The Electoral College? Give me a break!
Does the Electoral College Represent the United States Today?
In today's political landscape, the Electoral College seems to have lost all historical validity and relevance. The 2019 Elections virtually demonstrated the Electoral College is on the verge of becoming nothing more than a puppet show with soap opera legislators and politicos pulling the strings.
The newly formed union must be protected from the dangers of factions, said James Madison over two hundred years ago. Today, four years since the last elections, the very factions the Father of the Constitution feared threaten to wipe out his legacy.
For one, Donald Trump and the pseudo-political cohorts corroding the GOP rant non-stop about non-existent fraud and blatantly push to impose laws and regulations allowing them to manipulate elections and, of course, the Electoral College. This behavior is far from what the Founders of this nation dreamed of and promoted.
What is the Electoral College?
In 1787, the Constitutional Convention faced the dilemma of implementing an electoral system that met the needs of the newborn American nation.
James Madison, rightly called the Father of the Constitution, believed that elections by popular vote were the right way to choose the government and the President. However, he feared that smaller states wouldn't be fairly represented. This concern ultimately led him to support the creation of the Electoral College.
It was the era of the three-fifths, the absolute suppression of women's rights, and a time when only white property-owning men had the right to vote.
For these and many other reasons, the Electoral College, like any other institution thought to reflect and address the challenges of a specific historical moment, began to die the day it was born. The course of history would gradually bury it.
Time passed, and the world changed, but the Electoral College remained stagnant.
Social and political aberrations, like those mentioned above, were eventually amended in the Constitution. Today, African Americans are treated as human beings, women have rights, and voting isn't an absolute privilege reserved for white property owners.
Economically, there have been significant changes, too. Today, California, the birthplace of the internet and every neon wonder inundating our lives, including Hollywood, produces more than France with 9 million fewer employees. In fact, California is the nation's top economic power and fifth globally (2022). The second national power and tenth globally, Texas, produces as much as Brazil with 80 million fewer wage earners than the South American giant.
Currently, the dominance of these two states is based on financial and real estate services, rental and leasing of real estate, technical, professional, scientific, and governmental services, trade, education and health services, manufacturing, and various sectors of the general industry.
In percentage terms, agriculture accounts for just 1.5% of California's economy. However, such a low local impact is enough to make the state the nation's top agricultural producer. Texas is the country's second-largest agricultural producer, although comparatively, the impact is also minimal on the local economy.
So, does the Electoral College serve any purpose in today's times?
Setting aside the infamous actions of unscrupulous officials, the Electoral College is nothing more than a relic with historical value and its existence today seems unjustified.
Over time, the Electoral College has become disconnected from its surroundings. In addition to the significant socioeconomic changes from 1787 to date, we can add the chronic stagnation of laws and regulations that were never intended to be eternal, let alone to address the needs unknown to the Founders.
The Electoral College is by no means a sacrosanct institution, as some would have us believe; in essence, it merely outlined basic and very simple aspects of what a fair electoral system should be at the time it was created. In fact, one of the most important objectives of the Electoral College, then and now, to prevent voter manipulation, lacks real value in the age of the drones and AI
The original version of the Electoral College stipulated that electors would meet in their respective states and not in a common location. The goal was to avoid shady maneuvering and the negative influence of not so clean political powers. It was a noble objective and probably an infallible method in an era when the survival of cities depended on proximity to waterways, which, for the curious, did not exceed 25 miles, and mail was delivered by horse. However, it is hopelessly useless in the age of bank wires.
Times have changed, and the Electoral College doesn't seem to have adapted accordingly. It's not a political problem, as they want us to believe; it's a matter of correspondence with the times we live in.
James Madison's visionary foresight, which allowed him to understand that no law or regulation should be set in stone, emphasized the need for adaptability in governance, but we have ignored him completely.