> People forget the U.S is a democratic constitutional republic.
Honestly I'm not sure who forgets this, considering how this point is brought up any time anybody wants to criticize the electoral college (as far as I see, anyways).
Regardless of why it is the way it is, in my opinion the electoral college is an absolute garbage implementation of a federal election.
Some states are vastly better represented than others because of "swing state" game theory. A third party is not viable except as a spoiler.
States are incentivized to implement first past the post voting from a game theory PoV because if you're a swing state you want to stay a swing state as it is financially and politically beneficial, and if you're not a swing state you don't want your solid blue/red state giving up even one delegate to the opposing party.
On top of that, the entire goal of the electoral college was that we would vote for electors we trust and those electors would handle voting in a President. Yet we don't even do that, we vote for a presidential candidate and an elector is chosen to carry that vote out to the national level! Presidential elections are poorly implemented direct democracy masquerading as federalism.
Honestly I'm not sure who forgets this, considering how this point is brought up any time anybody wants to criticize the electoral college (as far as I see, anyways).
Regardless of why it is the way it is, in my opinion the electoral college is an absolute garbage implementation of a federal election.
Some states are vastly better represented than others because of "swing state" game theory. A third party is not viable except as a spoiler.
States are incentivized to implement first past the post voting from a game theory PoV because if you're a swing state you want to stay a swing state as it is financially and politically beneficial, and if you're not a swing state you don't want your solid blue/red state giving up even one delegate to the opposing party.
On top of that, the entire goal of the electoral college was that we would vote for electors we trust and those electors would handle voting in a President. Yet we don't even do that, we vote for a presidential candidate and an elector is chosen to carry that vote out to the national level! Presidential elections are poorly implemented direct democracy masquerading as federalism.