Our Remarkable Electoral College

The wisdom of our awkward Electoral College (EC) goes far beyond the matter of relative electoral weight between urban and rural voters. Thank the Framers for doing more than diffusing presidential votes across our vast nation.

They designated electors to each of the three political branches with the purpose of each institution in mind.¹ As opposed to the House and Senate, whose members know their employers and thus whom they must satisfy, the Framers’ President was unbeholden to the people-at-large, states, Congress, faction, or collection of factions – what we know as political parties.

Article II outlined a peaceful process to appoint new Presidents. Unlike the occasional situation in monarchies upon the death of the king, we needn’t fear rioting mobs or civil war every four years. ² The EC imparts stability to sometimes unstable moments: the replacement of one chief executive with another.

From Machiavelli, our Framers found scholarly support for their perceptions and institutional designs of republican government. They also learned what to avoid. Given the sometimes raucous track record of replacing aged kings, they feared its equivalent if their new republic intended to replace or reaffirm a chief executive every four years.³

Our Framers discarded the ages-old methods of appointing chief executives. We cannot thank them enough! They devised a third body, neither popular nor aristocratic, a temporary electoral college to whom their choice, the President, owed nothing! Thanks to a few electors, passing electors who did not hold federal office themselves, the Framers’ President didn’t owe his office to either the masses or an aristocracy. He could do his duty to the Constitution, and not to a political party.

If you go back to population numbers of 1770, there are four states that chiefly matter: Virginia (450k), Penn & Mass (both 240k each), and Maryland (200k). Four states were 60,000 or less in residents (Georgia, Rhode Island, Del and New Hampshire). The fear for more than half of the states was that Virginia, Mass, and Penn would dominate voting, and enact laws that were more beneficial to them. This is why you have both a Senate and a House, and why the Electoral College exists like it is.

How we’ve changed in 200-plus years....massive urbanized areas now threaten the voting pattern. If you threw out the Electoral College....states like Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, and Utah wouldn’t matter. The same logic or wisdom in dismantling the Electoral College would then exist for dismissing the Senate.

I’ll point out one other factor, which the news media hasn’t discussed in twenty years. Go look at county by county voting since the mid-1990s. The Democrats are unable to show any strength in rural counties. The numbers were dwindling at the 2nd Clinton election, and have gone down in every single election since then. The truth is....the strength of the Democratic vote, is absolutely dependent now upon suburban regions.

Here is a reply I wrote on the 24th of this month in opposition to the new leftist notion that prisoners should vote but the views stated are applicable to the College of Electors:

We have a Constitution whose whole purpose on the federal level was to deny the mob control of the government and at the same time to deny tyrants control of the government. This is indeed a very narrow path to tread with traps and snares on either side but the goal of a representative government, safe both from the Jacobins and from Caesar, was one aspect among many reflecting the genius of the Framers. To tread the narrow path between the rule of the mob and the tyranny of Caesar, the framers were never deceived by Bernie Sanders' notion that the vote was more precious than the ultimate goal of a good representative government.

Hence, the framers had no qualms about limiting the franchise to whites, to men, the property owners and to citizens. They were quite at ease to deny the vote to slaves, females, non-freeholders.

The idea that the object of our great experiment is democracy alone is wrongheaded. The object of our constitutional Republic is good government in which the tendency toward tyranny is checked by democracy (in the House of Representatives) and the tendency toward mob rule is checked by the Senate, the college of electors, title III courts, and division of powers, not only on the federal level but between the federal level and the states.

There can be no more clear definition of "the mob" than the occupants of prison. Why would we risk our Republic, our checks and balances, our carefully but precariously balanced government to criminals? Why would we risk our system under the rule of law to convicted lawbreakers? The reason, of course, is that our modern-day neo-communists are essentially Jacobins who fervently want to pitch this country into the hands of the mob. History tells us that the man on horseback succeeds the mob. The Jacobins were followed by Napoleon and, equally, this experiment in mobocracy will lead inevitably to terror first and then to tyranny. Leftists are by nature God players, who reflexively exempt themselves from the ravages of their own policies. In this case they assume that they will emerge in the saddle to tread the narrow path between the rule of the mob and the tyranny of Caesar.

The framers had no qualms about limiting the franchise to whites, to men, the property owners and to citizens. They were at ease with themselves enough to deny the vote to slaves, females, non-freeholders..

The idea that the object of our great experiment is democracy alone is wrongheaded. The object of our constitutional Republic is good government in which the tendency toward tyranny is checked by democracy (in the House of Representatives) and the tendency toward mob rule is checked by the Senate, the college of electors, title III courts, and division of powers, not only on the federal level but between the federal level and the states.

> The Senate ceased its real function after Senators were directly elected. <

Right. The Senate was set up to represent the states while the House was set up to represent the people. But today’s Senate is just a House with longer terms.

The 17th Amendment was a body blow to the Republic. And here’s the irony. The 17th Amendment was enacted in response to corruption in the state legislatures.

But with the direct election of senators, we have corruption caused by big money, and by special interest groups. And that corruption is much worse, IMO.

When the framers were considering the documents needed to form a more perfect union, the smaller states were greatly fearful of Virginia. A look at a map of America at that time shows that Virginia incorporated the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and a great part of Minnesota. The Electoral College was accepted as the best way to reduce the overpowering influence of a single state, or perhaps (as we have today)a small number of heavily populated states. The Electoral College was and is the product of genius. To eliminate it we return to Plato’s Athens and the failed democracy of that epoch.

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