Some Thoughts on the Electoral College

Some thoughts on the changes the Democrats are making to the way the Electoral College works

Over the last few years, 15 blue states have altered the way they calculate who shall receive their electoral votes. Multiple times in US History Presidential candidates have lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, meaning that sometimes the presidential candidate with the most votes has lost, and a candidate with fewer votes has won. Donald Trump is one of these anomalies. He won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote. But there have been others, quite a few actually: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, and George W. Bush. In fact, Abraham Lincoln could be added to this list because he won with no clear popular majority—the election of 1861 was divided between 4 candidates none of whom won a majority of the popular vote.

Anyway, what I understand is that these blue states, wedded to the idea that the popular vote is fairer than the electoral college system, will award ALL of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote despite the voting outcome in their particular states.

So here are some thoughts on this subject.

Image that you live in Pennsylvania and your state votes 60% for a Democrat and 40% for the Republican. And let’s imagine that the popular vote for the Republican Presidential Candidate is 50.1 what this means is that your state will award all its electoral votes to the candidate that a majority did not vote for!

Now maybe it’s just me, but that somehow doesn’t seem very democratic. It may be attentive to the popular will at the national level, but it most certainly is not expressing the will at the state level. And, after all, states exist to protect state interests. At least that is what I would have presumed. States have political identity and civil polities that are not fully subsumed by the whole. I am not saying states are sovereign, but I am saying that states have reserved powers and political identity apart from the whole. People in those states have a right to be represented as citizens of those states.

Indeed, I would argue that this new progressive model of voting not only violates the idea of democracy, it violates the purpose of state government and even more, injures the spirit of democracy at a more fundamental level than any flaws in the Electoral College. In short, your state would be casting your vote opposite of your expressed will!

How is that democracy?

Let’s take it a step further. What happens if multiple candidates (more than two) split the vote such that no single candidate received a popular vote? Even if the state law provides for pluralities, how does this super majority concept advance the idea of majority rule?

How would you like it if everyone, I mean everyone, in your state voted for candidate A, but the new progressive model of voting awarded all your electoral votes to the person everyone opposed and deeply distrusted?

How is that democracy?

I would make the argument that even constitutional rule, national or state, cannot properly work to nullify the express will of the people. You cannot pass an amendment that says that you cannot pass amendments. You cannot, or at least should be very careful not to make a law that says voting does not matter. The making of such laws that surrender the authority of the plebiscite to institutions (national vote) outside the authority of the plebiscite is foolish at best, dangerous at worst and possibly violative of the very spirit of democracy.

One might argue that the Electoral College is in itself the very kind of system that damages the power of the plebiscite by circumventig direct democracy. That is true, but it does not surrender the process of an election to some entity outside of itself. The constitution is the product of the ratification of the people speaking through the states. This new progressive model of voting is a dissolution of the state’s voice by the majority will of people who are not citizens of that state. It suppresses the voice of the people within that state in order to surrender itself to another political entity-the national majority. States and the nation are different intities and play different roles in governance. In short, this new progressive blue state model of voting is a renunciation of the state to the national will. I don’t think any state constitution has the proper authority to do that, or at least should not do that if there is any wisdom left in that state.

I am not sufficiently adept at math to prove the following, but I can image a situation where using this new method, oddities would arise just as glaring as those occasioned by the Electoral College. In other words, is it not possible that these states would hand over an Electoral College victory, by awarding their state’s electoral votes in accordance to a national majority vote?

That is only one abstract criticism. But there is another. And a more profound one.

I think this whole blue model progressive mechanism violates the Constitution. Maybe…

Why?

Because there is a sleeping giant in our Constitution called the Guarantee Clause that states “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…” That is Article 4 Section 4 of our wonderful constitution.

Now I must tell you that I could be wrong, but the idea that the rule of law under a state constitution, ordered by the principles of democracy, can award the votes of your state according to the judgement of people not in your state, seems to do violence to the very concept of republican governance. If the majority of the people in my state vote for B, I find it incomprehensible that the law can require my vote to go to A.
Can a state or any republican government beholden to the people, as a function of law, surrender the power of its plebiscite to the outcome in another state? That seems very, very odd to me. Indeed, it begins to look less and less like democracy and more and more like some kind of elitist tyranny.

The progressive left is not and never has been interested in plebiscites. They are interested in power. That is the historical tradition of leftism, where ever it has prevailed, democracy has been distorted, manipulated and eventually made meaningless (you are seeing this within the E.U. and the Brexit votes). This is just another effort to subvert political institutions to the will of those who know better than the rest of us.

I offer these thoughts as a beginning point of criticism.

I encourage your response.