by Sandy » Mon Oct 28, 2019 11:29 am
If you ask defenders of the Electoral College why, most of them start by discounting the votes of the larger cities and states simply because there are more of them. I hear people say that Hillary only won the popular vote because of California and if you take that away, the rest of the country voted majority Trump. Aside from the fact that it doesn't work that way, why should California's votes not count? They contribute more to the economy than any other state, three times as much as the next closest one. California is a microcosm of the whole country, I trust their vote to be more representative of the way America thinks and to be more in the best interests of the country than the states south of the Mason Dixon line. The idea that their votes individually should weight less than those in North Dakota, which doesn't even have a full congressional district population, is counter to the principles stated in the constitution.
States already have a venue in which statewide votes have an effect within a federal system. It's the Senate. Every Senator is subject to a statewide vote and it is the collective result of those elections which produce the makeup of the Senate. That, combined with what's left of their way of reaching a majority, is where states rights are balanced in the federal system. Giving the election of the president to the control of the states (and subject to their election laws) means that there is no federal office that is directly accountable to the people.