The battle over the Electoral College continues on.
The men and women that you elect to the U.S. Congress in both chambers need to hear from you regularly on the important issues, and they need to hear from you today regarding the latest actions of Illinois’ own U.S. Senator Dick Durbin.
U.S. Senator Durbin along with radical Leftists such as Bernie Sanders aim to undermine the brilliant Electoral College established by our Founding Fathers. Durbin and Sanders and others are ignorant of the purpose and importance of the Electoral College. They argue that it’s a “relic” and “racist” in its design.
Electoral College opponents could all benefit from the teachings of Tara Ross, author of Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College. In two Prager University 5-minute videos (watch them here and here), Ross provides an excellent short civics lesson:
Why didn’t the Founders just make it easy, and let the presidential candidate with the most votes claim victory? Why did they create and why do we continue to need, this Electoral College?
The answer is critical to understanding not only the Electoral College but also America.
The Founders had no intention of creating a pure majority-rule democracy. They knew from careful study of history what most have forgotten today or never learned: pure democracies do not work.
They implode.
Democracy has been colorfully described as two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner. In a pure democracy, bare majorities can easily tyrannize the rest of a country. The Founders wanted to avoid this at all costs.
Both videos lay out the basics in an easy to understand fashion:
Our Founders so deeply feared a tyranny of the majority that they rejected the idea of a direct vote for President. That’s why they created the Electoral College. For more than two centuries it has encouraged coalition building and national campaigning, given a voice to both big and small states, and discouraged voter fraud.
In this video, Ross addresses a “well-financed, below-the-radar effort to do away with the Electoral College” that wants to do “exactly what the Founders rejected: award the job of president to the person who gets the most votes nationally.” Ross explains that the effort’s goal is to ask states to “sign a contract to give their presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the winner of the state’s popular vote.”
Ross gives an example of how this would have worked had it been in place in 2004:
[W]hen George W. Bush won the national vote, California’s electoral votes would have gone to Bush, even though John Kerry won that state by 1.2 million votes!
Can you imagine strongly Democratic California calmly awarding its electors to a Republican?
Our U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives need to hear from us on this important issue.
First posted at IllinoisFamily.org.
