Voting for President from 1789 to the early 1800s was a very different affair from what it is now. Back then, each congressional district elected the President separately from the others in the state. For example, a rural district in upstate New York would vote for one for one guy, and the elector of that district would vote that same guy; regardless of whom New York City voted for. At the end of the election, each of the individual votes of the electors would be counted and the winner would be President.
This way of doing things was implemented to give rural communities representation in the Presidential elections. It was a very fair system, and avoided a lot of the voting conflicts that we have now. But people from the big cities changed this when they realized that they needed to control the state. Nowadays, it’s a winner-take-all system where the candidate who the majority of the votes of the entire state carried all the electoral votes. Thus you have all blue states and all red states today.
This method however does not represent the voting public’s will. It allows the big cities (like New York City in the example) to control the elections in their states. If you have a swing state where there are very close amounts of Republicans and Democrats, the minorities and special interest groups get to control the vote.
The abolitionists were some of the first people to take advantage of this. They said to a candidate that if he voted their way on slavery, all of their people would vote for him. Hence a small minority of the total population decides the election, and the true bulk of the people are not represented.
If we had kept the system this way, we wouldn’t have the fierce struggles over swing states that we do now, because the red areas would vote red, and the blue areas would vote blue. There wouldn’t be any struggle for the red to overcome the blue or vice-versa. I propose that we change the system through the state legislatures (the way you’re supposed to change the election system) to bring back the voting of individual electors for individual party candidates; instead of the unfair, winner-take-all system that we have now.
Which do you prefer?
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