What is the point of having human Presidential Electors? Nearly every state binds the vote of the Presidential Electors to the statewide popular vote winner. Even if the winner of that state’s popular vote shoots his running mate in the face on election night, the Electors are still bound to cast their vote for him.
If Electors don’t vote for the winner of the state popular vote, they are immediately fired, fined, and replaced with another more willing cog. There is zero autonomy in this.
This is far from the original design of the elector system. In the original vision of the elector system, Voters actually voted for the elector, not the President. Then when the winning number of electors got together on December 10, they cast their votes for whomever they wish, whether that presidential candidate was one they promised to pick, or one they picked from a hat that day. Didn’t matter. They had autonomy to vote for whomever and however.
The idea behind this is that mobs of people are often really bad at making decisions. Think Salem Witch Trials or lynchings. People in general are really bad at judging character, especially when there is peer pressure involved. With autonomous Electors, they were free to really dig in and parse the information on each candidate and choose the one that they felt was right.
They also had the choice to pick someone who wasn’t even a contender in the actual race. They were free to disregard anyone who was not reputable or honest. Or they could pick their friend. They could also use last minute information to change their minds too. So if the candidate they were going to pick did something terrible after the election, they could pick someone else.
Then, if all the electors cast their votes and no one candidate got a majority of the votes, that is when Congress stepped in and made the deciding vote.
But that is not how any of this works now. Now, they are little more than figure heads, there to rubber stamp the popular vote.
If we wanted to change this, we could. We could at the bare minimum ask that electors be elected proportionally to the vote. So if 50% of the people voted for one candidate, 30% voted another and the other 20% voted for a third, then the electors of the state would be split on similar lines.
Or we could ask for Ranked Choice Voting, and continue with the cog method of electors. At least in this system, the final selection of electors would have some support from a majority of voters rather than just the popular segment.
Or we could just pass a constitutional amendment to get rid of the elector system and let that mob of voters be manipulated by the duopoly parties into only choosing from their candidates, and continue getting lunatics, murderers, and war criminals in office.
Or we could go back to the original vision of electors and give them the autonomy to choose whom they wish for President and bump it to Congress if they can’t pick by a majority.
