What is the point of the Electoral College?

[josephadel_3]

Why couldn't they just have people vote for a candidate and have those votes go to Congress to vote for a Candidate? Isn't that sufficient protection from tyranny of the majority?

[Patriot123]

Well because we're a Republic, and not a Democracy. If we were to do a direct election, it would be a direct contradiction of what a Republic is, and what this country was founded upon.

[Julian Sanchez]

There were two initial rationales for the Electoral College, only one of which really continues to apply.

The first was that the EC was originally intended to serve as a kind of "search committee": It would select the president on the occasions when some one candidate commanded an absolute majority of electors, but it was thought that this would only rarely be the case. More often, it was expected, the EC would end up narrowing down a list of suitable candidates, and the House of Representatives would end up choosing the President, as the Constitution provides in the event that no one candidate has an absolute majority. Note also that the Constitution left to the states the manner of choosing electors: While this is now universally done by popular vote, it was similarly presumed that electors would often be chosen by state legislatures, providing an additional buffer between pure popular preference and the choice of the executive. (State legislators presumably being both accountable to their constituents, but also better able to be informed about the candidates and their policies, especially pre-electronic media.)

That rationale is largely irrelevant now, as electors are chosen by popular vote in every state, and typically (largely as a function of a relatively stable two-party system the Founders hadn't anticipated) someone has a simple majority of electors going in. The other rationale is that the process is meant to embody the selection of the president by the states, rather than the undifferentiated U.S. population as a whole. Electors are assigned proportionately to population, of course... but not *perfectly* proportionally, which is why it's possible to win the popular vote but lose the election, as we saw in 2000. The idea here was that different states would tend to have different characteristic interests -- industry, farming, ranching, trade, etc. -- and the allocation of electors provided a kind of weighting mechanism to make it less likely that a few extremely populous states could control the process, to the detriment of the distinct interests of the less populous states.

Another way to put it is that, so long as a state assigns electors on a winner-take-all basis, there are diminishing returns to focusing on any one state. Suppose, for instance, you have a Democratic presidential candidate currently polling at 60% in California. If it were all about popular vote, the candidate's best strategy might be to keep appealing to and promising things to benefit Californians, to try and get up to 70 or 80%. But with a winner-take-all EC system, you don't get any more benefit from winning over 80% of Californians than if you only win 51%. So the candidate has to seek to have a broad appeal to voters across lots of different states, even if their absolute numbers are smaller.

Now, in a sense, this works: Presidential contenders end up having to pay an absurdly disproportionate amount of attention to Ohio, for instance. In a close race, shifting a few hundred voters concentrated in that state might be worth much more to a candidate than winning a few extra thousand votes from some more diffuse category of voters spread across the whole nation. Whether this is a good thing, on the whole, is another question.

[josephadel_3]

Well because we're a Republic, and not a Democracy. If we were to do a direct election, it would be a direct contradiction of what a Republic is, and what this country was founded upon.

This is why I'm asking why Congress can't take the popular vote into consideration and then decide who wins.

[New Governor Of Alaska]

Why couldn't they just have people vote for a candidate and have those votes go to Congress to vote for a Candidate? Isn't that sufficient protection from tyranny of the majority?

What a crazy idea!
What if people will elect someone whom Elite doesn't like? :D

Electoral College is a FILTER.

[freedom-maniac]

One Word:

SHEEPLE

[Julian Sanchez]

Separation of powers. Again, in the original design of the system, it was expected that the decision frequently would fall to Congress. But the separate electors were partly meant to prevent the situation where the president is beholden for his position to powerful members of the same legislative body he's supposed to check. Hence the constitutional prohibition on any current holder of elective office serving as an elector in the EC.

[Julian Sanchez]

Alternatively, you could just Google "Federalist 68" and read Alexander Hamilton's explanation for the structure of the Electoral College.