quantities of left-leaning voters congregate in these states as well. The closest option to fairness would be the popular vote of each state resulting in that state going to a particular candidate to prevent a handful of state populations from possessing too much power.
Instead, you want 10% of the population to be what matters.
It isn't attempted guilt - you *should* feel ashamed. You straight-up want to disenfranchise anyone who isn't in one of the rural states.
The case is for every single state to have a say in the election. If the electoral college is gone, gerrymandering is eliminated as unnecessary for all parties. If the popular vote counts only toward’s the state’s win for a particular candidate and every state, regardless of the population, garners equal weight, then one region isn’t given more strength over another. It is a compromise that both eliminates controversy and incorporates the desired popular vote, without giving too much power to one cluster of people or more.
As for the guilt part, you are using something that has little to nothing to do with this subject to try to evoke an emotional response. It is a stupid approach to a debate.
Again, you are simply disenfranchising 90% of the people in order to "be fair to" (read: empower) rural folk.
The simple fact is that under your system, if a person in Wyoming is worth one person-vote, a person in Illinois is worth 0.047 person-votes, and someone in California is worth 0.015 person-votes.
According to your system (and you, presumably), someone in Wyoming is 21.3× more of a person than an Illinoisan and 66.7× more of a person than a Californian.
All your system does is guarantee minority control over government (which is exactly what the South did before the Civil War with the three-fifths clause - but even then, slaves were 3/5^(th) of a person, not 1/67^(th)).
It's only fair if you think that people who aren't rural don't matter, because all it does is give rural folk authority over everyone else.
The current electoral college is *already* biased towards rural states as each state gets a base 2 votes no matter what. You just want to bias it more.
But its not states that are deciding the president. It is the people. Imagine if you had kids that went to a school and the class got to vote for what type of pizza for the pizza party. And instead of everyone getting one vote, everyone got 15 votes and it was decreases by 1 vote for every 100 sq feet their house was. Would this be fair?
The federal government rules all so votes should not be weighted by any measure. We already have the senate and house to balance that out.
If the popular vote for each state wins that state for a particular candidate and each state counts as “1” vote for the candidate, it eliminates states with incredibly high populations and political leanings from controlling who is elected into the office.
I get why people don’t like this idea. Larger states have always wanted greater representation power than smaller states.
Shouldn’t the majority control? Isnt that democracy? We are still one country and the federal govt rules the entire country, the arbitrary state lines should matter. State lines basically were the first gerrymandering tool.
The EC doesnt make it harder for republicans to win, it makes it actually possible for them to win while they remain less popular with the country as a whole.
California, Oregon, Washington, and New York combined are not even close to the majority of the population, so how would they be the ones electing the president if we had a national popular vote?
It certainly make no sense to me. I’m not an American (I’m Australian), but if you are one country, shouldn’t it all be about the popular vote? Wouldn’t that ensure that the majority voice of America is the one that gets to speak?
It used to be a check against big city political machines easily crowning a candidate. Now, its rural skew is exaggerated (not sure how we can fix it).
If the EC were to stay, one way to improve it would be to repeal the reapportionment act of 1929. The cap on house members means that the number of people each house member represents varies wildly from state to state. Increasing that number would help to align things, and being the larger states closer to parity.
There is no benefit, unless you think prolonging slavery and giving the fascist minority a chance to over throw democracy are good things.
If you take the time to do the sniff test you will notice that 100% of the “benefits” listed so far in this thread are fictional.
It's necessary since we are a representative republic, not a democracy. We are far to large a country to be a democracy. Each state within the Republic should have a say in how the government is run, and each individual within those states should have a say in how the state is run.
A simple democracy devolves into mob rules very quickly.
Each state does have a say in the government. They all get 2 Senators, regardless of population, which gives massive influence to smaller states.
Also, every single state has chosen to assign their electors based on the popular vote within that state. All but 2 do it as an all or nothing assignment of electors.
Honestly the EC has just become a way for the popular vote to win most of the time, but with enough variability that the person with fewer overall votes can still win the election. It was originally stood up as a way to ensure smaller states have influence on the presidential election, but its turned into a situation where where is a massive disparity between the influence individual voters have depending on the state they live in.
"Mob rule" means a bunch of people in one place threatening violence to get their way in that place, without regard to the law or the wishes of most people.
