The Sons of Liberty

Interestingly, I somehow ended up in a slightly heated discussion with my Dad the other day on the subject of the Electoral College. Pops is all for ditching the college in favor of a popular vote (he’s one of those ‘Bush stole the election’ folks). Now, off hand, it might seems as if a constitutional amendment discarding the Electoral College system in favor of a popular vote to elect presidents would make a certain amount of sense. After all, we are supposed to be a democracy, and in a democracy the majority is supposed to rule, right? But then I started to really think….

The Framers of the Constitution clearly spent quite a bit of time coming up with and later adjusting our election process. The first version of the presidential election process is stated right in the US Constitution - Article Two, Section One (although it’s not called by it’s current name there). It was even an important enough concept that they saw fit to tweak it somewhat with the 12th Amendment, making the Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections separate events as well as making other changes to how electors cast votes. It just seemed to me like a lot of time was spent in consideration of the entire election process, both before and after the Constitution was drafted, and yet we did not end up with a popular vote for president. Why?

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