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Eva Seifert's avatar

Unfortunately the Founders thought that the EC would be educated, informed, honorable men. They were incredibly naive on that point. Thought as a nation, we have been extremely lucky.

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Eric73's avatar

There's a certain irony here in that, generally speaking, the Founders designed our system with full acknowledgement of human flaws, and to some extent, relying on them. For example, they expected the tendency toward institutional self-interest to prevent Congress and the Executive from getting too cozy. They were naive in hoping that political parties would not become strong enough institutions on their own to eclipse the formal institutions of government.

However, you're correct that in the end, they expected that honorable men committed to our ideals would make the right decisions on important matters – given an appropriately deliberate forum which would cool the passions of the masses. This, of course, is one of the fundamental principles of republican government. And in this case, they decided to further insulate the Executive from Congress by convening a separate body to decide, rather than having Congress decide as in a parliamentary system.

And here is where they made a crucial mistake: they left the process and criteria for choosing electors entirely to each state. And while practical and logistic concerns prevent our usual congressional representatives from being explicitly compelled by their state to vote one way or another on legislation, no such concerns exist when a body is being assembled upon demand explicitly for the purpose of deciding one question. The only guardrail left is at that point is lack of intra-party cohesion from state to state. Which you had, to some degree, before the age of instantaneous global mass communication.

And so here we are. 😒

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