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There’s a Partisan Fiction at the Heart of the Case against the Electoral College


Muda69

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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/theres-a-partisan-fiction-at-the-heart-of-the-case-against-the-electoral-college/

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On the substance of the defense of the Electoral College, consider me four-square behind our editorial today. This paragraph is key:

In our era of viciously divisive politics, the states are arguably more necessary than they have ever been. Critics of the Electoral College bristle at the insistence that it prevents New York and California from imposing their will on the rest of the country. But the Electoral College guarantees that candidates who seek the only nationally elected office in America must attempt to appeal to as broad a geographic constituency as possible — large states and small, populous and rural — rather than retreating to their preferred pockets and running up the score. The alternative to this arrangement is not less political contention or a reduction in anger; it is more of both.

If anyone thinks the American republic would remain stable if political power is consolidated in coastal urban enclaves, then they lack understanding of American history, American culture, and human nature. The founders struck a balance between state and federal power for good reasons — reasons that remain valid today.

But can we get real for a moment? While there are some constitutional scholars who carry on this debate based on high-minded concerns about the nature of American democracy, the real energy behind the Democratic anger at the Electoral College (and behind the Republican defense of it, for that matter) is purely partisan. They look at the national popular vote since 1992 and see exactly one Republican win but three Republican presidencies. Since George H. W. Bush’s rout of Michael Dukakis, only his son has managed a popular-vote victory.

So, if we abolish the Electoral College, the Democrats win, right? Not so fast. The Democrats are basing their optimism in part on “success” in a political race that no one is actually running. There is not a single sensible political strategist who has ever plotted out a presidential race for the purpose of winning the popular vote. That’s like game-planning to run the most total yards or to shoot the most free throws.

The bottom line is that no one can state with confidence who would have won the 2016 race if the national popular vote determined the outcome. The strategy would be completely different. Candidates would message differently, campaign in different states, and engage in radically different ad buys. Perhaps Hillary Clinton would have won. Perhaps not. We simply don’t know. In fact, outside of the true blowout elections, we don’t really know who would have won any of the close national contests since 1992.

And let’s not pretend that a national popular vote elevates every citizen’s vote in a way that the Electoral College does not. Your vote counts in each state, and the fact that your state is overwhelmingly red or blue is no more or less demoralizing than the popular-vote idea that your single vote is thrown into a pool of 130 million others.

Besides, if we want to talk about antidemocratic institutions — and the vastly disproportionate impact of a few, small states on national elections — the real culprit isn’t the Electoral College. It’s a primary system that places extraordinary emphasis on the power of winning the first three primaries. We live in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina’s America, and that’s far more troubling than perpetuating an electoral system that our founders wisely determined was helpful for maintaining national unity.

Agreed.  If we get rid of the Electoral College we might as well drop the "United States" from the name United States of America.  

Edited by Muda69
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Just now, DanteEstonia said:

How so?

Because you remove a large reason why we have geographical/social entities know as 'States'.    As the opinion piece states:  

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The Electoral College guarantees that candidates who seek the only nationally elected office in America must attempt to appeal to as broad a geographic constituency as possible — large states and small, populous and rural — rather than retreating to their preferred pockets and running up the score.

 

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1 minute ago, DanteEstonia said:

Why do we have states, Muda?

Because the USA it is one of the largest countries in the world by land size, and it needed some way to be subdivided in increments. 

The states system came about due to the fact that the U.S. did not want a strong centralized government. By having a lose confederation to ensure there would be no more tyrants like the King of England controlling them. 

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42 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Because the USA it is one of the largest countries in the world by land size, and it needed some way to be subdivided in increments. 

The states system came about due to the fact that the U.S. did not want a strong centralized government. By having a lose confederation to ensure there would be no more tyrants like the King of England controlling them. 

Memory bank call up:  Tim Wilson - King of England

 

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What Is The Purpose Of The Electoral College?: https://www.dailywire.com/news/44922/knowles-what-purpose-electoral-college-michael-j-knowles

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You have Elizabeth Warren calling for the abolition of the electoral college. It's not just her. Beto O'Rourke just today came out and said there's a lot of wisdom with abolishing the electoral college. The electoral college, one of our oldest institutions for one of our most important decisions, which is electing the president, and you now have the mainstream candidates of the Democratic Party calling for its abolition.

Why? What is the purpose of the electoral college? It has a few purposes. One, it's to restrain pure democracy. Very good, very important, that's a wonderful thing. What is another purpose of the electoral college? It doesn't just restrain democracy, let's say all of the American people voted for super-duper mecha-Hitler or they elected Stalin Jr. to be president, the electoral college could then come out and say nope, sorry we are going to disagree with the American people and we're going to elect a good candidate, so there's that aspect. The other way that they do it is by removing the vote for president, one or two degrees from the people, which is very important because the people don't elect the president. The people participate in votes in their states to choose electors to elect the president, but the people don't elect the president. We are not a democracy; we are a democratic republic. We have a representation system of government.

