LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Electoral College: United States
built 178 days ago
Those who call for the abolition of the Electoral College are hostile to liberty. Not surprisingly, most advocates of abolition are statist elites concentrated largely on the east and west coasts. These political, economic, academic, media, and legal elites overwhelmingly favor a strong centralized federal government, and express contempt for the federalist concept of states’ rights. They believe in omnipotent federal power, with states acting as mere glorified federal counties carrying out commands from Washington.
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That's not the way it's done, of course, and, given the Constitution's enshrinement of the Electoral College, things aren't likely to change. To quit the college would take approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of state legislatures, so fuggedaboudit.
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The number of Electoral College votes for each state is determined by their number of members of Congress. Thus, smaller states have slightly disproportionate influence in the EC, as states with only one House of Representatives member (Alaska, for example) have their vote tally tripled by the addition of votes for their two Senators, while large states, like California with 52 House members, receive a much smaller incremental benefit for adding their two senators to the count.
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In the early years of the electoral college system, several state legislatures chose electors without a popular vote. After 1828 only South Carolina continued this practice, abandoning it after the Civil War. Electors were chosen by the legislature in Florida in 1868 and in Colorado in 1876.
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The Constitution sets up the Electoral College as a buffer between the popular vote and the White House, and gives states room to choose how they will select electors. That power... is given to state legislatures. There is no mention of whether voters could make the decision directly, as they would in Colorado by voting yes on the ballot question.
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Many proponents of the electoral college see its negative effect on third parties as a good thing. They believe it protects the most powerful office in the country from control by what these proponents view as regional minorities until they can moderate their views to win broad, long-term support from across the entire nation. Critics of this argument disagree with the statement that emerging third parties are a bad thing.
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