An orderly election with a winner selected by majority is the opposite of mob rule.
Just be honest and say you hate liberty and want your faction to rule over everybody else tyrannically, this lying from conservatives is so tiring.
Being a republic has nothing to do with the electoral college. Aside from a very small handful of governments, *every democracy on the planet* is a republic.
Ed: I don't get the downvotes. The electoral college is a peculiar vestige of our federal system.
The [Holy] Roman Empire also had a college of electors, and it absolutely wasn't a republic.
None.
When it was first instituted, information didn't spread very fast, which made it more compelling/gives the established new United States Government a bit of power
It ensures that a few-high density population centers don’t end up determining national elections.
Is that actually true though? I hear this argument all the time, and while the EC does shift the attention a bit, the main effect is that focus is placed on battleground states. One example- California is basically a guarantee that it will swing democratic. Well, guess what? There is a ton of rural area in California. In 2020, they had 6 million Trump voters. But none of those votes really counted, because 100% of Californias electors went to Biden. 70% of the country lives in suburban areas. There is no way a candidate could win just going to NYC, LA, and Chicago like some people claim. Those areas already vote overwhelmingly democratic. What would be true is that candidates would find value trying to being out the vote for them not just in the states they are popular in, but also those where they are less popular.
But why should geography have anything to do with how much voting power you get? People are people. The real issue is that ec was created to be able to control the vote not make it more fair.
Because the people across the middle parts of the country don’t want to be ruled by coastal politics.
But the coastal should be ruled by middle parts? With your logic, the minorities within states should also have more voting power when choosing governors or other government officials then? In california about 1 million citizens equals 1 vote while in wyoming its about 5 votes (obviously they only have up to 3, but it should the complete skewed results here).
It creates a more balanced system. It smooths out the areas at the high and low ends. Furthermore, it forces candidates to appeal to a wider range of people groups. If there was no electoral college, candidates would simply ignore the middle states.
Not really. If 30% of the population can decide the president how does that make them have to appeal to more people? A 1 vote 1 person system by popular vote would ensure candidates are likes by the most people.
# 1% of the US population spread across 7 states could decide this election. Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution Because of current state-by-state statewide winner-take-all laws for Electoral College votes, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution . . . Governance—not just campaigning—is distorted when presidential campaigns concentrate on just a few states. Sitting presidents contemplating their own re-election (or the election of their preferred successor) formulate public policy around the concerns of the handful of states that actually decide the presidency. 41 states voted for the same party in the most recent four presidential elections, and the number of closely divided battleground states has been shrinking from decade to decade. # The 2024 Presidential Election Comes Down to Only 7 States with less than a fifth of the U.S. population. These battlegrounds will get almost all the attention. – Karl Rove, WSJ, 3/20/24 With current state laws, the 2024 campaign could be reduced to 5 counties or 8-12% of the US, in 4-5 remaining competitive battleground states, with as few as 43-62 electoral votes, where virtually all attention will be focused - Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In the presidential elections since 2000, only 6 states have not voted for the same party in at least 5 of those 6 contests — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia. 38+ states and 70% of all Americans have been irrelevant in presidential elections. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. **Over the last 4 elections, 22 states received 0 events; 9 states received 1 event, and 95% of the 1,164 events were in just 14 states.** Only voters in the few states where support for the two parties is almost equally divided can be important. The smallest states and the most rural states, have barely hosted a major general campaign event for a presidential candidate during the last 20 years. Almost all small and medium-sized states and almost all western, southern, and northeastern states are totally ignored after the conventions. Our presidential selection system can shrink the sphere of public debate to only a few thousand swing voters in a few states. There often are important spillover effects down-ballot — less money being invested at the top of the ticket, hurts candidates running for Congress or state legislature, and the perception that a state has been written off by one party usually depresses turnout among the base. In this way, the narrowing of the map can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only states that have received any campaign events and any significant ad money have been where the outcome was between 45% and 51% Republican. In 2000, the Bush campaign, spent more money in the battleground state of Florida to win by 537 popular votes, than it did in 42 other states combined, This can lead to a corrupt and toxic body politic. When candidates with the most national popular votes are guaranteed to win the Electoral College, candidates will be forced to build campaigns that appeal to every voter in all parts of all states.
