This week I want to continue my thoughts about the electoral college, something that is unique to the United States of America. Following the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman,”What form of government have you given us?” He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
What our founding fathers gave us was a Representative Constitutional Republic, which, over the years, has proven its greatness. Many writers and commentators have referred to our founding fathers, using the word “genius,” and referring to our constitution as “great.” Truly, we owe all our founders the honor and the respect they deserve for giving us the form of government that we enjoy today. It has endured the test of time and given us a nation of stability, one governed by laws, and one that has enjoyed a peaceful transition of power when electing new presidents.
On December 19, the electors of every state and the District of Columbia met to elect the next president of the United States. Each state has the same number of electors as it does U.S. Senators and Representatives, combined. For example: Missouri has 10 — 8 congressmen plus 2 U.S. Senators. Each party elected a slate of electors that are trusted to vote for the party’s nominee; that trust has rarely been betrayed. The chosen electors are bound by custom everywhere, and by law in many states, to support the presidential candidate who won the state’s popular vote. This process of electing a president has been very well laid out in the U.S. Constitution and has worked for over 200 years.
If the president were elected by popular vote, essentially the elite populists on both coasts would effectively rule the entire United States, while the Midwest and other areas would virtually have no say in who is elected. Without the electoral college, many states would have no real input into the process that would ultimately govern them, and their authority would be undermined, thus allowing for excessive federal overreach. Using the popular vote as our nation’s election standard would be yet another way of limiting the authority of the states.
There are several good reasons for keeping the electoral college versus adopting the national popular vote. With the electoral college the certainty of the election’s outcome is less likely to be disputed than with a popular vote, mainly because the winning candidate’s share of the electoral college votes will generally exceed that person’s share of popular votes. A good example was in 2012 when President Obama received 61% of the electoral votes—a virtual landslide—but received only 51% of the popular votes.
Furthermore, the electoral college requires presidential candidates to have trans-regional appeal. There is no region of the United States with enough electoral votes to elect a president on its own. A candidate cannot just pile up popular votes in the most heavily populated states and win the overall election. They must carry other states across the nation in order to accumulate the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.
Admittedly, the electoral college concept is a difficult one to grasp, and maybe that is why there seems to be increasing pressure to do away with it in favor of the national popular vote. A recent poll revealed that just over one-half of Americans favored doing away with the college while others favored keeping it. Proposals to abolish the electoral college have frequently been put forward but have failed largely because the alternatives would create even more problems.
Doing away with the electoral college would fundamentally alter the nature of our government and might bring about consequences that even the so-called “reformers” would come to regret.
The college has performed and proven itself in 58 presidential elections over our history as a nation. It has ensured that the president of the United States has both sufficient popular support to govern and that popular support is sufficiently distributed throughout the country so as to enable him to govern effectively. Sometimes tampering with the careful balance of powers between the national and state governments can become problematic when electing a president. The electoral college has kept the election process in the individual states and again proven its validity.
The republic we have been given, if we can keep it, depends largely on keeping in place those institutions of government that have sustained our nation and made it the greatest one the world has known. The electoral college is one of those institutions.
8 comments:
Gotta protect the slave states and the winner loses by 2.83 million votes
But it ain't rigged
Winners figure a way to win using the system that is in place. Losers attempt to manipulate the system to their advantage, then when they lose, whine that the system isn't fair.
The only slave states left are the ones that don't allow civilians to effectively defend themselves, like California and New York for those outside of the homes.
Harping on the popular vote count, where California and maybe New York? solely put Hillary over the top, is not even wrong, it's like running a normal World Series and then changing who wins because they hit the ball more times than the team that won by scoring more runs per the rules in force during the game. It assumes the unknowable, that if both Hillary and Trump had been going for the most popular votes, Hillary would have won that contest. When two times in a row she's proven to be utterly incompetent at running in a competitive political race.
The electoral would be ok if it were done in a different way. A candidate gets 55% of the popular vote then they get 55% of the electoral college vote. It is simple math and not rocket science. Getting a percentage of the vote and then getting all the electoral votes does not give equal representation to the losing side/candidate. This would seem to balance out the equation, math again shows up, as to what the real populace has supported. Not sure how the election would turn out, maybe the same way, but at least it would be fair and square.
5:58 AM: And a couple of states do something like that, Maine most notably, by each electoral district. Are you proposing to do this nationwide, as in the nationwide popular vote determines the winner, the Electoral College is basically swept away? (In that case, why don't we do the same for the Senate, many would ask.)
If done on a total nation wide basis, it would radically change Presidential elections and the balance of power between the urban and less dense areas, making the former decisive. Which was of course not the bargain that was struck when the Constitution was created, and therefore there is no Constitutional path to doing it, too many states would have to vote away all their influence over Presidential elections to ratify such a change.
This would also make illegal voting a existential issue, one that would pit state against state, for states would have major motivation to cheat to gain more influence over the nation. Could be a recipe for civil war, enough of us don't want to be ruled over by California and the other bicoastal states and their ruling class....
True that. It is well past time to do away with the winner take all concept in both primary and general elections. One man, one vote, across all states.
6:49 AM: Note my comments at 6:43 AM: how do you propose to achieve that, and avoid a civil war, or not achieve it through a civil war or coup or whatever, since the Constitution and the facts on the ground for the various states does not provide you a legal path to it?
It certainly is well within the Constitution. The allocation of Electoral Votes cast in the Electoral College is strictly within the control of each individual state. If you do not believe that, simply look at the method of allocation for both Maine and Nebraska.
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