I had thought the subject of the electoral college had died out until the next presidential election in 2020, but this excellent Frontpage Mag article defending the system recently comes not too long after a New York Times editorial on November 7 that had taken precisely the opposite view, recommending that the electoral college be jettisoned and the presidential election held by pure popular vote. I had made my views clear around a year earlier in the wake of the November 2016 election and recycled those in a response to the Times editorial:

“In the EU, four countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy) have more than half the population of the 28-member bloc. There is no way that Belgium or Greece or Denmark, say, is going to allow the Big Four to have their way through a pure popular vote given the deep differences among the member nations.

“That’s how Alabama and North Dakota and Alaska feel about NY and California. Thirty states chose Trump vs. 20 for Clinton, for better or worse. I don’t see how Clinton could have claimed legitimacy in that case. The electoral college may need reform, but a popular vote in a continental-sized country makes no sense to me.”

That may have been too brief to get the point across, but it generated a large number of comments, some of them pretty outrageous. I threw in Alabama mainly because it’s the top of the list alphabetically, but here are some of the responses:

“Tokyo person, I need those little states – climate change denying. women persecuting, anti-education backwaters – to at least leave those of us who have chosen to live more responsible lifestyles alone.”

“I’ve always [been] happy to pay taxes so that poor Alabamans could get food stamps.”

Jeez, I’ll have to remember to use a more neutral state as an example next time; the Frontpage article cited above wisely went with Wyoming. Others ranted about “the white racist slave owners who wrote the constitution”, which made me wonder if they have another Constitution they’d like to substitute.

The real issue was an apparent misunderstanding of how the US was formed. On my comparison of US states to member nations of the European Union, one commenter said,

“European COUNTRIES were Sovereign nations BEFORE the EU was formed. The 50 states were not. Alabama and the other 36 states had to be admitted to the Union. So, the comparison fails to make a cogent argument.”

Wrong. The 37 territories that became states after the US was formed were sovereign entities that could have chosen to apply to join the nation or not. They asked to join, and were admitted, based on the Constitution, which protects their sovereignty in choosing a president in the form of the electoral college. You can’t unilaterally change the rules to suit whatever the popular fancy is at the time. I constantly have to remind the Japanese that while their history is top-down, whereby a military commander forced independent domains to come together under his rule, the US is bottom-up, i.e., independent states peacefully negotiated terms and freely signed their names to an agreement. I always found it somehow fitting that America started with a contract.

Another commenter noted, “You are mixing apples and oranges. The EU is simply an economic forum, similar to NAFTA in our country.” If only that were true. The EU has reams of restrictions on its member nations that US states would never accept, such as a blanket ban on the death penalty and restrictions on fiscal policy (Alabama has more freedom to issue state bonds than, say, Greece). Most controversially, the EU is demanding that member states accept their share of refugees that Germany accepted on its own accord in the hundreds of thousands; it was immigration more than any other issue that prompted the UK’s decision to withdraw from the union as a violation of its sovereignty.

Though the majority of respondents seemed unhappy (to say the least) with my opinion, I did have a few people on my side. The most cogent comment, much better expressed than my own, was that those insisting that the US is a single entity

“fundamentally misunderstand the structure of this country. We are not hundreds of millions of Americans who happen to reside in areas demarcated on a map as being in particular states. We are residents of states, each of which is sovereign to a large extent, united into a country with a central government with limited powers granted by the states. The Electoral College is the way in which the will of each state is weighted into voting for a president.”

That view of state sovereignty, by the way, has been reinforced elsewhere by none other than California’s ever-entertaining Governor Jerry Brown, who has explicitly called his state “a separate nation” and, in an interview with the Huffington Post (where else?), “a real nation-state”. He declared to the Associated Press, “It’s important for the world to know that America is not Washington. Yes, we’re part of the union, but we’re also a sovereign state that can promote the necessary policies that are required for survival.” That was spoken in the context of a climate treaty he intended to sign that had been rejected by the US president at the time. He has taken the idea to mean the state can defy federal laws that he deems unfair, which explains his penchant for sanctuary cities. In other words, California has its own interests and will pursue them regardless of what other states or those pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington DC think. Rather illogically, it was that same Jerry Brown who signed the National Popular Vote bill on behalf of California in 2011, calling for direct popular election of the US president, i.e., negating the role of the states. He wants to have his California roll and eat it too.

The electoral college is unwieldy, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. Choosing representatives who vote on our behalf is the very essence of representative democracy and a curb against mob rule. If New Yorkers and Californians want their will to prevail, they’re going to have to reach out to the rest of the country, as distasteful as that might be. Not a bad thing, I think.