The Fault Dear Brutus...


If you are a woman of diminutive stature (I am only 5’2”) you appreciate the small advantage that comes from wearing high heels.  Wearing heels doesn’t make me as tall as everyone else, it just makes me a little more competitive in eye-to-eye conversations.   And that, oddly enough, explains why I love the Electoral College.  I am also a data-driven person, happy when surrounded by numbers instead of emotion.  Add an almost religious reverence for the Constitution and you have someone who is a hard sell on amendments.  So lets look at the Electoral College debate.
            First, there is the self-serving nature of the anti-Electorals.  We all know that they would be defending the EC if their gal won by the Electoral vote but lost the popular vote.  Hypocrisy is easily identified by its stench.  So much for the “I’m in a snit” argument. 
            Second, and infinitely more important, there is the Constitutional issue.  We are the United STATES of America.  The word “state” means “nation.”  We are a federation of equally empowered states that voluntarily have offered our allegiance to a greater state, the United States of America.  Both morally and Constitutionally each state is an equal member of this Union and has equal stature in its representation.  It is this concept of a federation of equals which makes us the longest living republic in the world.  Our strongest example of this concept is in the United States Senate where large and small states come to the table with an equal voice.   
But how do you balance the equality of large and small states while still representing the people as a whole?   In the Congress we do this with the House of Representatives with representation equal to population.  The House forms a counterbalance to the Senate.  But what do we do with the executive branch?
The genius of our Founding Fathers is proven in how they created (through honest compromise) the Electoral College.  Each state is given a number of electors equal to its representatives and its two senators.  Therefore, even the smallest states were given a modicum of equality. 
The inclusion of the two senators is the mathematically significant piece.  Which leads us to our third (and most logical) reason for a defense of the Electoral College.  Including the number of Senators to each Electoral number prevents the utter disenfranchisement of the small states to the population of a select few large states. It does so by honoring the equality of the small states disproportionate to their size.  
            For simplicity let’s look at just the smallest and largest states by population: Wyoming and California.  Wyoming has 0.17% of the total U.S. population, while California has 11.95% of the same.  California is 70 times larger than Wyoming.  Does that mean that they get 70 times more votes in the electoral college?  No.  California only has 55 votes compared to Wyoming’s 3 votes.  That is still 18 times more delegates, but it is not 70 times more.  In essence, Wyoming earns an electoral vote for only 200,000 people while the same vote costs a Californian almost 700,000 people.  Earning a single electoral vote for “Jones” instead of “Smith” costs Californians more than 3 times as much as it does the citizens of Wyoming. Notice that California still has a huge advantage over Wyoming, but it is not as big as a straight popular vote would provide.
            Without the Electoral College, it would take the population of 31 states (!!!) at the low end of the population to equal the population of California alone.  With the Electoral College it only takes the lowest 16 states to equal California’s clout.  
Given California’s still large advantage in the electoral process you wonder why they (and the other losers in the last election) are so adamant about doing away with the Electoral College.  For that, you must go back to item number one in this list.
The fact is that Hillary Clinton went into the 2016 election with 18 states that had consistently voted Democratic since 1992.  She lost.  That says more about her than it does the Electoral College. 
            God bless the founding fathers and keep the faith.  

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