Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the 2016 Presidential Election cycle was the gift that kept on giving. Seriously. There was alleged hacking from a Cold War era foe, the world was fully introduced to WikiLeaks, there were private email servers, deleted emails, Bleach-Bit, things being wiped with a cloth, pay-to-play scandals, FBI investigations that potentially were, then weren’t, then were again, then weren’t again, despotic vitriol, groupie crotch grabbing comments, alleged mockery of disabled people, not to mention baskets of deplorables everywhere… but through all of that noise, the Electoral College worked to perfection.
If the Founding Fathers could be resurrected like Lazarus, or kidnapped like Abraham Lincoln in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, they’d agree that their design for elections worked correctly and with the intent with which it was created… therefore, to borrow some developer IT speak, it was “working as designed”.
The intent of the College is noted on the National Archive and Records Administration website, which reads:
“The founding fathers established it [Electoral College] in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.”
So how can I make the statement that the Electoral College worked as designed?
Easy, it’s all in black and white right there in Article II of the United States Constitution.
The first thing anyone living in this country has to understand is that we do not live in a democracy. No matter how many dangling chad’s there were in Florida, or how many million more votes a particular candidate received, or how many city blocks are burned to the ground in protest, the fact that the United States is not a true democracy hasn’t changed. This was done on purpose.
By why aren’t we a truly populist, or literal, democracy?
Having more than a few people in a literal democracy is impossible. Don’t believe me? Go ask ten co-workers where they want to go for lunch and only give them two choices. You see, a democracy is, at its core, a majority, or mob, rules state. No one is ever going to get 100% consensus… in the world of politics, 60% is considered a huge victory… 70% is near impossible. If the United States were a true democracy, Hillary Clinton would be President Elect of the United States as a result of a popular vote… but she’s not. The reason she’s not is because the United States functions, and was set up, as a Representative Democracy, or Representative Republic.
What is a Representative Democracy?
Basically, this is a form of government where “democracy” is founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people.
To give you a little bit of a history lesson, the Founding Fathers were basically the rock stars of the 18th century. They were the intelligentsia, the wise and learned men of the time who also happened to have studied just about everything ever written up until then. They’d traveled the world over, spoke multiple languages, lead men in battle, but more importantly, they were also students of history. They knew everything there was to know about every form of government invented by man… autocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, dictatorship, theocracy, totalitarian… it is worth noting that the governmental constructs of socialism and communism weren’t invented until the 1840’s.
From all of these hundreds of years of combined study and knowledge, they knew exactly what would never work and they knew what had potential.
A Representative Democracy is/was specifically designed to level the playing field in elections by sticking up for the little guy and preventing mob rule in the form of regional candidates. Unfortunately for Mrs. Clinton, as the maps below illustrate, she was a regional candidate.