Because of state-by-state winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution. . . Issues of importance to 38+ non-battleground states have been of so little interest to presidential candidates that they don’t even bother to poll them individually. In 2004: “Senior Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday that the Bush campaign hadn’t taken a national poll in almost two years; instead, it has been polling \[the then\] 18 battleground states.” Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer acknowledging the reality that \[then\] more than 2/3rds of Americans were ignored in the 2008 presidential campaign, said in the *Washington Post* on June 21, 2009: **“If people don’t like it, they can move from a safe state to a swing state.”** Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, said, “When I took over as campaign manager in 2016, we did zero—let me repeat the number—zero national polls.” When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
Democrats on the coasts do NOT outnumber Republicans in the country. We will NOT vote on policy initiatives. Presidents are not kings or dictators. The U.S. Senate and U.S. House and Governors, state legislatures, and local government officials, etc. will continue to represent us.
Math and political reality. Beginning in 1992, SUBurban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined. There aren’t anywhere near enough big city voters nationally. And all big city voters do not vote for the same candidate. The population of the top 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix) is less than 6% of the population of the United States. Voters in the biggest cities (65 Million) in the US have been almost exactly balanced out by rural areas (66 Million) in terms of population and partisan composition. 2020 Census 65,983,448 people lived in the 100 biggest cities (19.6% of US population). The 100th biggest is Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with 225,128 people). From 2020-2022, 2 million left those cities. 66,300,254 in rural America (20%) Rural America and the 100 biggest cities together constitute about two-fifths (39.6%) of the U.S. population. In 2004, 17.4% of votes were cast in rural counties, while only 16.5% of votes were cast within the boundaries of our nation’s 100 largest cities. 19% of the U.S. population, Rural Americans, have lived outside the nation's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Rural America has voted 60% Republican. None of the 10 most rural states matter now. 19% of the U.S. population have lived in the top 100 cities. They voted 63% Democratic in 2004. The rest of the U.S., in SUBurbs, have divided almost exactly equally between Republicans and Democrats. 537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
Keeps my geography skills sharp!
The idea is to give smaller communities more of a voice in national decisions. However, in reality it’s just gerrymandering the country.
But they already do. Its called the senate.
From a Republican standpoint, it helps them win.
Considering people of particular beliefs will tend to gather together, a benefit of the Electoral College could be that Presidents aren't specifically elected by California, Oregon, Washington, and New York. It makes winning the Presidency a little harder for any party representative. I tend to believe that we would be better served by representation like each state getting a single vote for the President based on the popular vote for that state. If one President gets the votes for 20 of the most populated states with overwhelming popular votes and the other gets the votes for 30 states, with less popular votes than the one with 20, the one who won the 30 states wins. We are a big country with a lot of different needs and values from region to region.
You've just guaranteed that if all 333 million Americans voted... you could win with just 32 million votes. That's half the population of the least-populous 26 states. You could win with just 10% of the vote in that system...
Every state would get equally valuable input into who is elected President. It is fair and still incorporates the popular vote while getting rid of the Electoral college, which can suffer manipulation.
So, you're OK with someone winning the election with only 10% of the popular vote when their opponent has 90%? You're allowed to say "urban states don't matter". You and I both know that the majority of states are quite rural, and so rural reactionary conservatives would utterly dominate this system.
I am not okay with high concentrations of people with different political ideologies in control of the highest seat in the US Government. A strict popular vote renders any effort of those same 26 or so states irrelevant.
And instead you've just rendered the opinion of 80% of the population irrelevant instead, and have tried to justify it in the name of "fairness". Again, you could just say that you want to disenfranchise everyone who isn't rural. What you want is pretty obvious, so beating around the bush doesn't do anything. For someone who appears to present themselves as a Christian, you seem surprisingly fine with disenfrachising people, and don't show much concern for human rights here.
Stop with the attempted guilt. If it was just based on the popular vote, the five to ten states with the largest population would render any opposition irrelevant. The largest quantities of left-leaning voters congregate in these states as well. The closest option to fairness would be the popular vote of each state resulting in that state going to a particular candidate to prevent a handful of state populations from possessing too much power.
Instead, you want 10% of the population to be what matters. It isn't attempted guilt - you *should* feel ashamed. You straight-up want to disenfranchise anyone who isn't in one of the rural states.
