Quote Originally Posted by spaldy View Post
Orgs, not meaning to get you stirred up. However, two sides to look at the presidential election process. As you know we are not a democracy. We are a representative republic. Big difference.

The other side of the electoral college is that it's the sole reason that the entire country is not controlled by a collection of large urban areas. You can see the brilliance of the founding fathers. You can see what happens when that happens at the state levels. Living down state IL, upstate New York or off the coast in California means you are basically without representation on any state or federal matters in those states. Chicago, New York City or So Cal or San Fran means you just pay taxes but have little or no input on how the state is run.

The whole intent was to provide equal representation as well as make it hard to pass laws/regulations. That's largely been destroyed when they passed the 17th amendment which made the senate a popular vote position. The senate, along with Judicial was intended to act as a "brake" on populist and mob rule that predominates in the House. With the 17th amendment the senate is little different that the house and when one party controls congress, the senate and the presidency it can just pass anything it wants regardless of the impact on the country. The $35,000,000,000,000 debt ($272,00 per citizen) is one simple example of not having guardrails on a system. This does even include trillions of dollars of liabilities that aren't included in "government accounting" on the debt.

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

I think the 17th amendment along with the politicization of our public schools sealed our fate. The old Ben Franklin saying "'When people discover they can vote themselves money that is the end of the Republic'.
You're not wrong. Even in NH, there is a big North/South divide.

Southern NH is not so different from Massachusetts, which has a much different vibe to those living North of where I live.

I guess no system is ever going to be perfect, but the whole election process seems more of a circus than anything else, even if important things are at stake.