The purpose of the Electoral College

(via DoobyBrain)

2 Comments leave a comment below

  1. Ugh. That is a cute little cartoon that conveniently fails to inform people that the whole reason the electoral college really started was because Southern states that had huge numbers of (not able to vote) slaves making up their population totals (even though slaves weren’t really considered people) were afraid they’d get short-changed during elections, so it was decided that slaves could count as part of their overall population (Remember the 3/5 Compromise — how a slave was counted as 3/5 of a person? That’s where that fits in.) and then they got more electoral votes based on their population number, even though they didn’t have the largest number of actual voters. That, plus the electoral system making states look much more red or blue than they really are, thus giving a false sense of security/false impression to the general public, and the fact that three separate times in our history we have ended up with a president who failed to win the popular vote, are some huge reasons why this is a deeply flawed and antiquated system that needs to be replaced. I wish someone would make a cartoon about that.

  2. This is a much better video about the Electoral College: