There are some things I agree with and some I disagree with.
Now, the whole thing is a response to another article (one I cannot access due to paywalls), which mentions the electoral college letting Trump lose the popular vote but win the election. This is at least a valid point. But it then goes on to say:
After all, Trump became president in 2016 after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College (Article II). He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Article III), two of whom were confirmed by senators representing just 44% of the population (Article I). Those three justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a reversal with which most Americans disagreed.
While polls have indicated that while "most Americans" didn't want it overturned, I believe polls also show that "most Americans" support abortion regulation that wasn't allowed under the Supreme Court's prior abortion rulings.
But there's a larger problem, which is that this example ironically goes against its own narrative. The whole reason Roe v. Wade occurred at all was the US Constitution. Now, I think Roe v. Wade was a
misapplication of the constitution and there's no right to abortion in the Constitution. But whether Roe was a correct or incorrect interpretation of the Constitution, the fact of the matter is that it was based, at least nominally, on the Constitution. In other words, you'd never have Roe v. Wade if there wasn't a constitution. This example ends up backfiring. Curiously, the article linked to in the opening post doesn't bring up this point when criticizing the original article despite it being such a strong point against it.
But let's focus on the linked article, which is mostly about defending the electoral college... and doesn't seem to do a great job.
Once again, the left takes out its big guns against the Electoral College. But they seem to lack a basic understanding of American Civics 101. By design, the founders did not give us a pure democracy — which they viewed as dangerous, potentially leading to mobocracy.
The Constitution empowers “we the people” through our elected representatives. Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution deals with the electoral process. To sum it up: We don’t directly elect the president, but we vote for those who do. In all this, the Constitution provides a layer of protection — sparing us from would-be tyrants.
It then spends several more paragraphs advancing this argument: The US isn't a pure democracy, it's a republic where there are elected representatives, and that's why the electoral college exists.
This argument for the electoral college collapses practically right away when you think about it. Electing the president by popular vote is already not a pure democracy, because people are electing the leader rather than being the leader themselves. The extra layer of a republic is
already there, with no need for an electoral college. But even if we suppose we need an extra layer on top of that layer, the article is rather silent on an obvious question: Why don't we do this for other offices, like governors?
Zero states elect their governor with any kind of electoral college. If the electoral college is such a critical way to avoiding pure democracy--even though a popular vote for president already avoids pure democracy!--why aren't people who bring up this claim also advocating for governors to be elected via an electoral college? It's a considerable inconsistency.
The article also offers the usual misleading claims about the electoral college's reasons:
Without the Electoral College, the big cities and big states would always determine who would become the president. The Constitution thus protects the interests of those in the minority, who live in less populous states and cities. Small towns in Vermont were never meant to be ruled by majorities from California.
Sounds great, but there's not evidence as far as I can tell that this was in any way their reason for choosing the electoral college over a popular vote, despite the popularity of claiming it was in popular culture. The primary reasons were that states with lots of slaves would object to a popular vote as they would be disadvantaged by the non-voting slaves (this is why the electoral college implements the 3/5 compromise where, for the purpose of choosing representative numbers, slaves counted as 3/5 of a person) and the idea that the general populace wouldn't be able to choose presidential candidates well, and thus they should choose more informed people to make the decision. After all, with lower communication back then, it was expected most people would have trouble knowing much about people outside of their state. And so the idea was that the people would elect people they believed were knowledgeable, and the knowledgeable people would go out, discuss it amongst themselves, then cast their votes for who they thought were best.
Of course, with slavery gone, that first reason doesn't matter. And the second didn't work out either; the idea of people choosing electors to exercise independent discretion fell apart right away, and electors swiftly turned into mere functionaries whose job was to do nothing more than vote for candidates that were decided before the electors were even chosen. The only election where the electors exercised any kind of real independent discretion was 1796 (the first contested presidential election), and the result was that due to vote scattering, we ended up with a president and vice president of opposing factions! (basically, imagine if the result of the 2016 election was Trump being president and Hillary Clinton being vice president, or the result of 2020 being Biden becoming president and Trump being vice president) After that, people realized that having the electors actually decide for themselves who was best was a bad idea, and ever since the electors might as well be robots. Sure, you'll get the occasional faithless elector now and then, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Who electors vote for is decided before they ever go and cast their vote.
There were a few mentions of state size being a factor in the electoral college in the debates over it, but it was as I noted a fairly minor reason for it. In fact, it's actually not even that necessary; the Senate already provides a safeguard to small states. Furthermore, the electoral college does very little in the end to aid small states. The large states get
way more votes in the electoral college than the small ones. Indeed, the most populous state early in US history was Virginia, and guess what? 8 of the first 9 presidential races were won by people from Virginia! Now, someone might say it's unfair to count Washington's victories as he was unanimously elected, but even so, we end up with 6 of 7. It's quite clear that the electoral college wasn't exactly doing much to benefit smaller states.
So it doesn't look good for the article when it's claiming the reasons for the electoral college are things that weren't the primary reasons and one of which (the "big cities" bit) does not appear to have been even a minor reason.
Honestly, if one looks at the discussions over the electoral college, it's pretty obvious they completely misunderstood how it would play out in practice, like when George Mason worried that under the electoral college, "nineteen times in twenty" no single person would manage to win a majority of the electors and thus it would always be falling to the House of Representatives to choose the winner. What he worried would happen "nineteen times in twenty" ended up happening only once in history.
There are some arguments for retaining the electoral college I think might have some merit, but pretty much all the
original reasons for it are either irrelevant or turned out to not work. If the article wanted to argue that there are
new reasons to retain it, that would be one thing, but instead if acts like the reasons it brings up were the original reasons, when they... weren't.
Maybe this post is a bit rambling, but seeing the kind of errors this article makes about the electoral college, which far too many people make, is rather annoying and I've been wanting to do a writeup on this sort of thing anyway.
