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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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That had nothing to do with it. It would have been extremely easy for people in each state to count the votes for that state, then bring those vote totals to the capital where those state-totals are added together to get the final country-wide count. The problem is that that kind of simple, one-person one-vote system means that each vote would be weighted equally, and in some states there was a large portion of the population that couldn't vote but the state's decision-makers still wanted that portion to affect how much say that state had in choosing the President.
So basically, the Electoral College is there because of slavery.
You are correct, of course. Based on the writings of the founders at the time they established the system, it was clear that the system was never intended to be a democratic one in the first place. They didn't trust each other and they certainly didn't trust uneducated rural Americans with the power to select the chief executive.
The fact that they couldn't agree on whether or not to count a slave as a full person for the purposes of counting population is all the more reason the system should have been swept away ages ago.
They could, however, agree that a tax on tea-smugglers was worth starting a war and killing thousands over.