It seems that as more and more time goes by, my appreciation for the ingeniousness of our Founding Fathers elevates.
I write this before knowing the outcome of the election. I sit behind a ‘veil of ignorance,’ with no advance knowledge of who will win the popular vote and who will win in the Electoral College.
We have a growing movement to replace the Electoral College with a winner-take-all National Popular Vote. This is advocated by some influential voices on both sides of the political spectrum.
But there are so many reasons why the unique system of voting for president is so vitally important to our republic. And we are, thankfully, a republic — not a majority/mob-rule ‘democracy.’
So here’s a quick civics lesson on the wisdom of the Electoral College.
First and foremost: We are a confederacy of states. The power of the federal government is derived from the states and the people. Washington is not the center of the universe. Power is disbursed across the land in America. New York and Washington don’t rule over our country — even though they think they do.
The Electoral College assigns power to every state — and safeguards the primacy of the states. It is critical to our system of federalism. America is unique in the world in our system of checks and balances, decentralized government power, and protection of the rights of the minority.
Without the Electoral College, eight to 10 large states would determine the election. California has a larger population than nine small states combined. But California, for all its virtues, is far from representative of our diverse country.
Would any candidate care about voters in Nebraska or New Hampshire or Nevada or Maine or Alaska or Iowa given that California has more voters than all of them combined? They wouldn’t even bother to ever go to those states and would be instead chasing down every last vote to be had in Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Bronx.
Second, the Electoral College dramatically curtails voter fraud. The incentive to engage in massive illegal voting schemes in major cities (red and blue) would be massive and impossible to police. The graveyards would be full of voters on Election Day. Under the current election rules, the payoff from stuffing the ballot boxes in deep-red and deep-blue areas is curtailed. But under a National Popular Vote, even a few hundred thousand illegal ballots in major cities would have the effect of entirely disenfranchising every voter in North and South Dakota.
Stolen elections could become the rule, not the exception.
Some complain that because we’ve had elections where the candidate who wins the popular vote doesn’t win the election, the system is antidemocratic. I would argue these occasional outcomes only make the Electoral College all the more indispensable in keeping our country intact. The system isn’t perfect, and something needs to be done about the risks of ‘unfaithful electors’ who could change the election outcome.
But just as in tennis, where the player who wins the most points doesn’t always win the match, the current voting rules help protect our democracy, not undermine it.