This is very important. It's important for the preservation of liberty because once you have more direct democracy, you see liberty disappear. The tyranny of a mob is worse than the tyranny of a dictator, or of a bad monarch, or somebody like that now calling to abolish that. Now they're going to abolish the electors, and they're going to abolish the electoral college — but don't worry because a major Democrat, if not the leading Democrat in the country Nancy Pelosi, is calling to allow 16-year-olds to vote. So they want to destroy the electoral college, but then they want to expand the electorate to include 16 year-olds. Why? In her words, so that she can capture them when they are kids — when they're impressionable when they're immature when they're juvenile when they're uneducated when they are being indoctrinated by leftists in the school system, while they've still got them. The presidential candidates haven't come out for this yet, mark my words, at least one of them will come out for the before the end of the primary.

 

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3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Because the USA it is one of the largest countries in the world by land size, and it needed some way to be subdivided in increments. 

The states system came about due to the fact that the U.S. did not want a strong centralized government. By having a lose confederation to ensure there would be no more tyrants like the King of England controlling them. 

You are putting the cart before the horse. Mr. Beal really did you a disservice as a Social Studies teacher.

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Unmediated mass democracy would lead to the serfdom of minority groups and the smallest, poorest states.: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/democrat-opposition-constitutional-order-electoral-college/

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The Senate. The Electoral College. The First Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Supreme Court. Is there a part of our constitutional order that the Democrats have not pledged to destroy?

There are some Democrats out there in the sticks — a lot of them, in fact — who simply don’t understand the constitutional order. They believe that the United States is a democracy, John Adams et al. be damned, and, in fact, they often are confused by the frankly anti-democratic features of the American order, because they have been taught (theirs is a pseudo-education consisting of buzzwords rather than an actual education) that “democratic” means “good” and “undemocratic” means “bad.”

But the Democrats in Washington are a different story. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris went to law school. They understand the American constitutional order just fine.

And they hate it.

The American order is complex — it is much more sophisticated than “democracy,” which assumes that nothing stands between the individual and the national state except aggregation, that might (defined as 50 percent + 1) makes right. The American order is based on the idea that the United States consists of many different kinds of people in many different kinds of communities, and that each of these has interests that are legitimate even when they conflict with the equally legitimate interests of other communities. The densely populous urban mode of life is not the only mode of life, and the people of the urban areas are not entitled by their greater numbers to dominate their fellow citizens in the less populous rural areas.

The basic units of the United States are, as the name suggests, the several states. The states created the federal government, not the other way around. The states are not administrative subdivisions of the federal government, which is their instrument, not their master. In this, the United States is fundamentally different from countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan, which have unitary national governments under which provincial distinctions are largely irrelevant.

In our system, the states matter. Under the Democrats’ vision, some states matter: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio, which, without the institutions of federalism, have among them the numbers and the power to effectively dominate the rest of the country.

At the time of the Founding, the people of the smaller states did not desire to enter into a union in which they and their interests would be dominated by the larger ones. The people of the smaller states still do not wish to be politically dominated by the larger ones. For that reason, the interests of the states as such — not mere aggregates of voters — are taken into consideration. The Senate, as originally organized, existed to preserve the interests of the states as such against the opportunism and predation of the more populous House of Representatives — and against the ambitions of the executive, too. Turning the Senate into an inflated version of the House was one of the progressives’ first great victories against the Constitution of the United States and an important step toward the sort of mass democracy that our constitutional order is explicitly designed to prevent.

But the states have other protections as well, one of which is the Electoral College, which helps to ensure that the president — the Founders were right to fear presidential ambition — is not a mere tribune of the plebs, a rider upon “the beast with many heads” empowered by the mob at his back to abuse and dominate members of minority groups — smaller states, religious minorities, political minorities, etc.

The rights of minorities are further protected — from democracy — by the Constitution’s limitations on the power of the federal government and specifically by the Bill of Rights, which places some considerations above democracy: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to security in one’s home and papers, etc. One of the main constitutional functions of the Supreme Court is to see to it that the federal government does not violate the Bill of Rights, even when We the People demand that it does — especially then, actually: Rights that enjoy wide popular support require very little constitutional protection. It is the unpopular rights that require protection.

Of course there were blemishes and oversights. Even the enlightened minds of the 18th century were hostages of their time, and the interests of African Americans and women were not taken into consideration. Those defects were corrected, partly by the shedding of blood but to a great extent by constitutional amendments that abolished slavery, enfranchised women, and brought the American people at large more fully into the constitutional system. The preamble to the Constitution describes a “more perfect union,” which is not the same thing as a perfect union. The genius of leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was that their calls to radical change ran against the grain of American society at their time but were perfectly in tune with the American idea and the principles of the American order.

