OPINION:
It’s time for the quadrennial discussion of the Electoral College. Every four years more than a few folks wonder aloud why the U.S. president isn’t simply chosen via a national popular vote.
Since American schools don’t teach civics in class anymore, many newly minted adults have no idea the actual answer to this question — though in all fairness, plenty of folks in middle age and beyond don’t understand it either.
The Founding Fathers, in their infinite wisdom, created a system for choosing the president intended to give each state a significant voice in the election process. It is commonly known as the Electoral College.
The U.S. census of 1800 shows Virginia had roughly 880,000 residents. A little to the north, Delaware had only 64,000 people. Massachusetts had approximately 574,000 people while several states had 200,000 or less. Each state saw advantages to being part of a union of states but all wanted to make sure their unique needs were represented in the nation’s capital.
If the popular vote had been the original method chosen for federal leadership, Virginia and Massachusetts could have banded together and essentially chosen each president with no regard for the smaller states. The Union would have been doomed, because why would those smaller states have joined?
The disparity between populations among our current 50 states, plus Washington D.C., is even greater than it was in their day: California has a population of close to 39 million. Wyoming has only 577,000 people, a ratio of nearly 70-to-1 versus the 14-to-1 gap between Virginia and Delaware then. If the presidential vote was merely a national winner-take-all contest, states like Delaware then and Wyoming now would be rendered meaningless.
Let’s add a little more perspective. The ten least populous states now (Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Maine, Rhode Island and New Hampshire), when added all together, have a total population of about 9.5 million — still almost 30 million fewer people than California. In a scenario where the popular vote decided the president, the wishes of those ten states, and many more, would be instantly wiped out by large states like California.
We can fine-tune that perspective even more by looking at the 2016 presidential election. Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton loves to belly-ache about how she lost despite getting more votes nationwide. Despite the fact that we have never chosen our president this way and that everybody knew the rules going in, Mrs. Clinton continues to refer to being robbed, or that her election was somehow stolen. In fact, Mrs. Clinton is the poster child for why the Electoral College is a good thing.
She won the national popular vote by roughly 2.9 million votes. Wow! Nearly three million people were disenfranchised by the Electoral College we are told. Not so fast there, buckaroo.
A closer look shows us Mrs. Clinton won California big time — by 4.3 million votes. That means, Donald Trump beat Mrs. Clinton by 1.4 million votes in the other 49 states and D.C. Despite her protestations, a popular vote decision would have ignored the wishes of the rest of the country for the sake of Californians. That is clearly not what the Founding Fathers were shooting for.
I am confounded then by the recent move by little old Maine to join a compact of states. The plan is rather than let the voters of their state decide who to support in each presidential contest, Maine will give all four of its electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes nationally.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills supports Maine simply acquiescing to the will of the large-population states, saying “I struggle to reconcile the fact that a candidate who has fewer actual votes than their opponent can still become president of the United States.”
Perhaps Ms. Mills needs a primer in Civics 101.
There is an old saying, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Apparently, it needs to be updated to say something like, “As the big states go, Maine lies in surrender.”
The Electoral College system means every state gets a voice. Why any state would want to wave a white flag of submission and tell its own voters their opinions don’t matter; instead they should count on the people of California to make their decision for them, is beyond me. Utter foolishness.
The Electoral College is a small piece of brilliance that assures a variety of states will affect who becomes president, not only the Virginias of 1800 or the Californias of 2016.
Don’t be swayed by the sore losers and ill-informed complainers. America is a union of states. Each of those states has a voice in choosing a president. Stripping small and medium states of that voice may be Mrs. Clinton’s utopia, but it’s not what the Founding Fathers wanted, nor is it in the nation’s best interest.
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