How about doing this for the Electoral College?

I'm throwing this out for discussion. If the discussion ends up as "it's totally stupid and no one in their right mind would go for it," that's the risk I take :). Also, it may be impossible to implement if it requires a change to the US constitution.

I propose the following for the Electoral College to allow it to do its job, which is choosing the person to become the next President:

1. The populations of the individual states don't vote for a candidate for President; instead, they vote directly for electors to the College
2. The number of electors is unchanged from the current system, which avoids problems with elections being decided by New York, Florida, Texas, and California.
3. The electors are specifically forbidden from saying "I will vote for the candidate that is nominated by a particular party." Instead, they run on a platform that describes what policies they would like their candidate to pursue. Of course that means it would probably be pretty transparent what party they would vote for, but doesn't bind the electors to any given party.
4. Electors are allocated based on the proportion of votes they get state by state, so there's none of this nonsense of one party getting all the electors if they get 50.1% of the vote. Remember, too, that electors are not allowed to state which party they intend to vote for.
5. The party candidates for president are chosen after the electors are in place. The primaries can be in progress, but the conventions to actually choose the candidate happen in the first two weeks of December.
6. At the appointed time, the Electoral College meets in a three day circus (sorry, convention,) does some horse trading with the candidates, and hopefully there will be more than two good ones to choose from, then through secret ballot wisely chooses the best person to become the next President of the United States of America.

But, some will say, this isn't democratic! To that I say (but only within the context of this proposal), "Democracy be damned! The US is a republic."

While I can think of several advantages and disadvantages of this proposal, I'll start with this:

Advantage: It could prevent the election from turning into a mud-slinging contest between the candidates for president
Disadvantage: There's no guarantee against one elector or any given group of electors being idiots

I'm interested in seeing what other advantages and disadvantages can be seen in this scenario, and how it could still be gamed to favour one party over another in any given state.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2hU6ou5