[EM] In defense of the Electoral College (was Re: Making a Bad Thing Worse)

[Aaron Armitage]

 > Why would anyone go to the trouble of elaborating and
> proposing a 
> relatively complicated ranked-ballot method that is
> justified by meeting
> the Condorcet criterion and Majority for Solid Coalitions
> and so on,
> and then turn around and suggest that it is desirable that
> weighting votes
> unequally should be maintained, thus ensuring that any
> voting method
> cannot meet those criteria or even  Majority Favourite or
> Majority
> Loser?
> 

Although I'm also against the EC for the same philosophical reasons you
are (or more precisely, against letting it produce a counter-majoritarian
result: a compact that guarantees the majoritarian winner an EC majority
makes it harmless pagentry), the major problem with it is the fact that
the underlying system is plurality. Plurality is disfunctional when there
are more than two candidates. The adaptation to this, namely the reduction
to two major candidates, is also disfunctional. A national plurality
election only gains anything in the very rare case that the EC result
would have been different, and even then it gains relatively little
because the choice has already been artificially restricted to two
candidates, neither of whom may have been the CW in a larger field. Almost
any other single winner method gains much more in every election.

A system where each state gives its EC votes to the Condorcet winner in
that state, while not guaranteed to elect the national Condorcet winner
(and therefore not properly majoritarian overall), is better than a
national plurality contest, because it doesn't go pear-shaped as soon as a
third candidate appears. Even though national plurality obeys the majority
criterion if we take the field of candidates as a given, an EC awarded by
Condorcet is in fact more majoritarian because it opens up that field. A
national CW deprived of office by the EC may not have even made it through
the party primaries under plurality.

Of course I would rather see the national CW elected all the time, either
by eliminating the EC or by a compact pledging it to the CW.