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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
In a democracy where people elect representatives, the majority is not always supposed to prevail. They're designed (particularly ours) to avoid having a tyranny of the majority. The electoral college avoids having elections decided by pure majorities.
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You are confusing different things. We do various things to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. For example, property rights and free-speech rights. So the powers of the government are limited. That is *not* a principled reason that a minority should get to exercise those powers instead of a majority. It used to be that women and blacks and others were disenfranchised, and white men had that minority rule. It is wrong.
And the electoral college is a vestige of a pre-industrial age, something that hangs on because it's hard to change. There are not a lot of people arguing that some principle suggests that voters in California, Texas and New York should underrepresented relative to Hawai'i, North Dakota and Vermont.
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Suppressing the vote by illegal means is dirty pool. Seeking to exploit rules and structural advantages to avoid having the majority (or minority, if you're of the majority and trying to avoid having minority rule) control is just playing the game.
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It's also dirty pool. But the question was not about how the "game" is "played," but about how journalists cover it.
