On Monday, the Electoral College convened to validate the election of Joe Biden. He won the vote of the electors by a vote of 306-232. Put aside for a moment all of the irregularities and the investigation of alleged voter fraud. Of all the masterful handiwork of our Founding Fathers in crafting our Constitution, one of the wisest decisions was creating the Electoral College.
The Constitutional Convention in 1787 held in Independence Hall in Philadelphia brought together the greatest minds and most significant advocates of human liberty ever assembled at any time at any place in the history of the world. The older I get, the more I marvel at the ingeniousness of the likes of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, and so many other statesmen in devising this system for electing the president of the United States.
This year’s election proved the brilliance of the Electoral College. Some 150 million people voted. Biden won the popular vote by several million votes. But the actual election was still one of the closest in history. A swing in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire of 100,000 or so votes (out of 150 million cast) would have swung the election to Trump. That’s less than 0.01% of the vote count. The decision of every voter in these states figured decisively in determining the outcome.
Would anyone care about the votes in Nebraska or Nevada if this were a national popular vote? The election might as well, under those circumstances, get held in about five states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. The vote outcome in all of the other states would be all but irrelevant. The founders designed the Electoral College to put the power of the election in the states.
Young people and foreigners don’t understand our voting system because they don’t know how our nation was founded.
America is a federalist system where the federal government’s powers derive from the states, not the other way around. We are not a democracy. This is not majority rule. We are a representative form of government. We are not the united people of America, and we are the United States of America. The founders placed the power to elect the president in the states, with large states based on population receiving more votes but small states having the power to protect their local interests, as we discovered again this year. Does anyone think that the 40 million people in California think much about Nebraska farmers’ welfare or the fishermen in Maine?
One central theme of our Constitution is to protect the interests and inalienable rights of minorities — those who might be outvoted. The Electoral College helps achieve this.
The Electoral College is under assault from those who want a national winner-take-all election system called the National Popular Vote. It is a tremendously awful and un-American endeavor to pack all of the power in the big states that already command massive authority in our national government. The votes in Rhode Island, Alabama, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming will never matter again.
Just as a matter of practicality: In this day and age with all sorts of allegations of fraudulent voting in big cities — I’m from Chicago, so believe me, I know a lot about the art of stealing elections — can you imagine how much voter fraud would go on if it was just a matter of which candidate got the most votes regardless of where the votes originated?
No other nation votes as we do for president. The Electoral College is a uniquely American system, where every voter in even the smallest states matters. Let’s keep it that way.
