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Why the Electoral College Matters
Tara Ross is brilliant, tough, and very, very determined. Proof? She has championed the vital but deeply unglamorous body, the electoral college.
If you’d like to go into the topic at any length, pick up Tara’s fine book. But if you can only spare a few moments — and would like a link to send around to your family and friends — then take a look at this.
And be sure to bookmark it. It can only be a few months now before the articles inveighing against the electoral college start to appear in the liberal press, just as they do before every presidential election.
Thanks, Tara — and thanks to the good people at Prager University.
Published in General
Prager University recently had a couple of good podcasts about why the Electoral College is vital and necessary for a healthy republic.
This is one of many ways that the founders kept things from moving too fast. I think that we have removed too many of these checks and balances to our peril.
Abolishing the EC won’t happen because the constitutional amendment that would be required will never get enough states to approve. There wouldn’t be enough small states willing to make their votes completely irrelevant.
The idea some states have of throwing their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote regardless of who wins the state will last until it would mean the candidate who won the state would win the electoral college but lose the popular vote (I’m looking at you California).
I’d like to see a system where states would apportion their EC votes according to who wins each congressional district, with the two senate votes going to whoever wins the state. That would tend to make every congressional district important and result in candidates campaigning in places as unalike as Wyoming, and DuPage County IL.
I hope someone stops the movement to abolish the Electoral College.
I wish the Republican Party would take up this issue. They have the time and the resources to put the case together for maintaining the Electoral College.
I do no know of anything that is surrounded by so much false information.
It is really important to our country.
Thank you for this post.
If you’re against the EC, then you must also be in favor of abolishing the Senate, using the same logic. And even more so, because the Senate really does offend the principles of the anti EC movement every time it votes on something, while the EC only does so about twice a century, which is about how often the EC winner loses the popular vote.
Why not vote directly for the individual electors, rather than a slate of electors? Why should each state be “winner-take-all”? If I lived in a state with four electors, why shouldn’t I be able to vote for two Democratic electors and two Republican electors? Why should electors have to declare their allegiance at all?
Very good. I enjoyed this immensely.
Picky, but I have to say it:
I usually really like the Prager University videos, and the content of this is fine, but I do not like that whoever did the graphics seems to have chosen the color scheme from an Obama bumper sticker. What’s wrong with Old Glory Red and Old Glory Blue?
Because people don’t elect the president. States do. If a candidate can get just a partial vote from the panel of electors, we might as well go to a popular election. Id rather go in the opposite direction: eliminate the panel. Each state gets one electoral vote, based on how the popular vote in that state turns out.
This is an important issue.
The scenario most likely to threaten the Electoral College system is media-stirred momentum from another election where the popular vote choice loses; a close three-way race; and/or a situation where an elector unfaithful to his party swings the balance.
Another problem could be sufficient large states subscribing to the plan where their electoral voters are awarded to the candidate who wins the popular vote. This would circumvent the Amendment process, and is therefore the strategy favored by opponents of the Electoral College.
I disagree with one item in the video. It’s too easy for massive voter fraud in concentrated, poorly-monitored urban population centers in a swing state or two to tilt the outcome in the Electoral College. Tighter scrutiny of voter registration rolls should be an urgent priority.
You’re right that electoral fraud in Ohio and Nevada are genuine problems. The EC doesn’t eliminate fraud as an issue, but it dramatically reduces it. Fraud is easiest in jurisdictions with a pure partisan membership. If NYC were able to swing presidential elections through massive fraud, NYC would do so. As it is, elections are mostly decided by swing states in which at least some of the political hierarchy is mixed.
The National Popular Vote compact doesn’t make it likely that California’s electoral votes will be swing votes; it would be almost impossible for a candidate to win the popular vote and need the blue NPV state’s vote to win the election. It’s still somewhat likely to undo the Constitutional structure.