Seth wrote:
That depends entirely upon what you mean by a "fair" system.
Fair, meaning one vote for every citizen. So very simple. It's perhaps the simplest concept in politics and yet your side is forever making things more complicated in an effort to hide the injustice of the current system.
Seth wrote:
Much of the "popular" vote comes from the same densely populated states. The purpose of the electoral college is to give all states an equal vote --
That is incorrect. The EC has one and ONLY one purpose... To provide surrogate voters on behalf of the representatives. If California had a million representatives and Texas had one, the EC would do nothing to counter the uneven numbers. It would simply give a million votes to California and one to Texas.
You are confusing the purpose of the EC with an obsolete agreement on the number of representatives the Southern states were allowed, based on their slave populations, to counter the disadvantage of their smaller populations.
There was NEVER any constitutional discussion by ANY of the founders OR anyone since to address the issue of adjusting the number of votes to counter differences in the population of actual citizens per state.
You're more than welcome to produce ANY evidence to prove me wrong. Good luck!
Seth wrote:
there is a vast gulf between what voters in certain regions need, for example, and what big city voters do
There is also a vast gulf between what voters WITHIN certain regions need. More times than not when it comes to the federal issues the divisions are between industries more than they are between states. Divisions also exist between religions, between race and probably most significant of all between economic classes.
To insist on defining the interests of the American people on the state they live in is to ignore most of the interests of those people. It's a stupid, stupid idea and it's NEVER been considered in the almost 250 years since America was born.
I'm sorry Seth, I don't mean any personal offense but what you are suggesting is nothing less than delirium.
Seth wrote:
-- it wouldn't be terribly "fair" if the votes of residents of certain states never had a say in who sits in the White House.
Which is the way the system works now! Voters in California only get a 5th of the say that one voter in Wyoming gets, which is precisely the problem you pretend the EC is avoiding.