The Democrats’ calls to radical change in 2019 are precisely the opposite: They are very much in keeping with the transient passions of the time but fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order.

The Electoral College ensures that the citizens in the less popular states are not reduced to serfdom by the greater numbers (and greater wealth) of the people in the more populous states. This balancing of minority rights with democratic processes is a fundamental part of the American order (properly understood, the value of plebiscitary democracy is not substantive — majorities are at least as likely to be wicked and oppressive as virtuous and just — but purely procedural), and the Electoral College is the instrument by which that principle is applied to the election of presidents. The Democrats desire to abolish the Electoral College for purely self-interested reasons of partisanship: They think that there would be more Democratic presidents under unmediated mass democracy.

The First Amendment ensures that all Americans have the right to engage in political speech. Democrats wish to put political speech under heavy regulation, so that the people holding political power set the rules under which they may be criticized and debated. The Democrats have attempted to gut the First Amendment under the guise of “campaign finance” regulation, as though the right of free speech could be separated from the means of speech. It is worth bearing in mind that the Democrats’ latest attack on the First Amendment was occasioned by the desire of a political activist group to show a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the run-up to a presidential election — a film whose circulation the Democrats sought to prohibit as a “campaign finance” matter.

The Supreme Court stepped in to stop that, finding that the First Amendment means what it says. And now the Democrats propose to corrupt the Supreme Court, expanding the number of justices from nine to whatever number it takes for a future Democratic president to create a majority of Democratic partisans on the Court. They are counting on the same court-packing scheme to give them the power to effectively repeal the Second Amendment without having to bother to propose and ratify a constitutional amendment — a political fight that the Democrats would surely lose.

What the Democrats are proposing — abolishing the constitutional protections afforded to smaller states and political minorities, perverting the Supreme Court, gutting the Bill of Rights — amounts in sum to a revolution, replacing our government with a government of a very different character and structure.

They are doing this mainly because the Constitution prevents them from achieving their immediate short-term political goals. And we should be clear about what those immediate political goals actually are: muzzling their political opponents and those with unpopular political views, disarming the citizenry, stripping minority groups of political power, and rigging the political system in favor of their own constituents. They would, if given the power, burn down the American constitutional order and replace it with something closer to ordinary mob rule, plain and unapologetic ochlocracy. The United States is not drifting into fascism or socialism — it is drifting into anarchy.

That’s quite a fit to throw over Mrs. Clinton being denied her tiara.

The Republican party likes to position itself as the defender of the Constitution. But with a few exceptions (Senator Ben Sasse prominent among them), Republicans in elected office demonstrate very little appreciation for the actual stakes on the political table. For the moment, they are more concerned with defending the Trump administration — which, whatever you think of it, is a short-term concern — than with defending something that is far more important, far more precious, and, in all likelihood, impossible to replace. If 2016 taught us anything, it is that the Jeffersons and Madisons of this generation apparently are otherwise occupied, that our political leadership is for the time diminished, and that the institutions the Democrats propose to incinerate could not be rebuilt by contemporary Americans any more than modern Iraqis could successfully revive the Code of Hammurabi.

Excellent commentary by Mr. Williamson.

1 minute ago, DanteEstonia said:

You are putting the cart before the horse. Mr. Beal really did you a disservice as a Social Studies teacher.

What came first Dante,  the states or the federal government?

And your continued fascination with dead man is kind of disturbing.

Why haven't you taught your strident belief in a United States King to your students yet?

 

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25 minutes ago, TrojanDad said:

Had Hillary won the last election, you would not hear Beto or Elizabeth saying a word.  Same for the call to change the Supreme Court now.....

 

 

To be fair, the current President has been very quiet about the Electoral College since his win ... although he wasn't when Obama had won.

 

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4 hours ago, TrojanDad said:

We are not really talking about Trump....the discussion was about Dems having no issue with the electoral college had Hillary won.  There would not be a peep about it and you know that.  But I get your deflection.

Now I will admit it look like Trump has changed his position.  Very much like many Dems have changed their position on border security.  From once a crisis, to no longer an issue.  Makes sense....when a side loses, they look for votes.  Regardless of the cost. 

Actually, you were talking about it and pointing out said hypocrisy ... just expanding it to all Democrats.  I pointed out that said hypocrisy is not the exclusive domain of Warren and O'Rourke.  As for Trump changing his position, I don't know if he has or not.  If he has, then it's very possible, as you point out, that Warren and O'Rourke could have indeed changed their minds too ... and if he didn't change his mind, then the leader of the GOP is right there along with Warren and O'Rourke in his view.

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16 minutes ago, TrojanDad said:

I am saying this wouldn't be an issue, nor a thread had the Dems won the WH.  That is fact.   You brought Trump into the discussion in lieu of agreeing or disagreeing with the statement.  Its called deflection.

