By: Diane Benjamin
I’ve heard WAY too many people talk about abolishing the Electoral College lately. Here’s a crash course in why it is in the Constitution!
We are not a democracy!
We are a Representative Republic. Populism never has been part of our government, and never should be. The Constitution protects the rights of the minority, not the majority. Mobs can not be allowed to run the country.
Under the Electoral College every state has a voice in elections. Representation is based on population. Every state participates in electing a president, not equally, but they all have a voice.
Big parts of the nation wouldn’t be represented without the electoral college. Only heavily populated states would have a voice, there wouldn’t be a reason to ever campaign in smaller states. This would cause states to be vulcanized against each other. The country would have no cohesion if states like California and New York and cities like Chicago and Philadelphia elect president after president. Without the Electoral College, the rest of the country would have no voice.
Every state has at least 3 Electoral College votes. This is intended to create harmony by giving everybody a voice. Power under the Constitution rests with the states, not the federal government. The popular vote in each state is reflected in the Electoral College vote, so it isn’t as if each vote doesn’t matter.
Since a lot of the Constitution is already immaterial, abolishing the Electoral College would be just another death knell in what is supposed to be the law we live under. Some states do a better job of cleaning their voter rolls than others. We’ve all heard stories about dead people voting and now illegal aliens. The Electoral College protects the integrity of the vote for all states. More Electoral College votes aren’t awarded because of the number of people who vote.
The Electoral college protects every person’s right to have a voice. Abolishing it would be a disaster for representative government.
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Understand but perhaps they should consider drilling down the “points” in all states like they do in NE and ME. IL is the perfect example of one large metro area controlling the outcome of the states electoral votes.
Being a constitutional republic does not mean we should not and cannot guarantee the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes. The candidate with the most votes wins in every other election in the country.
Guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes and the majority of Electoral College votes (as the National Popular Vote bill would) would not make us a pure democracy.
Pure democracy is a form of government in which people vote on all policy initiatives directly.
Popular election of the chief executive does not determine whether a government is a republic or democracy.
So you are okay if Iowa, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, etc never have their votes courted?
In the 2012 presidential election, 1.3 million votes decided the winner in the ten states with the closest margins of victory.
One analyst predicted two million voters in seven counties are going to determine who wins the presidency in 2016.
Now 48 states have winner-take-all state laws for awarding electoral votes.
2 award one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district, and two electoral votes statewide.
Neither method is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
The electors are and will be dedicated party activist supporters of the winning party’s candidate who meet briefly in mid-December to cast their totally predictable rubberstamped votes in accordance with their pre-announced pledges.
The current system does not provide some kind of check on the “mobs.” There have been 22,991 electoral votes cast since presidential elections became competitive (in 1796), and only 17 have been cast in a deviant way, for someone other than the candidate nominated by the elector’s own political party (one clear faithless elector, 15 grand-standing votes, and one accidental vote). 1796 remains the only instance when the elector might have thought, at the time he voted, that his vote might affect the national outcome.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld state laws guaranteeing faithful voting by presidential electors (because the states have plenary power over presidential electors).
States are allowed to make their own rules, and they should!
Why not have the popular vote winner be the winner period? At it’s very simplest meaning, that means that most people in the country (who voted) want that candidate to be the President which in my opinion, should be the main factor looked at in regards to elections. I understand that the U.S. Constitution protects the rights of the minority, but not at the cost of the general consensus of people. Having the winner of the popular vote be the winner of the election would also solve the issue of people (like myself) who live in “safe states” (which are either “almost always” Republican or Democrat states) not having their vote matter or count towards anything but the popular vote. If I live in Texas and want to vote Democrat, I may as well throw my vote away and vise versa with states like New York. Yes, large cities have a large voice in the current election system, as they should, but it’s also not an insurmountable advantage that rural areas cannot beat. New York city has roughly 8 million people, while the state of New York has roughly 19 million people. Chicago has roughly 3 million people while Illinois itself has roughly 13 million people. This system would actually give all PEOPLE a voice instead of the current established system based on giving STATES a voice.
Kiss your country goodbye! The majority of the country – all that fly over country – will never see a candidate campaigning in their state. It would be a waste of their time.
Why do people need to see a candidate campaign in their state in the first place? We have television and the internet to view speeches, stances, debates, etc. And by using the popular vote, the majority of the country would absolutely see their candidate campaign because the candidates would be focused on where they could get the most votes to win (e.g. the majority of the country POPULATION-WISE)
They also won’t care what you think or what them to do! They don’t need your vote.
That’s no different than our current set up except that my vote in Illinois would actually matter in determining who the next president is. Again, the Electoral College system only makes sense when it’s truly based off of population and it currently is not. The only thing the Electoral College does is make votes for particular states count more than others. A vote from a person from Wyoming counts over 3 times as much as a vote from a person living in California because the amount of Electoral College delegates is not proportional to the population. That is unfair to people living in California any way you slice it. In an actual fair election, all votes are counted the same.
So you want the people in California to run the country. Instead of having 55 electoral votes, their population would outweigh most other states – giving them no voice. That’s exactly what the EC was designed to prevent.
California’s 39 millions votes are not going to run a country made up of 320 million people, but again a popular vote system is NOT based on state, it’s based on the individual peoples votes.
If you what tyranny – go for it. Illinois has already tried to get an intergovernmental agreement with like minded states that make the vote immaterial. They want the electoral college votes to go to whoever wins the popular vote. Sounds like something you would support.
I don’t see how having everyones votes actually count is supporting tyranny. In 2012, over 2 million people in Texas voted Democrat and in California over 4.5 million people voted Republican. If you live in Illinois, Texas, California, New York, or another “safe state” have fun having your vote not count towards anything.
What other parts of the Constitution should be changed? If you don’t understand the rights of minority states, there must be other parts you want changed too!
There are other things that I believe need to be re-evaluated as mature, intelligent, societies do, but for the sake of this discussion, I won’t get into them. It is important to make people think about these issues regardless of what they believe, so thank you for providing this platform.
Abolishing the Electoral College absolutely nationalizes voter fraud. Then…all the dead Democrats in Chicago and illegal Democrats in LA can not only swing state results, they can literally (and directly) decide the election. NO THANKS!