LogFAQs > #921211754

mooreandrew58 posted...

and i'm not arguing that. just saying its still legit cause thats how the system was designed to work.

Debatable. It's how the system works, but not really how it was designed to work.

Recall that if no candidate wins an absolute majority of electoral college votes then the matter goes to congress; the House of Representatives picks the president and the Senate selects the vice president (from the top three candidates who received at least one electoral college vote). But here's the thing - this system was expected to be the norm, not a weird hypothetical tie-breaker rule for a one-in-a-million situation where the electoral college is tied.

Based on notes, essays, and comments published at the time the constitution was being written, it was clear that the constitution's framers didn't really intend for the electoral college to pick the president; instead, they expected that the electoral college would put forward a list of names and that *congress* would then pick the president. Which, incidentally, is how most democracies do it - the legislature is elected directly by the people and they pick the executive; as an example, in Westminster democracies (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, et al) parliament is elected and they get to choose who the prime minister is (which, at least in theory, could be anyone, but in practice is almost always the leader of whichever party gets the most votes). Notably, since the legislature is responsible for picking the executive, they also have the right to replace them - prime ministers can be tossed out and replaced without any elections taking place if they lose the confidence of parliament.

Anyways, the electoral college picking the president was assumed to be a once-in-a-lifetime event. What the founders hadn't counted on is the founding of political parties and the coalescence of votes around just a handful of candidates. It was intended that a large number of people would step forward and contest the presidency - none of them were likely to win an absolute majority of the electoral college, so instead congress would now have a short-list of the best candidates and would pick the one they felt was the most suitable for office. But as soon as it became a one-on-one fight in the 1800s, the whole system stopped working as intended and a mechanism that was originally intended as a safety valve to ensure that a candidate so overwhelmingly popular could not be denied office instead became the normal way to pick a president, distorting the popular vote and, arguably, corrupting the intent of the constitution.
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