Retain the Electoral College

The Electoral College was designed precisely to keep raw majorities from too much control. Without it in 1789, there would be no U.S. today. It’s as valid today as then:

(a) If you were to remove the vote counts of just Los Angeles and NYC in 2016, Trump would’ve won the popular vote. That large municipalities/States could determine the country’s future was something the smaller states wanted assurances wouldn’t happen. Hence the EC was became the mechanism. If there were no EC, most campaigning and money would revolve around a handful of metro areas in the country. Ironic that Elizabeth Warren campaigned for abolishment of the EC in a state like Mississippi.

(b) In 2016, no candidate won the popular vote. All came in under 50%. Add to that the fact that only 55-60% of the voting population actually voted, AND removing the count of those under 18 and unable to vote by virtue of non-citizenship then both Trump and Clinton received between 18-22% of the population vote.

(c) The office is President of the United STATES (not people). The design is that States are paramount and elect an executive to run their bidding.

(d) The only reason Democrats are suggesting this is they lost by the rules. Otherwise this would not be an issue at all.

You need some game rules to address issues like these. You don’t win the World Series by counting home runs. Home runs win you games. Games (States) win the World Series.

         G – Joe, April 19, 2019

[the above is a comment about an article about the necessary conflict between bureaucrats and populist politicians that appeared on Quillette at https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/the-mandarin-revolt/ ]

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Afterword by the Blog Author

The founding fathers put the constitution together in secret sessions with no notes kept. Written arguments were prepared for the public by advocates of the constitution (The Federalist Papers) and by antagonists of the constitution (The Anti-Federalist Papers). But what happened live and in person was intentionally not recorded. How to select the head of state was one of the last issues to be settled. But I am telling you from my personal experience as a city, county and state auditor who spent a lot of time in county courthouses that the founders did not trust county governments and their tendency to rule by nepotism and threat. County governments weren’t honest then and aren’t honedt now. Think about Cook County, Illinois, in 1960 or Dade County, Florida, in 2000. The electoral college has always been a necessary firebreak to prevent mobocracy and machine politics. It is still necessary.