THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE MUST GO!

Please remember who actually won the 2016 Presidential election –

Candidate            Party           Popular Votes

Donald J. Trump      Republican      62,980,160

Hillary R. Clinton   Democratic      65,845,063

Gary Johnson         Libertarian      4,488,931

Jill Stein           Green            1,457,050

Trump lost the election to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 Million votes.  When you add the votes for the two major “third party” candidates almost 9 Million more Americans voted against Trump than for him.

The American people did not put Trump in the White House.  The blame for the daily damage Trump does to America and American values and democracy belongs to the Electoral College.

Ironically, one of the reasons the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College was, according to “Why the Electoral College” from HISTORY CENTRAL, because “they feared a tyrant could manipulate public opinion and come to power”.   The article explains that Alexander Hamilton and the other founding fathers “believed that the electors would be able to ensure that only a qualified person becomes President. They believed that with the Electoral College no one would be able to manipulate the citizenry. It would act as check on an electorate that might be duped. Hamilton and the other founders did not trust the population to make the right choice. The founders also believed that the Electoral College had the advantage of being a group that met only once and thus could not be manipulated over time by foreign governments or others.”

The other reason for creating the College was to give extra power to the smaller states, part of compromises made at the Constitutional Convention to appease the small states.

So, one of the main reasons for the existence of the Electoral College is to keep a dangerous demagogue like Trump out of the White House.  It obviously does not work. What it can do is negate the actual “will of the people”, as it clearly did in 2016.

Even Trump himself opposed the Electoral College, at least before it put him in office.  On November 6, 2012, Trump tweeted “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”  It turns out to be perhaps the only time he was right – Trump’s Presidency is a disaster for our democracy, and since the Electoral College put him in office it follows that it, too, is a disaster.

The last time the winner of the popular vote lost via the Electoral College was in 2000 - Gore had 543,895 more votes than Dubya.  Before that election, the last time the popular vote winner did not become President was in 1888.

Like Trump, the Electoral College must go!  We must never again allow it to put an incompetent, unqualified and ignorant malignant narcissist in the White House, contrary to the wishes of a substantial majority of the voters.

Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat, introduced a bill in the House to eliminate the Electoral College on the first night of the 116th Congress.  However, actually getting rid of this outdated and unnecessary way of electing a President would take a constitutional amendment, which would require 3/4 of the states to approve it. 

So, while eliminating the Electoral College is essential, it will be very hard to do.  But we must start the process now.  

TAFN