'Supreme Court rules that states can penalize so-called "faithless electors"'

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Not sure I can tolerate fundamentalists, myself.

[ProfessorDetective]

That's good. I understand that people will sometimes find people they cannot in good conscience vote for, but IMO that doesn't give them the right to substitute their decision for that of the electorate. They either need to hold their nose and do the will of the people or find someone who can.

Are these electors intended as mere tools from an age where long range communication was a difficult and time-consuming thing...

Well, that, trying to give the less populace states more voting power, and the Founding Fathers thinking the general Populus weren't educated enough to be the final say and wanting a filter.

If you ask me, we need to go to direct popular voting. Yes, the coasts will get the most say, but if that where most folks are...

Info on that 'voting power' point:
youtu.be/7wC42HgLA4k

[TGLS]

That's good. I understand that people will sometimes find people they cannot in good conscience vote for, but IMO that doesn't give them the right to substitute their decision for that of the electorate. They either need to hold their nose and do the will of the people or find someone who can.

Are these electors intended as mere tools from an age where long range communication was a difficult and time-consuming thing or are they put in place to act as elected officials? If the former, then there's no need for them in the first place anymore and they can be removed and, indeed, should be. If the later, then they have the responsibility to act against the stated interest of their constituence in order to act in the interest of their constituence and need the freedom to do so.

Well, I'm fairly sure it isn't the former, given that they used to be appointed directly by states and haven't met as a single body.

--

A direct popular vote system is probably going to end up solving problems of maps that look like this

A dollar sign is a million dollars and a hand is a visit by either candidate.

[Darth Wedgius]

That's good. I understand that people will sometimes find people they cannot in good conscience vote for, but IMO that doesn't give them the right to substitute their decision for that of the electorate. They either need to hold their nose and do the will of the people or find someone who can.

Are these electors intended as mere tools from an age where long range communication was a difficult and time-consuming thing or are they put in place to act as elected officials? If the former, then there's no need for them in the first place anymore and they can be removed and, indeed, should be. If the later, then they have the responsibility to act against the stated interest of their constituence in order to act in the interest of their constituence and need the freedom to do so.

I'd say the former, but removing the electors would be slow due to constitutional hysteresis, and we'd still have to have someone reporting the vote, someone who could be tempted to override the voters.

As to the latter, IMHO nobody is infallible, and that would substitute their own judgement for the voters', and to say I'm uncomfortable with that would be to be an understatement.

You see, what the constituency really needs is socialism. Or laissez faire free markets. Or to get rid of those evil Republicans. Or to get rid of those authoritarian Democrats. Because we all know that Trump is racist and Biden is senile.

All those are sincere beliefs widely held, but it gets worse. There is a reporter who was asked if he was a democratic socialist, and he corrected that to just "socialist." There's a Biden campaign member who said that conservatives might need to be put into reeducation camps, and I wouldn't swear that there aren't people on the forum who agree with him. There were people who believed that Obama wasn't a U.S. citizen by birth, and thus ineligible to be President.

Look at me, for example. I can't see why someone could want Marxism for America. I'm not saying "Marxism" to mean anything on the left I don't like, in the way some people use "fascism" to mean something other than fascism, I mean actual "We're trained Marxists" Marxism. Where Marxism has been tried, it often produced short term gains, but in general the performance has been dismal and it's ended with authoritarian messes. Even China has gone free market (you might not call China Marxist but Maoist, with that whole worker vs peasant focus, but that's pretty close), as has Cuba. To try to establish Marxism, a system people literally died trying to escape, here in the U.S., a country people literally die trying to get into, seems literally crazy to me.

But I might be wrong. I'm not that smart -- GreyICE would back me up on that. My history teacher said that before the American revolution, and for some time afterward, there was a lot of doubt that a democratic system could work long-term. And those weren't crazy doubts; democracy isn't perfect. But it's worked here and abroad as well as any system has, overall anyway.

Maybe Marxism could work, and it's just never been tried the right way. Places it's been tried, it's either been imposed or it's been in places without a history of democracy or without what the Smithsonian insisted was "white culture," like a tradition of rugged individualism. Maybe every other time Marxism was tried, someone forgot to carry the three.

So if a Marxist candidate gets elected, who am I to say no? I'd probably step down and get someone else to do the dirty. Same if a Nazi got elected. I'd be busy getting my visa in order anyway.