Ah.. definitely a question for Melonie. lol.. I've always thought that it is actually the "Electoral" votes that count, and ultimately determine the outcome. Am I understanding that right?
Yes, absolutely correct. when you and I vote for president we are actually casting votes for "electors". Each state is assigned a certain number of "electors" based on the state's relative population. It is the "electors" who then cast THEIR votes for presidential candidates. Actually, the "electors" ALWAYS vote for the candidate that the voters elected them to vote for, but they are not legally bound to and COULD vote differently if given enough reason.
From my understanding, having an Electoral College stems from the same 'states rights' theory that gave us a Senate where every state is equally represented regardless of population, versus a house of representatives where each state is represented in proportion to its population. The principle is that every state's "voice" should count not just the ones with huge populations totally dominating the smaller states, which was a condition of the original 13 colonies forming the USA in the first place. IMHO there was a great deal of wisdom in choosing this approach !
With the electoral college system, the "losing" votes of registered voters in individual states don't count. This means that in the 2000 election Al Gore won California with a large majority of votes from registered voters. However, George Bush won lots of states with smaller populations with smaller majorities of registered voters. Therefore if you add up the winning registered voters' votes for Gore in California plus the losing votes for Gore in the smaller states, it did indeed come out to be more registered voter votes than Bush received. Nonetheless, Bush won more "electors" and is thus president while Gore is lecturing.
If we were to abolish the Electoral College system in favor of "true democracy" we would also have to abolish the Senate, where it's currently possible for the low population states like RI and VT and WY to "out-vote" the states of CA and NY even though the combined population of RI + VT + WY is less than that of greater NYC or greater LA.
The Electoral College and the Senate are "checks and balances" against the extreme concentration of power in a very few places, because those very few powerful places might possibly develop some 'wacky' ideas which would not be good for the rest of the country ! The founding fathers were indeed very wise men ! But the one thing that the founding fathers failed to anticipate was the evolution of individual city newspapers into a nationwide system of electronic broadcasting, with the centers of that electronic broadcasting being located in those very few powerful places. Unlike 200 years ago, where people who lived 1000's of miles apart were very unlikely to hear of/read about the 'wacky' ideas emerging far away, today those 'wacky' ideas can be selected as the lead story by a very few powerful people in those very few powerful places, and electronically broadcast to people in every part of the country with a loud enough message to sometimes drown out locally developed ideas to the contrary. The Electoral College and the Senate guarantee that those ideas to the contrary will still be heard, even though the very few powerful places can now shout their own ideas across the country with a much louder voice !
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