(mis)Representative Democracy, A New Series From Throughline
(mis)Representative Democracy, a new series from Throughline. NPR hide caption
(mis)Representative Democracy, a new series from Throughline.
NPROur textbooks, our media, and our political speeches take it for granted: we live in a representative democracy where the will of the people is paramount — our votes count.
But that isn't actually true. America has never been a country of one person, one vote. For hundreds of years, activists have tried to get us closer. But even today, it's not a direct democracy. And that's by design. Our system was built by a select few, for a select few. We were never all supposed to get a say.
In this series, we'll take a close look at voting in America, and how that's shaped what American democracy is, what it was meant to be, where it's failed, and what it might become.
In the first episode of the (mis)Representative Democracy series we meet a group of people who have influenced every presidential election in U.S. history — the Electoral College.
Series begins next Thursday, October 15th.