Trump did change his position.  Pretty easy to find.

And the GOP and followers wouldn't be defending the Electoral College, per the original article, if they hadn't only won the popular vote in one election in the last two decades.  As the original article pointed out ... partisan on both sides.

But since we are on this topic, you mean to tell me that, had Trump won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College, that he and his voters would have sat by silently?  There is no way in he//.  Trump won the election and the first thing he did was complain that there were MILLIONS of illegal votes and that he really won the popular vote.  BTW, there was a thread or at least posts on GID about the Electoral College and abolishing it back when Obama had won his second term, so I think you're not quite on the mark in claiming that the thread wouldn't exist if Hillary had won the election.  Matter of fact, had Hillary won the Electoral College and Trump won the popular vote as he believed would, there WOULD most likely indeed be a thread on the Electoral College and how it was about the popular vote.

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55 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

Wouldn’t it take a constitutional amendment to do away with the EC?

Yes it would; however, one of the issues with the EC is that while it exists, it doesn't specifically state HOW the states must apportion their votes.  Most do it by winner of popular vote in the state; however, a couple of the states do it by popular vote in congressional districts, so that's why Maine and Nebraska sometimes end up with split votes in some elections.  There's been discussion recently about some states apportioning their votes based on the national popular vote as opposed to the state popular vote.  

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45 minutes ago, foxbat said:

 

Yes it would; however, one of the issues with the EC is that while it exists, it doesn't specifically state HOW the states must apportion their votes.  Most do it by winner of popular vote in the state; however, a couple of the states do it by popular vote in congressional districts, so that's why Maine and Nebraska sometimes end up with split votes in some elections.  There's been discussion recently about some states apportioning their votes based on the national popular vote as opposed to the state popular vote.  

If I recall from government my senior year, about 100 years ago, one thing that the EC gives us, is a majority, which is also constitutionally mandated. Clinton won in 92 with like 42%-45% of the popular vote, with Perot siphoning votes away. I believe Reagan barely had a majority with slightly over 50% in 1980, with Anderson in the race. I'm sure there are other instances, but those two were both in my lifetime and I can recall them easily. I have heard on the radio, could be Warren not sure, someone championing the abolition of the EC envision 3, or 5, or 20 parties involved in the process. If we can extrapolate that out, it stands to reason we could have that many people running for president. So this create an unintended consequence? Look at the current D field for president, one can only imagine if we had multiple parties, one can only assume at least a handful of the 437 D running for president might consider another party. Look at quasi legit candidates, Bernie, Biden?, etc., if they took a third, fourth, or 20th party, they would legitimately take enough votes from other candidates to have a winner without a majority in popular vote, which ends up creating more chaos, anyone remember 2000?

Personally I'm down with the EC. I think it's brilliantly designed to keep small geographic areas from dominating the political process. If we abandon the EC, nationally the only states that would matter to anyone are CA, TX, NY, IL, FL, and PA. Everything else will become irrelevant. As I understand it this is one of the reasons CA is considering a split into multiple states. CA being largely red, with the exceptions of most of the coast. Conservatives feel like regardless of how they vote, their voices are not heard, because SF, LA, and SD so dominate everything. 

As with so many things, it seems today people only see today, they don't look at the big picture. There was some chatter about abolishing the EC after 2000, but the Internet wasn't quite the thing it is today. I really believe this movement is a knee jerk reaction to 1-2 events people came out on the wrong side of. And given the current political climate, I'd say amending the constitution has about a snowball's chance in hell of happening. 

Edited by Impartial_Observer
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5 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

If I recall from government my senior year, about 100 years ago, one thing that the EC gives us, is a majority, which is also constitutionally mandated. Clinton won in 92 with like 42%-45% of the popular vote, with Perot siphoning votes away. I believe Reagan barely had a majority with slightly over 50% in 1980, with Anderson in the race. I'm sure there are other instances, but those two were both in my lifetime and I can recall them easily. I have heard on the radio, could be Warren not sure, someone championing the abolition of the EC envision 3, or 5, or 20 parties involved in the process. If we can extrapolate that out, it stands to reason we could have that many people running for president. So this create an unintended consequence? Look at the current D field for president, one can only imagine if we had multiple parties, one can only assume at least a handful of the 437 D running for president might consider another party. Look at quasi legit candidates, Bernie, Biden?, etc., if they took a third, fourth, or 20th party, they would legitimately take enough votes from other candidates to have a winner without a majority in popular vote, which ends up creating more chaos, anyone remember 2000?