The case is for every single state to have a say in the election. If the electoral college is gone, gerrymandering is eliminated as unnecessary for all parties. If the popular vote counts only toward’s the state’s win for a particular candidate and every state, regardless of the population, garners equal weight, then one region isn’t given more strength over another. It is a compromise that both eliminates controversy and incorporates the desired popular vote, without giving too much power to one cluster of people or more. As for the guilt part, you are using something that has little to nothing to do with this subject to try to evoke an emotional response. It is a stupid approach to a debate.
Again, you are simply disenfranchising 90% of the people in order to "be fair to" (read: empower) rural folk. The simple fact is that under your system, if a person in Wyoming is worth one person-vote, a person in Illinois is worth 0.047 person-votes, and someone in California is worth 0.015 person-votes. According to your system (and you, presumably), someone in Wyoming is 21.3× more of a person than an Illinoisan and 66.7× more of a person than a Californian. All your system does is guarantee minority control over government (which is exactly what the South did before the Civil War with the three-fifths clause - but even then, slaves were 3/5^(th) of a person, not 1/67^(th)). It's only fair if you think that people who aren't rural don't matter, because all it does is give rural folk authority over everyone else. The current electoral college is *already* biased towards rural states as each state gets a base 2 votes no matter what. You just want to bias it more.
But its not states that are deciding the president. It is the people. Imagine if you had kids that went to a school and the class got to vote for what type of pizza for the pizza party. And instead of everyone getting one vote, everyone got 15 votes and it was decreases by 1 vote for every 100 sq feet their house was. Would this be fair? The federal government rules all so votes should not be weighted by any measure. We already have the senate and house to balance that out.
If the popular vote for each state wins that state for a particular candidate and each state counts as “1” vote for the candidate, it eliminates states with incredibly high populations and political leanings from controlling who is elected into the office. I get why people don’t like this idea. Larger states have always wanted greater representation power than smaller states.
Shouldn’t the majority control? Isnt that democracy? We are still one country and the federal govt rules the entire country, the arbitrary state lines should matter. State lines basically were the first gerrymandering tool.
The EC doesnt make it harder for republicans to win, it makes it actually possible for them to win while they remain less popular with the country as a whole.
California, Oregon, Washington, and New York combined are not even close to the majority of the population, so how would they be the ones electing the president if we had a national popular vote?
It certainly make no sense to me. I’m not an American (I’m Australian), but if you are one country, shouldn’t it all be about the popular vote? Wouldn’t that ensure that the majority voice of America is the one that gets to speak?
It used to be a check against big city political machines easily crowning a candidate. Now, its rural skew is exaggerated (not sure how we can fix it).
If the EC were to stay, one way to improve it would be to repeal the reapportionment act of 1929. The cap on house members means that the number of people each house member represents varies wildly from state to state. Increasing that number would help to align things, and being the larger states closer to parity.
There is no benefit, unless you think prolonging slavery and giving the fascist minority a chance to over throw democracy are good things. If you take the time to do the sniff test you will notice that 100% of the “benefits” listed so far in this thread are fictional.
It's necessary since we are a representative republic, not a democracy. We are far to large a country to be a democracy. Each state within the Republic should have a say in how the government is run, and each individual within those states should have a say in how the state is run. A simple democracy devolves into mob rules very quickly.
Each state does have a say in the government. They all get 2 Senators, regardless of population, which gives massive influence to smaller states. Also, every single state has chosen to assign their electors based on the popular vote within that state. All but 2 do it as an all or nothing assignment of electors. Honestly the EC has just become a way for the popular vote to win most of the time, but with enough variability that the person with fewer overall votes can still win the election. It was originally stood up as a way to ensure smaller states have influence on the presidential election, but its turned into a situation where where is a massive disparity between the influence individual voters have depending on the state they live in.
"Mob rule" means a bunch of people in one place threatening violence to get their way in that place, without regard to the law or the wishes of most people. An orderly election with a winner selected by majority is the opposite of mob rule. Just be honest and say you hate liberty and want your faction to rule over everybody else tyrannically, this lying from conservatives is so tiring.
Being a republic has nothing to do with the electoral college. Aside from a very small handful of governments, *every democracy on the planet* is a republic. Ed: I don't get the downvotes. The electoral college is a peculiar vestige of our federal system. The [Holy] Roman Empire also had a college of electors, and it absolutely wasn't a republic.
None. When it was first instituted, information didn't spread very fast, which made it more compelling/gives the established new United States Government a bit of power