All This Silliness about Abolishing the Electoral College

By William Sullivan

 

“How could this have happened?” the media pundit bemoans, as he looks over the foolproof election data that he disseminated prior to the election.  “How do I tell my daughter that America elected a racist, sexist bully?” the self-loathing, white-privileged mother cries, as she glances at her previous article about how a state law prohibiting confused men from entering what may be a little girls’ bathroom is somehow tantamount to misogyny.  “Love trumps hate!” reads a banner among the rioters in the street, as they visit violence and destruction upon innocent people and businesses in their community.

Perhaps sillier than all of that, however, is the incessant mantra amongst all of these people about how Hillary may have actually won the election because she garnered more of the popular vote than Trump.  By now, you’ve heard the disgruntled leftists parroting the sentiment that the Electoral College is an archaic relic that is either racist (what else?), or has obviously outlived any usefulness it may have once had.  Therefore, in the interest of progress, it must be abolished.

Outgoing California Senator Barbara Boxer has recently introduced a doomed-to-fail bill meant to do just that.

This argument is, of course, painfully dim and tiresome.  The Electoral College is one of many safeguards against what de Tocqueville would later describe as the “tyranny of the majority” that our Founders feared, or more specifically, the threat of a concentrated majority in a state that happened to be more populous than another.  After all, it’s doubtful that Rhode Island would have chosen to ratify the Constitution and join these United States if they believed that their state’s unique desires at the federal level would be perpetually overruled by the much more populous New York, for instance.

In the simplest terms, the United States was conceived as a voluntary union of sovereign states which were unified under the limited federal government which bound them -- one which could only act within the very strict guidelines enumerated in our Constitution.  It is very much by design that the prerogative of each sovereign state is influential in the election of our president, and the Electoral College helps to ensure that.
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Articles: All This Silliness about Abolishing the Electoral College