From: cthorne@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Charles E Thorne)
Subject: Re: Great Britain as a malfunctioning democracy
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 20:20:44 GMT

In article <1992Apr16.184311.12173@cl.cam.ac.uk> gdb15@cl.cam.ac.uk (Guy Barry) writes:
>In article <1992Apr16.140118.27596@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> cthorne@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Charles E Thorne) writes:

>>It's true that the electors vote for president rather than the popular
>>vote itself, but the electors are not part of Congress.  They also almost
>>never vote against the person they were elected to vote for.  I think once
>>in the last 100 years, one elector voted against the person he was to have
>>voted before, because he thought they shouldn't get a majority.

>>Also, in addition to the fact that the number of electors includes a number
>>equal to the number of senators, each state's electoral college vote goes
>>entirely to the winner of the majority of votes.  Thus if a state goes
>>nearly 100% for a candidate, they still get the same number of votes as if
>>they went 51% for the candidate.  This is the major cause of the election
>>where less than 50% of the popular vote elects the president (as in the
>>Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960).

>Can you, or any of the other US readers, shed any light on the origins
>of this bizarre process?  Surely the obvious, and fairest, way of electing a
>President (as opposed to a Parliament) is by having a single ballot.

Many of the quirks in the U.S. systems can be traced back to its creation
as a federation (nation) of individual colonies (which had broken off from
Britain).  The war was fought using a weak federation of former colonies
which had no taxing powers and each colony (state) sent delegates to a 
Congress.  After being unable to pay for the war, they called a new
convention to revise the government.  The new convention wrote a
constitution based on their experiences of the first years of government.

One of the big fights was the populous vs. the small states (NY, Penns. and
Virginia against states such as R.I., Vermont, Connecticutt).  The compromises
which resulted included two houses of Congress (representatives directly
elected by districts of equal population--and a Senate with two Senators
from each State--selected by the States; which were originally chosen by
State legislatures--later by direct vote).  The other question was how to
select the President and Vice President.  They ended up with the electoral
college which gaves states power as states but yet ended up being approximately
the same as a direct vote.  Typically the President will carry just more than
a majority of the voters (about 51%), but will carry 35 or 40 states and thus
usually ends up with 75 or 80% of the electoral vote.  There have never been
serious discrepancies (someone getting 40% of the vote but 60% of the electoral
votes, e.g.) so there hasn't been a great incentive to change.  If no one gets
more than 50% of the electoral vote, the Congress makes the decision.  The
resistance to that concept keep the parties as two fairly equal parties.  Since
a third party with less than 50% of the vote has no power, they don't persist.

The advantage of having completely separate institutions gives each an
independence of the other since the representatives are directly elected by
their constituencies, they only need to satisfy their voters to get re-
elected.  The president has the nation as a whole as a constituency and
usually gets re-elected if the country doesn't get worse.  They can only run
for re-election once, so at least once every eight years there's a change in
presidency.

Charlie
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