The Electoral College Works, Leave It Alone

NEW YORK—Let’s all dogpile on the Electoral College.

It’s undemocratic, it’s outdated, it’s un-American. The New York Times (surprise, surprise) believes it should be abolished and we should go to a straight-up popular vote.

Because (this is the part they don’t tell you when they make this argument)…

Screw Wyoming.

Screw Vermont.

Screw Arkansas.

Screw Rhode Island.

Screw Delaware.

How could the concerns of those little pipsqueak states matter when the massive voting blocs of the Upper West Side and West Hollywood and Nob Hill and the South Side of Chicago are saying, “You people go back to your bass boats and your cattle ranches and your plaid work shirts and let us run the country as we see fit.”

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The founders never intended 100 percent popular voting except at the lowest levels of government, town halls and city councils, where everyone knows one another. Anything beyond that, they wanted some kind of check on the passions of the mob, so that nobody got railroaded just because they were too small to defend themselves.

In other words, the Electoral College is set up to defend minorities.

That’s why Wyoming gets three votes out of 538. This one half of one percent apparently outrages the East Coast Brahmans who would prefer to ignore the small-government radicals from Laramie and Casper who keep rabble-rousing for causes like better management of the wolf population and more equitable policies for grazing livestock on federal land. Who cares about crap like that? They should have exactly what their population entitles them to—

.018 percent of the vote.

They can use the incredible clout of that .018 percent to get whatever they need and then go back to roping their goats or whatever they do.

The same goes for the syrup farmers in Vermont and the Walmart moguls in Arkansas. Twenty-five of the fifty states have seven electoral votes or fewer, so all those people who choose to live away from the crowded urban areas can basically just go artificially inseminate themselves. The most underrepresented people in America—citizens of the District of Columbia—should have those three votes taken away so we don’t have to listen to their constant bitching about, you know, how they’re not represented in Congress at all.

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