Keep the Electoral College
Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral college. This year Trump won both.
According to Pew Research, 6-in-10 Americans want to abolish the electoral college so that the president wins by popular vote. I wonder if those 60 percent really understand the genius behind the electoral college and how it fits our Constitutional Republic.
This is how it works: Each state is entitled to the number of electors equal to each state’s representation in Congress. Therefore each state gets 2 electors for its 2 senators plus an elector for each of its members of the House of Representatives which is determined by the state’s population. The majority of votes in each state wins all of its electoral votes. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
Indiana has 9 members of the House plus 2 senators equalling 11 electors. Comparatively California, the largest state, has 54 electors.
Here’s the reason why the Founders created the electoral college: It mixed two important philosophies established in the Constitution: (1) the maintenance of a republic, as opposed to a democracy and (2) the balancing of power between the smaller and the larger States and the various diverse regions of the nation.
Small states like Rhode Island feared they would have no say nor protection from larger states like New York. This is still a concern today.
According to the 2020 U.S. census, 6.8 million people live in Indiana. compared to nearly 40 million people who live in California. There are 10 million people who live in Los Angeles County. If our presidential election was determined by a popular vote, one county in California could negate our entire state’s voice in an election.
Without the electoral college, presidential candidates would spend all of their advertising money in the large population centers (the cities). They wouldn’t waste any time courting voters in states with small populations like Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota or Alaska.
But with the electoral college system, those states get 3 electoral votes each. Trump won all of those states in this election which totaled 15 electors. Add to that our state’s 11 electors and now the people represented in the small states have a voice.
According to brilliantmaps.com there are 3,153 counties/districts/independent cities in the US. In 2020, Trump won the popular vote in 2,595 of them (82.30%) while Biden won 558 (17.70%).
It looks like Trump should’ve won that election but the votes in the counties Biden won totaled more than the counties that Trump won which carried those states with the most electors for Biden.
Question: If we abolish the electoral college should we also abolish the Senate which represents States equally regardless of population? After all a democracy is government by popular majority.
The left often repeated during the campaign that Trump was an “existential threat to democracy.” But our Founders never intended our government to be a democracy.
Our 2nd President John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence said, “A simple democracy . . . is one of the greatest of evils.”
After the Constitutional Convention, Elizabeth Powel asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin replied, “a republic if you can keep it.”
The electoral college has worked well for 248 years. We should keep it.
Is President Biden trying to start WWIII? Is he trying to sabotage Trump’s return in January?
Over the weekend, Biden authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-made long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia. The Kremlin’s response was to authorize the use of nukes.
“No one anticipated that Joe Biden would ESCALATE the war in Ukraine during the transition period. This is as if he is launching a whole new war,” Ric Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, wrote on X.