Personally I'm down with the EC. I think it's brilliantly designed to keep small geographic areas from dominating the political process. If we abandon the EC, nationally the only states that would matter to anyone are CA, TX, NY, IL, FL, and PA. Everything else will become irrelevant. As I understand it this is one of the reasons CA is considering a split into multiple states. CA being largely red, with the exceptions of most of the coast. Conservatives feel like regardless of how they vote, their voices are not heard, because SF, LA, and SD so dominate everything. 

As with so many things, it seems today people only see today, they don't look at the big picture. There was some chatter about abolishing the EC after 2000, but the Internet wasn't quite the thing it is today. I really believe this movement is a knee jerk reaction to 1-2 events people came out on the wrong side of. And given the current political climate, I'd say amending the constitution has about a snowball's chance in hell of happening. 

I don't have an issue with the EC either.  I love Alexander Hamilton's quote about it ... "... if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent."  

In terms of splitting states, there had been talk for a while of Texas doing similar, but for a different reason.  It would provide for an additional eight Senators as the idea was to split the state into four new states plus Texas which was a provision of its annexation.  The opposite of California, however, would hold true in Texas, in that Democrats could peel away electoral votes from the state's bundle and, with potential demographic changes, the net could end up with Texas being more blue than red.  Nate Silver did a really interesting piece on this back in 2009: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/messing-with-texas/ using the McCain-Obama votes for analysis.  

 

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12 hours ago, Impartial_Observer said:

If I recall from government my senior year, about 100 years ago, one thing that the EC gives us, is a majority, which is also constitutionally mandated. Clinton won in 92 with like 42%-45% of the popular vote, with Perot siphoning votes away. I believe Reagan barely had a majority with slightly over 50% in 1980, with Anderson in the race. I'm sure there are other instances, but those two were both in my lifetime and I can recall them easily. I have heard on the radio, could be Warren not sure, someone championing the abolition of the EC envision 3, or 5, or 20 parties involved in the process. If we can extrapolate that out, it stands to reason we could have that many people running for president. So this create an unintended consequence? Look at the current D field for president, one can only imagine if we had multiple parties, one can only assume at least a handful of the 437 D running for president might consider another party. Look at quasi legit candidates, Bernie, Biden?, etc., if they took a third, fourth, or 20th party, they would legitimately take enough votes from other candidates to have a winner without a majority in popular vote, which ends up creating more chaos, anyone remember 2000?

Personally I'm down with the EC. I think it's brilliantly designed to keep small geographic areas from dominating the political process. If we abandon the EC, nationally the only states that would matter to anyone are CA, TX, NY, IL, FL, and PA. Everything else will become irrelevant. As I understand it this is one of the reasons CA is considering a split into multiple states. CA being largely red, with the exceptions of most of the coast. Conservatives feel like regardless of how they vote, their voices are not heard, because SF, LA, and SD so dominate everything. 

As with so many things, it seems today people only see today, they don't look at the big picture. There was some chatter about abolishing the EC after 2000, but the Internet wasn't quite the thing it is today. I really believe this movement is a knee jerk reaction to 1-2 events people came out on the wrong side of. And given the current political climate, I'd say amending the constitution has about a snowball's chance in hell of happening. 

You are using the term “majority” wrong.

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The Electoral College and Slavery: A Reality Check: https://spectator.org/the-electoral-college-and-slavery-a-reality-check/

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In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, we have been subjected to increasingly shrill calls from the left to abolish the Electoral College. Several Democratic presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren, have added their voices to this dissonant chorus. But their arguments suggest that the framers were wise to be wary of the mischief caused by unscrupulous politicians who play on the emotions of the voters. An exquisitely apposite example of such demagoguery is the claim that the Electoral College itself is a relic of slavery. This was recently repeated by Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) who brayed:

The slave states wanted equal representation in the Senate because they wanted to keep slavery. The slave states wanted to have an Electoral College where the members that they had in Congress counted towards the vote of president, where the slaves counted as two-thirds, and in the popular vote they would count as zero. So the slave states didn’t want a popular election because their slaves wouldn’t count towards voting and the slave states would have less votes.

According to Congressman Cohen’s biography, he was educated at Vanderbilt University. His comments suggest that his parents must have paid a hefty bribe to get him enrolled in that once-respected institution. Cohen’s statement reveals a breathtaking level of illiteracy regarding American history in general and the Electoral College in particular. For example, Cohen obviously believes that, when the Constitution was ratified, slavery was limited to the southern states. In reality, slavery was ubiquitous throughout the fledgling nation—both north and south. Yes, you read that correctly. The 1790 census reveals the following:

More than 6 percent of New York’s population consisted of slaves. Likewise, 6.2 percent of the people living in New Jersey were slaves. The number of slaves in Delaware totaled 15 percent of its population. Maryland’s slaves accounted for a whopping 32 percent of its population. The census also found that New England states like Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire had significant slave populations. Even Pennsylvania had a few. Only Massachusetts had none. In other words, the “slave states” included all but one. There was no need for them to impose their will on the other states represented at the Constitutional Convention.

