[moz]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The original reason for it was that, in the early days of the United States, the country was extremely large and sparsely populated, and, before the days of good communications, there was simply no practical method for all the people to vote directly for President.

It also allows for some gerrymandering - the lower limit on the number of electors favours small states. But originally it also meant that two people had to die before the process had to be re-done, making it more reliable. When there were only a few states and they were roughly the same size that wasn't important. Today I think it's one of the smaller flaws.

The US electoral system definitely could use a shake-up, if nothing else isn't it about time you involved some professionals? Most democracies have an independent electoral commission that employs (and trains) bureaucrats whose job is to run the elctions properly. Which means that (for instance) New Zealand had its elections four days after the US and already knows the result because we employ people who can count to do just that. The system scales - Australia uses the same princliples and a more complex voting system which sometimes takes a few days to rattle through if the result depends on special votes (mostly out-of-electorate votes).

I voted and in the five minutes (literally) I spent in the building I saw perhaps ten other voters. We also vote on a Saturday and employers are legally obliged to facilitate voting by their employees (of course, since it takes 5 minutes that's not exactly a giant imposition).

The main reason *for* the current US system that I can see is that when it was set up most people (viz, rich white men) were not keen to pay for a bureacracy to administer it, and since the US was so small at the time there wasn't a pressing need to do so. So they let the people who were interested run it, and accepted that "active in politics" almost always means "running for election". These days the US is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger, significantly more complex and there's no reason to let partisan hacks have anything to do with running the elections. FFS, the UN does a better job.

Of course, switching to a democratic system would be good too, but baby steps, people, baby steps. First get the current system actually implemented properly, then start wondering if it could be changed. Unless you decide that it can't be made to work, then change it to one that can. But since other countries run systems broadly similar to yours without most of the problems you have, surely you can manage it too?