One of the reasons why the
delegates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention devised the Electoral College
to elect the federal president was that they thought that even at 7 million,
the population of the U.S. back then was too large for the even just the
propertied people, who could vote, to know the candidates very well, if at all.
At over 300 million, the U.S. population during the presidential reelection campaign
of Joe Biden had to rely on the mass media and the political elite, including
statements by the White House, for information on whether the sitting president
was too old to serve viably in a second term. The limited number of presidential
electors in the states would presumably be small enough that they could have
the opportunity to size up the candidates in person. But with electors from fifty
rather than just thirteen states, such an opportunity would not be likely. So
given the exponential growth of the United States both in terms of member
states and their respective populations, the originally anticipated benefit of
the Electoral College would not still hold even if the two major political
parties had not taken over the College. Even if the states’ respective electors
were able to spend enough time in person with the candidates, the parties had
ensured that those electors could not be autonomous and thus exercise their
judgment. Instead, judgment could only be made at a distance by the massive American
electorate whose perspectives have been very vulnerable to intentional manipulation
through and even by the media. Put another way, the American people have been
vulnerable to making a bad choice based on faulty information. This makes
American representative democracy itself vulnerable.
The full essay is at "On Electing a U.S. President: Biden's Age."
