Don't Mess with the Electoral College

The New York Times today published an editorial advocating eliminating the Electoral College. The editorial opens by saying, "The Electoral College should be abolished...." The Electoral College is there for a purpose and most people, including those supposedly erudite editors at the Times, just don't understand why we have the Electoral College.

To be fair, the NY Times editorial rightly condemns a State of California initiative to distribute the Electoral College vote according to the number of electoral districts a candidate wins. That is wrong and the paper does a good job of making that clear.

There are those who would like to see the Electoral College disappear altogether and the President elected by popular vote. While that sounds like the democratic thing to do (ignoring the fact that we are a republic and NOT a democracy) it, too, is wrong — or at least not wise.

The purpose of the Electoral College is to prevent those states with large populations from controlling the electoral process. If the President were elected by popular vote rather than by representative vote then the votes of some states would not even matter. The Electoral College gives the smaller states a say in Presidential politics.

With the winner-takes-all system that most, if not all, states now have in place the Presidential candidate with the most votes state-wide gets all the Electoral College votes. Here, in the State of Washington, Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and the I-5 corridor determine the outcome of all statewide elections, effectively disenfranchising the less-populated districts. This is exactly what would happen if the Electoral College is eliminated. Our founding fathers saw that. It's too bad the editorial staff at the New York Times are not that astute.