Those red counties are the places Obama referred to as “clinging to guns and religion.” The people of those counties are the ones Hillary Clinton called a “basket of deplorables.” And taken by sheer acreage, it is the vast majority of our country. It is home to the hard-working people who have been hit the hardest by the recession and those who have failed to see the “recovery” touted by the Obama administration.
In this election, as in that of 2000, we see that wonderful constitutional instrument called the Electoral College come under attack. Well, of course, I would expect no less of a losing party. Had Trump lost he would have used the same excuse.
But is it fair? After all, every other elected post is determined by a popular vote, why not the highest position in the land?
Well, it is exactly because it is the highest and most important position in our government that the founding fathers decided not to entrust it to a popular vote. At the time the constitution was created, less populous states like Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia would have been easily out-voted by those more populous states like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. To those founders, that smacked of tyranny and needed a better solution than popular vote.
Interestingly, a similar problem existed with congressional representation. Many of the voting populous were located in states that had few slaves. The solution of the time was to allow 5/9 of the slave population to add to the voting population for apportionment of representatives. History is mute on why this method was not used for Presidential election, but as things stand today, we are most fortunate it was not.
Why not simply use the apportioned and elected congressional representatives to select the President? Well, at that time, there was not much in the way of political parties, but there was still sufficient wrangling among cliques within congress to foresee the problems that would cause.
How the President would be selected was such a contentious problem that it was one of the very last additions to the Constitution, and once it was added, the actual duties of the President were entirely left out.
In the end, a suggestion that had been discarded early in the convention was resurrected and flushed out to everyone’s, albeit reluctant, acceptance. The college of Electors was born and inserted in the final Constitution. While based on the same apportionment as Congressional Representatives, it stripped any connection to those representatives and shielded the President from the politics of Congress.
It was basically a good idea. Unfortunately, like much in the Constitution, it was an incomplete solution. And since anything not specifically called out in the Constitution is left up to the States, the implementation of the Electoral College became inconsistent.
Electors are chosen by the political parties, and the winning party gets to have all the electoral votes for that state. Can you see the problem here? This is exactly what the founders tried to avoid. Some states, however, proportion the electors by the vote within that state. In addition, electors are not legally bound to vote as dictated by their party!
What a mess! Still, it has allowed the people of mid-America and those states with small populations from being dictated to by the likes of New York, California, and Illinois.
Do away with the Electoral College? First, that would require a constitutional amendment – try to get 2/3 ratification for that. Second, it can be fixed. But any attempt to change it would likely end up looking like election by popular vote.
Personally, I like the Electoral College and believe it was an enlightened solution to a very sticky problem. It is too bad it was not fully defined in the original Constitution. It could use a better implementation but works pretty well as it is.
