--- In [email protected], Bhairitu <noozguru@...> wrote:
> > We need to dump the Electoral College. It is a dated concept. Otherwise > you don't truly have Democracy. But then with electronic voting > machines which are owned by questionable corporations owned by > questionable people you won't have Democracy anyway. And the courts > have ruled that it is okay for voting machines to use proprietary > software. Of course I wouldn't expect anyone on "the courts" to be > anything other than tech illiterate idiots. Of course, the United States was not envisioned as a democracy to begin with, it was envisioned as a Republic and a conglomeration of individual states that had various degrees of independence from the federal level, and it was a lot smaller than now. Also the various ways of splitting up voting and power seems to have been to avoid as much as possible the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of the few. Originally the person who came in second in the presidential race became Vice-President. If that were the case now, and Obama wins, Romney would be Vice-President. Now the Electoral College votes (12th Amendment to the Constitution) for president and vice president separately, typically in tandem with the party of the prrsident. It's Congress that passes the laws, so do not ignore those votes! The last essentially democratic state was Athens, except for towns with a population small enough to decide among themselves how to manage their affairs without representatives making decisions by themselves. John Adams wrote: 'Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.' Alexander Hamilton said 'It has been observed that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny: their figure deformity.' James Madison said: '...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.' Thomas Jefferson wrote: 'In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.' So these guys that set up the United States, did not care for democracy.
