— by Polydamas
Ever since Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton failed in her bid to become the first female President of the United States, a vociferous chorus of mainstream pundits has advocated for the outright abolition of the electoral college. Exhibit one in their argument is that Mrs. Clinton received approximately two million votes nationwide more than her Republican opponent Donald J. Trump. In contrast, Mr. Trump won 306 electoral votes to her 232 electoral votes, 36 electoral votes more than the 270 electoral votes necessary to secure the presidency. The discrepancy between Mr. Trump’s decisive victory in the electoral college and Mrs. Clinton’s advantage in the popular vote drives the frothing liberal-collectivist demand to do away with the seemingly anachronistic electoral college.
The applicable rules of the United States Constitution, however, make a tremendous difference between the winner and the loser of the 2016 election. Adherence to the applicable rules is required for both politics and for sports.
In the world of sports and gaming, in general, a person or a team can decisively win a game despite a significant disadvantage in some important aspect that normally makes a significant difference in the outcome. In American football, for example, the objective of the game is to score more points than the opponent. Amassing more yards, scoring more touchdowns, losing fewer turnovers, and committing fewer penalties than the opposing team usually correlates very strongly with victory. But this is not always true. Almost every week, a football team scores more points and wins the ball game despite its vanquished rival gaining more yards or losing fewer turnovers or committing fewer penalties. It also sometimes happens that the winning team scores fewer touchdowns than the losing team but makes up for it by scoring more three-point field goals.
The same is true in other sports. In basketball, the object of the game is to score more points than the opponent. The team that has more rebounds and assists, fewer turnovers, fewer fouls, more free throws, and a higher shooting percentage is more likely to win, but not always. A winning team can often overcome statistical disadvantages in one or more of the above statistics. Likewise, the winner of a chess match may still win despite a numerical inferiority in the number of chess pieces and even despite a significant handicap in the strength of the remaining chess pieces. Sometimes, a superior chess player will sacrifice powerful pieces like a queen or a rook as part of a clever maneuver to checkmate the opponent.
The person who loses a game, but who then proclaims that he or she should have won if the rules of the game were different, is rightfully considered a sore loser. Similarly, the person who demands that the rules of the game must be changed for future games, citing “fairness” or some other seemingly benign reasons for the change, should be conclusively deemed to seek to enshrine some advantage for himself that is anticipated to translate into future victories.
Now, why do Democrats wish to abolish the electoral college and to reward the winner of the nationwide popular vote with the presidency? It cannot be that they simply want “every vote to be counted” and “one person, one vote”. There can be no better visual illustration of what would happen if the electoral college system were to be scrapped and the popular vote were to replace it than the incomparable Michael P. Ramirez’s cartoon at the top, titled “The US Election without The Electoral College”.
If the nationwide popular vote were the sole determinant of victory, pure demographics would prevail. Presidential candidates would quite logically concentrate the vast majority of their campaign efforts on the voters in California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio.
Let us dig deeper into the map and consider the following:
According to the 2010 census, the Democrats own the most populous states in America: 1) California (37.3 million); 2) New York (19.4 million); and 5) Illinois (12.5 million). They dominate in the New England region, namely Massachusetts (6.6 million); Connecticut (3.6 million); Maine (1.3 million); New Hampshire (1.3 million), Rhode Island (1.1 million); and Vermont (625,000), for another 14.4 million. Add the state of New Jersey (8.8 million) in the mid-Atlantic region and the states of the Pacific region of Washington (6.7 million), and Oregon (3.8 million) and the Democrats have another 19.3 million people. All of the coastal states listed above account for approximately 103 million people and they have been fully under the control of the Democrats for decades.
We here at The Cassandra Times do not believe that the interests of individual liberty are served when the rules of the game are changed to allow one political party to always win the national popular vote and the presidency every time. The Democrats then will become as hegemonic and dominant in their rule of America as did Mexico’s ruling state party, Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which enjoyed uninterrupted rule from 1929 to 2000. A ruling political party that has no effective competitor for the affections of the people enjoys unchecked power and has little incentive to avoid trampling on the liberties of its people.
Not only is a system based upon the nationwide popular vote an unalloyed evil, students of American history know that the electoral college system is remarkably good. America is not a single, unitary country, but a union of fifty different states. America is a collection of fifty laboratories of liberty, and the Founding Fathers considered the people to be, first and foremost, the citizens of their own states. If a person is dissatisfied with the laboratory of his or her state of citizenship, he or she is always free to move to another, more appealing state.
The electoral college system is at the root of the union between the various states that make up the United States. The 1787 Constitutional Convention’s “Great Compromise” roughly combined the “New Jersey Plan”, which gave each state, small and large, an equal number of senators in the Senate, and the “Virginia Plan”, which allotted each state a number of Congress Representatives in proportion to its population. Had the larger and more populous states not agreed to every state having equal representation in the Senate, the smaller and less populous states would have never agreed to join the union in the first place.
