Electoral College

         2020 is rushing at us like a runaway political freight train, cars loaded with hats in the ring, Tweet wars, enough gray guilt to paint the entire White House, Mueller reports, and so many other investigations I can’t keep track of them all. And once again we’ll revisit the debate about the Electoral College. Not that anything can or will be done about it by next November.

      According to a Gallup poll in 2013, 62% (more Democrats than Republicans) of American voters are in favor of an amendment to do away with the Electoral College and to use the popular vote to decide who should be president. Granted, most winners with the 270 electoral votes have also had a majority of the popular vote. But five times in our history, people were elected who did not have the majority of the popular vote: Andrew Jackson in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016. Bush, with that strange Florida recount, beat Al Gore but lost the popular vote by 543,816. Most lop-sided of all was the amount by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump by almost four million yet lost by way of the Electoral College. Gore had a valid argument then and the voters in 2016 have an equally valid argument against this outdated method instituted by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between those who wanted Congress to select a president and those who wanted it decided by the people.

          Besides the unfairness of the above five examples, there’s another reason why we should use the popular vote: In states that seem to be already decided based on past voting (non-swing states for either nominee), too many voters might be discouraged from voting simply because they’d feel their vote wouldn’t matter. And it wouldn’t. The electoral votes in California, for example, are already decided ten months ahead of time. A vote for anyone other than Barack Obama wouldn’t matter. Might as well tear up your vote and throw it to the wind, maybe even skip voting entirely. A vote in South Dakota for anyone other than a republican wouldn’t matter. Throw that one to the wind as well, maybe even skip voting entirely. But, you say, they’d have other races to decide on a state and national level, so they’d still come out to vote. Yes, the dedicated and politically aware voters would still vote. But what about the millions of not so dedicated or not so politically aware, the semi-apathetic? Hmmm, the argument would be that we don’t want those millions deciding anything so important anyway, an echo of our Founding Fathers’ reason for not wanting a popular vote to decide such an important matter, their fear of giving too much power to the riffraff. Or as Ron Paul said in his 2004 essay The Electoral College vs. Mob Rule: “The Electoral College system represents an attempt, however effective, to limit federal power and preserve states’ rights. It is an essential part of our federalist balance. It also represents a reminder that pure democracy, mob rule, is incompatible with liberty.” So, Ron, who decides who the mob is? So, Ron, we should keep an elitist system for making this decision and not put it at least partially in the hands of the mob, the riffraff, the rabble, the great unwashed . . . the people? I don’t think so.

          In the next few blogs, I’ll visit some of the other concerns that will be discussed, debated, and fought over in the coming flood of political ads and interviews leading to the choosing of nominees and the final voting in November 2020.