In various articles I have discussed the historic reasons for the inclusion of the Electoral College process in presidential elections, citing specific reasons the Founding Fathers, soon after gaining American independence from the British Empire and experiencing the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, finally framed a Constitutional Republic at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The founders chose this form of government for the United States rather than a simple majoritarian democracy. As opposed to a mass democracy where a simple popular majority decides the law, the rights of citizens, and the election of all officials — in a Constitutional Republic, the deliberate rule of law is supreme, and the government is limited in scope and is subject to the doctrines of Limited Government, Separation of Powers, and Checks and Balances. In a Republic, the property of all, the human rights of unpopular minorities, and the natural rights of individual citizens are all protected, despite unjust, capricious, and sometimes the covetous vote of the majority of less-well-to-do citizens.
The Electoral College is one of those institutions of a republican form of government that protects the rights of all citizens to fair representation and participation in a presidential contest. The Electoral College (EC) allows all areas of the country to be fairly and more evenly represented in presidential elections, preventing several clusters of heavily populated urban areas from dominating presidential elections.
In a more recent article, referring to the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016, I described how four California counties could have decided unfairly and very detrimentally the presidential election for Hillary Clinton, if the popular vote solely had been the sine qua non for victory. Despite angry responses from many Democratic corners, the EC worked as it was intended, preventing four wayward counties from stealing the presidency.
The reason for returning to the subject of the EC is to describe the persistent efforts that are being made by demagogic Democratic operatives in a number of states to overthrow the Electoral College. This hatred for the EC is based on having sustained two crucial defeats by Republican presidential candidates, including the 2016 presidential election in which Donald Trump triumphed, blanketing the nation with a magnificently colored red electoral map, which as Dr. David Stolinsky points out, “you could drive from Key West, Florida, to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, a distance of 3193 miles, and never pass through a state carried by Hillary Clinton.”
The unruly behavior of Democratic activists, the irresponsible conduct, the inflammatory verbiage, and the contradictory behavior and oratory of the many demagogic Democrats after the Trump victory, as we shall see, attest to the fact that the Democrats would have praised the Electoral College to the skies, if only the reverse had taken place and Hillary had been elected president. Power for the Democrats was and remains everything.
But despite Trump’s overwhelming victory, we witnessed the baseless complaints by sore losers and the expressed hypocrisy of many Democratic operatives urging presidential electors to violate their pledge and refuse to vote for Donald Trump, despite the democratically casted votes in those states and the wishes of their voters. In fact only two Electors reneged on their votes for Trump, while four did so for Hillary. Dr. Stolinsky attributes this attitude of the Democrats to “the colossal hubris, the unbounded egotism, that enables current leftists to try to thwart the will of Americans and undo the election.” This is the same narcissism that assures them that they can build a socialist paradise, where all the builders of communism in the 20th century failed, because they are smarter than us and more intelligent than the rest of the world.
And what is the next step in the left-wingers attempt to dismantle the Electoral College? According to an AP report, “More states consider working around the Electoral College.“ First of all, we must realize that the Associated Press, as part and parcel of the liberal mainstream media, when it refers in the biased statement to “more states…frustrated after seeing another candidate secure the presidency without winning the national popular vote,” mostly refers to heavily Democratic states that vote for the Democratic ticket election after election. Thus, “the frustration” and desperation in these particular states is neither universal nor unpredictable.
As the article points out, “The states that have already passed legislation to join the group represent 165 electoral votes. Typically reliably Democratic states, the list includes California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and D.C. — all states where Democrat Hillary Clinton defeated Republican Donald Trump.”
But this effort should not be ignored outright; ideologically-committed left-wing legislators from other states, including some key “swing” states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Mexico are unwisely and detrimentally to their states’ representation in the federal system, planning to introduce legislation to essentially abolish, all but in name, the Electoral College process. Already 11 states have joined the effort, which began in 2006 and is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). Why Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, and New Mexico, among others, would join this Compact is beyond me, and certainly beyond the intelligence, political acumen, and comprehension of those legislators favoring and proposing it. The only logical explanation is that they place party ideology above the interest of their states and their constituents.
As battleground states, these swing states wield a tremendous political influence in presidential elections, and they would be relinquishing these key positions at the behest of selfish, unwise, faithless, and power-hungry legislators and Democratic operatives, who care more about their party, and themselves personally, than the states they supposedly serve. Since efforts aimed at amending the U.S. Constitution require, not only an Act of Congress but also ratification by 3/4th of the states, that route is probably futile.
But the Democratic operatives are undeterred; they are also leading attacks against the EC at the state level, as well as by simple congressional legislation. In 2016, according to NPVIC, there were 162 Democrats and 154 Republicans who sponsored the Compact. It behooves citizens to find out who those legislators are, legislators who are betraying their states and who should be sacked for this betrayal, particularly Republican ones, who should know better. In the case of these stray Republicans, we must ascribe their actions to ignorance or betrayal as RINOS (“Republicans in Name Only”).
All these efforts to bypass the Electoral College demonstrate that these faithless Democratic operatives are much more interested in gaining political power by any means, even undemocratic methods, than in preserving our constitutional process of fairness and the rule of law, on which the American republic is based, a form of governance that has brought so much peace and freedom to the world, preserved our own liberty, and that has ushered in the most prosperity and happiness to any people in the history of humanity.
The reality is that the Electoral College process has shown that it has worked as it was intended, and continues to function well. It has preserved the delicate geographical political balance among the various urban and rural populations of the small and large states of the federal union, and it has prevented small but heavily populated urban areas from dominating the process of presidential and vice-presidential elections at the expense of the rest of the nation.
In sum, the Electoral College is an essential part of our republican from of government that has preserved the integrity and sanity of the electoral presidential process acting with deliberation and wisdom, as was intended by the Founders to preserve our republican form of government. It should be kept in place and cherished!
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Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. is Clinical Professor of Surgery (Neurosurgery, ret.) and Adjunct Professor of Medical History (ret.) Mercer University School of Medicine. He is an Associate Editor in Chief and a World Affairs Editor of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). He is the Author of Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (1995); Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (1997); and Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002)
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