Cohen’s claim that the “slave states wanted equal representation in the Senate because they wanted to keep slavery” and the implication that this somehow drove the debate over the Electoral College is equally absurd. The decision to allow each state two senators regardless of size was an effort to ensure that the large population states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and New York (all slave states at the time) would not be able to undermine the will of the voters in low population states. The “two senator” structure actually reduced the power of the large slave states. In other words, Congressman Cohen has it exactly backwards.

 

Another of Cohen’s uninformed assertions goes thus: “The slave states wanted to have an Electoral College… where the slaves counted as two-thirds.” Here, he not only fails history but arithmetic as well. What he is blindly groping for is the three-fifths compromise. Like a lot of people who slept through their history and government courses, Cohen never learned that this often misrepresented compromise was not supported by the big slave states. It was supported primarily by the small states, the majority of which were located in the north, and it had nothing at all to do with the Electoral College. As Tara Ross points out in the Daily Signal:

A more honest assessment of the three-fifths compromise shows what it really concerned — congressional representation and taxation, not the Electoral College. Indeed, the discussions about the compromise and the discussions about the presidential election system were largely separate. The main reason the compromise is cited today is because, late in the convention, it was decided that each state’s electoral vote allocation would match its congressional allocation.

Cohen finishes off his remarks with the following claim: “So the slave states didn’t want a popular election because their slaves wouldn’t count towards voting and the slave states would have less votes.” Once again, he has it backwards. Cohen mistakenly believes the slave-to-white ratio at the time of the Constitutional Convention was equal to what it became after the invention of the cotton gin. It was, in fact, the smaller northern states who most feared direct popular vote. The large slave states had enough white voters to swamp the small states. Virginia alone had as many eligible voters as Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire combined.

It was because of that large disparity that opponents of slavery tended to favor the Electoral College. It is commonly believed that it was first proposed at the convention by James Madison, whose comments on the matter are routinely taken out of context by the people who peddle the canard that the institution was designed primarily to perpetuate slavery. This, as it happens, has no basis in fact. The use of some system of electors rather than a direct popular vote to choose the President was first suggested by delegates to the convention well known for their lifelong aversion to slavery. To quote Tara Ross of the Daily Signal again:

Rufus King of Massachusetts had already mentioned them. King was not in favor of slavery. To the contrary, he worked against it during his lifetime. William Paterson of New Jersey, another slavery opponent, also endorsed the concept of electors that day.… As slavery opponent Gunning Bedford of Delaware had said so eloquently [at the convention], the small states simply feared that they would be outvoted by the large states time and time again.

The notion that the Electoral College was designed to perpetuate slavery is nonsense. Most Democrats who make this claim, like Cohen and (inevitably) AOC, know little about American history and less about the institution they wish to abolish. Its more crafty critics, like Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, just lie. The obvious reason they dislike the Electoral College is that they can’t win playing by the rules. This is why the Framers designed it as they did — to preclude the tyranny of the majority. During the past 230 years, the number of states has increased and population centers have shifted, but demagogues haven’t changed much.

 

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Electoral College: Why We Must Decentralize Democracy: https://mises.org/wire/electoral-college-why-we-must-decentralize-democracy

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Although it was long assumed that the electoral college favored Democrats — and this assumption continued right up to election night 2016 — Democrats in the United States have now decided the electoral college is a bad thing. Thus, we continue to see legislative efforts to do away with the electoral college, accompanied by claims that it's undemocratic.

Not All Democracy Is Created Equal

In fact, the electoral college system is neither more nor less democratic than the electoral college system. It's unclear by what standard one can claim winning the presidency through 50 separate state-level elections is "less democratic" than winning one large national election.1

[RELATED: "Stop Saying 'We're a Republic, Not a Democracy'" by Ryan McMaken]

What makes the electoral college different, however, is that it was born out of recognition that the interests, concerns, and values of voters can differ greatly from place to place. Moreover, the system anticipated the phenomenon in which people in large densely populated areas would have different political values from people in other areas. The electoral college was designed to make it less likely that voters from a single region — or small number of regions — could impose their will across the entire nation.

In contrast, one large national election — as envisioned by the critics of the electoral college system — could hand national rule over to a small number of cities and regions.

But even the electoral college system is too much slanted in favor of national politics and large majorities. Far better strategies for governance can be found Swiss democracy. Thanks to the presence of a multi-lingual, culturally diverse population, the creators of the Swiss confederation sought to ensure that no single linguistic, religious, or cultural group could impose its will nationwide. Thus, Swiss democracy includes a number of provisions requiring a "double majority." That is, not only must an overall majority of Swiss voters approve certain measures, a majority of the voters in the majority of Swiss cantons must also approve.

