No, because that wasn't my argument. My argument was that fairness is judged based on the premises and foundational structure of the system. What's fair means that there are a set of rules that apply equally and are known in advance. Seabass's argument is like saying that the rules of Monopoly are "unfair" because they could be otherwise.Hermit wrote:You do realise that you just confirmed Seabass's observation that "Your defense of the EC boils down to "the system is fair by virtue of it being the system"", don't you?Forty Two wrote:What I argued was quite different - that it was not "unfair." And, it isn't unfair. It's a fair system under a federal, constitutionally limited republic.
We could eliminate the state-level popular vote to determine who the electors vote for altogether. Other options for rules include electing the President by a vote of the US House of Representatives. If that were the case, then our Representatives in Congress would pick the President, and the popular vote would be meaningless. If we did that, would it be fair?
The EC was designed as an accommodation to states joining the union who were of smaller sizes and populations. It recognized that a state like Georgia would be hesitant to join the union if it was not afforded equal dignity with, say New York or Massachusetts, the far more populous states.Hermit wrote:
It can of course be argued that your federal, constitutionally limited republic works exactly as designed (though it can quite convincingly be argued that the Electoral College utterly failed to do what it was designed to do by the Founding Fathers (pbut) in the last election), but from the democratic principle of one vote, one value it is far from fair.
There was some narrative about that the function of the EC was to make sure an unqualified president was not elected, and that we can all see that Trump is not qualified. However, that's just Democrat politics and propaganda. People who voted for him don't think he's unqualified. The real reason was to prevent a "regional" candidate from winning - i.e. you don't want the President to only appeal to the big population centers, or to one region of the country. No region has enough electoral votes to carry the election.
The Electoral College was considered to fit perfectly within arepublican, federalist government. The system allows majorities to rule, but only while they are reasonable, broad-based, and not tyrannical. The election process is a clever solution to the seemingly unsolvable problem that faced the original constitutional Convention -- finding a fair method of selecting the Executive for a nation composed of both large and small states that have ceded some, but not all, of their sovereignty to a central government. "`[T]he genius of the present [Electoral College] system,'" a 1970 Senate report concluded, "`is the genius of a popular democracy organized on the federal principle.'"
You'll note that what motivated Trump voters - going by what they said, rather than the motives attributed to them by others - was an anti-establishment bent, and a belief that too much power has been vested in the President, that the government was not serving the interests of the people, and had actively worked against their interests. The electoral college system worked the way it was designed to - gave the presidency to the candidate who obtained the broadest support - and broadest support is not necessarily the majority. A way to look at it is to imagine if Trump took all the individual votes in all of the top 10 states by population, and Hillary took 40 states. Who should be president in a FEDERAL system? The candidate that took 80% of the states, or the candidate that took the most votes?
In your system, you only get to vote for your preferred candidate in your voting district. You have no say in who becomes the Prime Minister. The PM is chosen by the Parliament. So, you can never have a Prime Minister who does not have the support of the Parliament, because when they no longer support him, they no-confidence him out.Hermit wrote:Our head of government is elected by the representatives the majority of people has voted for. The winner takes all system pertaining to your Electoral College makes no pretension to such proportionality. Not that I regard the Australian system as flawless. The upper house is not determined by one vote, one value. Each state gets to determine the same number of senators, regardless of the size of its population.Forty Two wrote:In Parliamentary systems, you elect your head of government not by a vote of the people at all, who have no say in who becomes PM. The members of parliament choose the PM, irrespective of the will of the people.
Oh, so you acknowledge flaws in the Ozzie system? Good. Do those flaws make it unfair?
The whole idea of a Senate in the US is non-proportional to the popular vote, yet we don't see a movement to abolish the Senate. Our Senate in the US has approximately the same amount of power as the House of Representatives. Yet, each state, from Wyoming to California, has 2 Senators. Each state has 2% of the Senate vote. That's not proportional to population. Is it "unfair" in a federal system where states have joined to form a nation, ceding some,but not all of their power to the central government?
Of course that's not unfair. For the same reason, the EC is not unfair.
Once again, "not unfair" doesn't mean "better" and doesn't mean "superior." I have no trouble with a parliamentary system. It's a system with different functioning under a different structure.
