Electoral College Part One

The quadrennial hue and cry has begun already. “Change the electoral college!” May I be blunt here? That is like going to a cricket or rugby game and demanding that it be played like football or baseball. Each game has its own laws and they designate and control the conduct of the game.

The typical, and expected complaints are lodged. “Unfair, archaic, chaotic, terrible, etc., are adjectives and not indictments. They are based, again, on the characterization above. The critics are 1) unaware of the true nature of the enterprise, 2) are driven by sectarian by motivation, and probably most important, 3) ignoring or discounting the historical context of the Electoral College.

Let’s begin at the beginning. The critics, like teenagers are declaring that they know more than their elders. And, like in “real life,” a semester or two of college sends them/us home with a new appreciation for how much Mom and Dad know and how little I knew back then and how far I have to go.

Another salient complaint is that the elector college is undemocratic. The founding fathers knew and understood history. Every democracy began with the idealistic goal of citizen rule. But once 50.1% of the voters discovered that they could vote to have the other 49.9% support them, the enterprise was doomed. The founding fathers opted, instead for a representative or federal republic. It incorporated the crucial concept of separation of powers. They subdivided the country, retroactively, into states and delegated the division of states into representative districts.

The representative districts elect the representative by popular vote in all of the states. (Their decision.) The senators are elected by a majority of the whole state. (Again determined by the individual states.) Then each state is allotted one electoral vote (elector) for each representative and senator. How the states apportion the electoral votes is up to each state.

So far, none of the “complaints” have not cited a specific fault in the process, except that their preferred candidate did not win. Counting popular votes is akin to going to a football game and counting the fans for each team to determine the winner of the game. The fans may inspire and tangentially affect the game, but they do not determine the winner. The electoral college is the states electing the President.

One other complaint is that the electoral college is designed to elect rich, southern white men. Check the 2000 election during which two rich, southern white men ran against each other. One had to win and the other lose. Then the 2008 and 2012 pitted two northern, and western rich white men against a supposedly poor, black man. The white men lost. 2016 pitted a rich northern woman against a rich northern man. The complaint, me thinks, is a moot point.

In conclusion, the electoral college works as it was designed for the country to elect the President. It was designed to avoid the dominance of massive population centers. Taking a look at the county by county results demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. The population centers dominate in both the House of Representatives and the Senate by virtue of their overwhelming number of voters. If they likewise controlled the Executive branch, the separation of powers would be effectively circumvented as they would control two of the three branches of government. And consequently by appointment and confirmation, they could conceivably establish control of the third branch, the judiciary.

Them old boys were not ignorant, bigoted farmers. Their wisdom and governmental acumen survives and is validated in current events.