In both cases, it is recognized that not all voters can be assumed to share the same economic, religious, and cultural interests just because they all happen to live within the boundaries of a single nation-state. 

Moreover, this assumption becomes all the more untenable the larger a political jurisdiction becomes. Is is unconvincing, for example, when nationalists assert that a protestant working-class Anglo voter in Boston, and a middle-class Catholic Hispanic landowning rancher in southern Texas, have common interests because they are both "American." In fact, their commonalities are sparse, to say the least.  These two groups live thousands of miles apart, experience very different economic realities, and are the product of two very different historical backgrounds. These two groups are unlikely to visit the same places, drive the same roads, or use the same schools.

If these two groups (and countless others) happen to participate in an election, by no realistic standard can we say the outcome reflects "the will of the people." Although we have been propagandized to think otherwise, the mere suggestion of such a thing should strike us as absurd.

Smaller Is Better

This problem, however, becomes lessened the smaller a political jurisdiction becomes. In the more ideal situations, the jurisdictions are small indeed. The median size of a Swiss canton, for example, is 234,000 people, which is the size of a small American city. The largest canton has 1.5 million people. Thus, in Switzerland, most public policy is created at a level which affects fewer than a million people. (The entire country of Switzerland has 8.5 million residents.) 

At this scale, it easy to see how differences among voters would be far more limited. Switzerland is only 220 miles across, and within a single canton, most voters are likely to share similar concerns about local infrastructure, cities, and institutions. They're more likely to share a common history, to speak the same language, and to practice the same religion. In other words, they're more likely to recognize others in their legal jurisdiction as people who truly have common concerns and needs.

This, of course, cannot be said about large jurisdictions like the United States, taken as a whole. With 320 million people across half of a continent, there is no reason to think any sizable number of people are apt to share a common sense of community or see themselves as sharing the same concerns and interests as people thousands of miles away. Certainly politicians and ideologues have long attempted to create a myth that this is possible. This is why we hear about how we all allegedly share a common heritage in the US Constitution. It's why many attempt to convince Americans to engage in quasi-religious rituals such as revering the national flag, or singing — cap in hand, and hand over heart — the same national songs. 

These are all extremely weak reeds on which to hang notions of national and democratic unity.  Given a strong enough state, however, unity can be forcibly imposed. 

The French Example

After all, coercively imposing notions of national unity and ideological sameness were the bread and butter of the French revolutionaries. It's not a coincidence that the French revolution ushered in new doctrines of "the general will," and the notion of "the people" as the lifeblood of a new ideology of the nation-state.

Unlike the liberal democratic notions of a decentralized, varied, and largely autonomous group of independent populations — eventually realized at least partially in the US and in Switzerland — the French revolutionary ideal of mass democracy required a version of democracy that was centralized, authoritarian, and heedless of the needs of various minorities. 

This was convenient given the sheer scale of the French nation-state which contained 28 million people. 

By contrast, US national democratic institutions were devised at a time when the population totaled no more than four million. Switzerland at the founding of the old Helvetic Republic in 1789 contained approximately 2 million. Moreover, governance in the United States was overwhelmingly local in its first century. The population of the entire state of New York in 1800 was less than 600,000 people.

The French state apparatus necessary to impose a single "general will" on a large national population proved to be problematic. Years of beheadings, financial crisis, factional conflict, and international war followed. Thanks to the centralization of the French state — and thus French democracy — the entire country suffered from the miseries imposed by an elite wielding nationwide power. With a political model based on the ideal of a single, democratic mass, few constitutional provisions survived to check the power of the central state. Elections thus became a high-stakes matter of seizing control of a state apparatus over a single vast territory. This was not a prescription for stability and serenity. 

Rousseau's Model of Mass Democracy

It is a great irony that much of the inspiration for France's national democracy came from Switzerland itself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who exerted great influence in French ideas of democracy and the "general will," formed many of his ideas about democracy from his experiences in the relatively democratic Republic of Geneva.

Born in Geneva to a family with voting rights, Rousseau appears to have internalized a somewhat idealized view of how Genevan democracy worked. Genevan democracy, of course, functioned on a very small scale, and it worked fairly well.

In his essay "The Background of the French Revolution," Lord Acton discussed how Rousseau's idealized views of democracy were affected by his positive experiences in Geneva:

Rousseau was the citizen of a small republic, consisting of a single town, and he professed to have applied its example to the government of the world. It was Geneva, not as he saw it, but as he extracted its essential principle ... The idea was that the grown men met in the market place, like the peasants of Glarus under their trees, to manage their affairs, making and unmaking officials, conferring and revoking powers. They were equal, because every man had exactly the same right to defend his interest by the guarantee of his vote. The welfare of all was safe in the hands of all, for they had not the separate interests that are bred by the egotism of wealth, nor the exclusive views that come from a distorted education. All being equal in power and similar in purpose, there can be no just cause why some should move apart and break into minorities.