The electoral college system embodies the “Great Compromise” and allocates to each state a number of electors equal to its Congress Representatives plus its two Senators. If the attempt to abolish the electoral college system were ever successful, it would be a complete repudiation of the “Great Compromise” and would justify the smaller states, which would be adversely affected by the nationwide popular vote system, to secede from the union.
There is scant realistic chance that electoral college system would be abolished because it is embedded in the United States Constitution. An amendment to the United States Constitution, under Article V, would require the affirmative vote of two-thirds of the Senators and two-thirds of the Congress Representatives and must be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures. To defeat such a constitutional amendment, 17 smaller states would simply instruct each of their two Senators to vote “no” and, failing this, the legislatures of 13 smaller states would simply refuse to ratify an amendment so deleterious to their interests.
Hugh Hallman’s op-ed in the November 17, 2016 Arizona Republic titled “Electoral College Keeps Wolves From Devouring Sheep” (http://bit.ly/2fU3b9K), respectfully reproduced below, capably explains that the electoral college system protects our Republic from devolving into a pure democracy. A nationwide popular vote would create a pure democracy whose majoritarian excesses could easily trample on not only on the interests of smaller states, but also on the individual rights of the citizens of these small states and on the individual rights of minorities.
As explained above, there are very good reasons, both practical and theoretical, for refusing to allow the voluminous number of voters in the coastal states and in their large urban areas to impose their collectivist politics and so-called enlightened viewpoints upon the backward semi-humans of “Flyover Country”. They will rail and throw temper tantrums that “Flyover Country” is on the “wrong side of history” because its benighted unwashed masses of primitives refused to anoint the first female President of the United States and to accede to her utopianist prescriptions. Nevertheless, a faithful reading of the Constitution and of both the “Federalist Papers” and the “Anti-Federalist Papers” should be most persuasive in reaching the conclusion that the electoral college system is an indispensable part of American history. Its defenders are, very clearly, on the “right side of history”.
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Electoral College Keeps Wolves From Devouring Sheep
Hugh Hallman
Arizona Republic
November 17, 2016
Why the Electoral College? Because the Founders knew voters could easily silence minority opinions.
Do divisions in this country stem from the growing diversity of our national community? Tolerance, even promotion, of diversity — whether of religion, race, sexual orientation or political philosophy — has always been a value in this republic.
Indeed, protecting diversity — and the minority rights so protected — was a founding mandate. Tempering the tyranny of the majority for the benefit of minorities is enshrined in the Constitution. That’s why the U.S. is a republic, not a pure democracy. As students of history, the Founders understood earlier democracies failed because voters become like two wolves and a sheep debating what’s for dinner.
Protection of minorities and their associated rights was and remains a foundation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For example, protecting religious diversity drove minority religions, then the Baptists and Catholics, to demand the Bill of Rights as a condition for state ratification of the Constitution.
Many were afraid the Church of England would become the Church of the U.S. The First Amendment was framed then to protect that religious diversity. People of all faiths — and those without — have their place in our society.
That led to today’s House and Senate
Protecting diverse minority views also gave rise to the bicameral legislature. The House of Representatives was established to represent the popular vote, with each voter’s interests having approximately equal weight. Each state’s representatives are determined by state population, so each voter’s voice may be heard equally.
With the risk to minority views at stake by popular representation, the Founders chose a different structure for the Senate. Originally elected by state legislatures, even when changed to direct election by state voters, the Senate provides only two Senators for each state, no matter the population.
Is that unfair? The Senate represents the cultures of each state, as culturally and socially diverse today as at the founding. With these different forms of election, the Constitution celebrates the factious individual voters exercising a more direct democracy balanced against the protection of the diversity of cultures represented by the states forming the republic.
The presidency and vice presidency then find their authority in the people and in the diversity of states. The model for filling these positions combine the approaches for the two chambers of Congress.
Protecting minority views from the majority.
Each has electors equal to its total representatives in Congress: They total the number of its population-based members of the House of Representatives plus the two state-based senators. Further, the imposition of “electors” between the people and their elected president and vice president was intended to provide the buffer to allow these two, once elected, to reach out to the broader public and serve the entire nation.
Ironically, those disappointed with the outcome of the presidential election seek to eliminate the Electoral College as an outdated vestige thwarting direct democracy. They overlook its protection of minority views from the tyranny of the majority.
Fortunately, even President Obama noted in his recent press conference the importance of outreach to the broader community as his prescription for the Democratic Party’s future success.
Imagine a campaign in only three states.
He said:
“[O]ne of the issues the Democrats have to be clear on is the given population distribution across the country. We have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere … . I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW Hall … . There’s some counties maybe I won, that people didn’t expect, because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.”
Imagine instead a presidential election with candidates campaigning only in Texas, New York and California — each side seeking only to gain the most popular votes. Would that represent the entirety of our country’s diversity? Of course not.
So the Founders gave us the Electoral College. To lose it, and its purpose of protecting the diversity of minority opinions, would move us even closer to the model of a dinner party among two wolves and a sheep.
Hugh Hallman is an attorney and former mayor of Tempe.