Why America Has An Electoral College, Explained For The Rest Of The World
It’s like the UN. That’s basically it
American democracy looks straight-up nuts to the rest of the world. The winner of the popular vote… doesn’t win? WTF? While the process is complicated, the reasoning is not. America is not a direct democracy. It is what it says on the tin — the United States. The propaganda is all about people but the laws and very name of the country are all about the states.
The simplest way to understand this is the United Nations.
Why?
You have no vote in the UN. The UN Secretary General is selected by member states. The United States is the same.
The Electoral College is a temporary, proportional UN that convenes every four years. They have one job and one job only. Select a President. Note that I said select, not elect. America is an indirect democracy.
Forget how actual, modern democracies work. The US works the same as the UN.
Wait, why?
But wait, why? This is a stupid way to run a country. American states today have no major disputes beyond college football. Why would you do this?
That’s history.
America was founded by rich white men that didn’t want to pay taxes. After they threw off the tyranny of King George the local elites were like yay, now I’m tyrant of Virginia but some dweebs in Philadelphia kept trying to get them to unite.
In order to unite the states, these dweebs designed, essentially, a mini-UN. The US Senate is exactly like the UN, one state, one vote. The Electoral College is another temporary UN. The only democratic element is the House of Representatives, which was also bullshit because only 6% of the population could vote at the time.
America is not government by the people. That’s just the marketing tagline. America is government by the states. Always has been.
What America call a democracy is actually an elaborate system of voter suppression. It’s designed to dilute peoples power by enslaving or imprisoning them and to preserve elite power by giving more representation to land than human beings. It is what they say it is. Some united states.
Why now?
Why does this system persist? Well, cui bono? Who benefits? It’s the same people that benefited in the first place. Rich white men that don’t want to pay taxes. Land owners. The elites. Now known as Republicans.
Republicans have only won the popular vote twice in the last 30 years and have yet elected two Presidents. They use this power to appoint Supreme Court Justices. This court is then used to even override popular elections (like Gore/Bush in 2000).
The world sees this as a broken system, but the question is broken for whom? For rich, white men the system works almost exactly as intended. It preserves and legitimizes minority rule. Even after women and black people were allowed to vote, it still worked. In that sense the founder’s had a longterm vision that worked. White power!
Not a modern democracy
Compared to the rest of the world, however, America is not a modern democracy. 56 countries got universal franchise before America. America was among the last democracies to figure out one person, one vote. In fact, they still haven’t figured it out.
Right, now, more people are disenfranchised by their prison state than were ever disenfranchised as a slave state. Think about that. At peak, 4 million people were enslaved and today 6 million are disenfranchised by the carceral state. And their votes are stolen because their bodies were/are counted in the census. It’s the same system. Enslaved votes went to their ‘owners’. Imprisoned votes go to their jailers, released votes to to where they live. It’s crazy, and it’s all in plain sight. The entire system is designed around state power, not human beings. What does this mean in white majority states? White power.
Also note, the descendants of the former enslaved are still disenfranchised by the Electoral College. It’s so obvious that geologists can see it. See this blue belt in the south.
It matches up to shoreline in the Cretaceous period, which is where all the good “Black Belt” soil is. Where people had farms. Where bastards enslaved.
The legacy of enslavement, enshrined in the Electoral College is that these states will never go blue, and these Black people’s votes will never count. They will always be outnumbered by the descendants of their enslavers and tormenters and their votes will disappear.
Disenfranchisement is the core of what America calls democracy. It is literally its bedrock. No American has no constitutional right to vote at all. When the Civil Rights movement led to the Voting Rights Act, their packed Supreme Court gutted it. Hence acts that look insane to the outside world — day long voting lines, ripping up post boxes — are all normal parts of the system. These are built in. To the ground.
The system isn’t built around voting, it’s built around voter suppression.This is how the system is supposed to work. The founders are looking up from hell, smiling. The Supreme Court is full of originalists and this is true. They preserve America’s original sin.
Like a big, racist UN
America is what they tell you they are. United states. Their rulers are who they always were, rich white men who don’t want to pay taxes. They do as they have always done, suppress votes to preserve state power. That is why they have an Electoral College, and a Senate, and why their democracy looks like a tyrannical farce to the rest of the world. Because it is.
America is not a democracy. It is tyranny of the states.