To assume, however, that the same situation is achievable at the scale of the French republic with nearly 30 million is a blunder of impressive size. The reasons for this are well explained by Acton:

Now the most glaring and familiar fact in history shows that the direct self-government of a town cannot be extended over an empire. It is a plan that scarcely reaches beyond the next parish. Either one district will be governed by another, or both by somebody else chosen for the purpose. Either plan contradicts first principles. Subjection is the direct negation of democracy; representation is the indirect. So that an Englishman underwent bondage to parliament as much as Lausanne to Berne or as America to England if it had submitted to taxation, and by law recovered his liberty but once in seven years. Consequently Rousseau, still faithful to Swiss precedent as well as to the logic of his own theory, was a federalist. In Switzerland, when one half of a canton disagrees with the other, or the country with the town, it is deemed natural that hey should break into two, that the general will may not oppress minorities. This multiplication of self-governing communities was admitted by Rousseau as a preservative of unanimity on one hand, and of liberty on the other.


Thus, Acton understood the protection of freedom lies in division, decentralization, and the liberation of minorities. For Rousseau, however, his latent federalism was no match for the idea of a national will of the people. Any idea of Swiss-style federalism collapsed under the fervor for a single national legislature that could impose the wishes of all the "French nation" to every corner of the Republic's jurisdiction. 

After all, why divide up the democratic mass if "the people" as a whole are never wrong? "Rousseau's most advanced point was the doctrine that the people are infallible," Acton wrote. "Jurieu had taught that they can do no wrong: Rousseau added that they are positively in the right."

Unfortunately, this ideal has never lost its appeal to many, and it continues to plague American politics with the idea that a "will of the people" can be realized in large scale elections across populations of tens of millions. After all, the abandonment of locally-based democracy is not just a problem at the federal level. The state of California today has more people than all of France during the revolution. New York, Texas, and Florida are not far behind. All of these states are controlled by unitary governments lacking provisions that temper democracy and protect minorities. Such a state of affairs would be unrecognizable to the Americans of the nineteenth century.  By their standards, the US has become a country of mega-states, mass democracy, and enormous republics that Rousseau might have looked on with approval. On the other hand, the best solution lies in a peaceful embrace of division, secession, decentralization, and disunity. Unfortunately, the electoral college controversy suggests the US is moving in exactly the opposite direction. As a result, division and disunity will still likely come, but in a much more violent way than what might have been.

 

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I personally feel that the "problem" of the anti-democratic potential of the Electoral College system is more a symptom than a cause, although treating the symptom may be the only option. It is a symptom of the fact that the Executive Branch, and specifically the President, has assumed so much of the power intended to be exercised by Congress.

One of the good attributes of how Congress is set up in that, whenever the country is very evenly divided politically, Congress is usually also very evenly divided politically.  As a result, partisan legislation, meaning legislative proposals that are based on policies that appeal strongly to one side of the divided electorate, but are anathema to the other side -- such as, for example, building a wall on the southern border -- cannot be passed. That gridlock is good because it avoids inflaming these political divisions, and whatever does get passed is usually "no brainer", good for everybody stuff. 

The Presidency, on the other hand, as a unitary office, is not "divided" politically when the nation is politically divided: it is a winner-takes-all position for whichever side of that roughly even political divide carried that the day in November. 

So when the President is able to unilaterally exercise power that is properly in the domain of the Congress, this bypasses the protection of the natural gridlock that occurs in Congress when the country is very evenly divided politically. And because a President contemplating re-election in such a political environment is dependent on maintaining the strong allegience of his/her "side" in the evenly divided country, he is very likely to use his power in a directly partisan manner.

This is especially significant in the context of the discussion on the Electoral College because the anti-democratic aspects of our system of government, like the EC, were designed to act as bulwarks against the "tyranny of the majority." But because the Presidency has now assumed so much of the power the Founders intended to be held by Congress, the anti-democratic potential of the EC actually creates the opposite risk of a "tyranny of the minority". 

The best fix, obviously, would be for Congress to re-take the powers it has ceded to the Executive branch. But there are so many practical impediments to that ever happening (mainly arising from the deep desire of members of Congress to avoid ever making any hard or controversial decisions that could threaten their ability to get re-elected), doing away with the anti-democratic potential of the EC may be a more doable "solution" to the issue. 

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8 minutes ago, Wabash82 said:

The best fix, obviously, would be for Congress to re-take the powers it has ceded to the Executive branch. But there are so many practical impediments to that ever happening (mainly arising from the deep desire of members of Congress to avoid ever making any hard or controversial decisions that could threaten their ability to get re-elected), doing away with the anti-democratic potential of the EC may be a more doable "solution" to the issue. 

How about reducing the overall power and scope of the federal government?  

 

 

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