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Why We Need the Electoral College
On December 19, for the 58th time since our U.S.
Constitution was adopted, presidential electors will gather
in their respective state capitals to cast their ballots. In
30 states, Republican electors will cast 306 ballots; in 20
states and the District of Columbia, Democratic electors
will cast 232 ballots.
On January 6, the 538 ballots will be opened and
counted during a joint session of the newly elected
115th Congress. Speaker Paul Ryan and outgoing Vice
President Joe Biden will announce that Donald J. Trump
has been elected the 45th President of the United States
by “a majority of the whole number of Electors” in the
Electoral College.
While Trump won a clear majority of the votes in the
Electoral College, he did not win the most popular votes.
Some liberals are engaging in sore-loser backbiting
by falsely focusing on the meaningless outcome in the
popular vote.
The Chicago Cubs did not score more runs than the
Cleveland Indians in the World Series, yet the Cubs were
declared the winner. Was that unfair, or does anyone
challenge that result? Of course not. A baseball team is
not rewarded for running up the score in one game, and
winning a game by 6-0 (as the Indians won game one) does
not count any more than winning a game by 1-0 (as the
Indians won game three).
Our Electoral College uses the same fair system as our
national pastime. Hillary Clinton “ran up the score” in
liberal states like California, New York, and Illinois, but
that should not and did not give her any extra advantage in
the election.
In illegal-immigration friendly California, Hillary
Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than 4 million
votes, and ballots were not even fully counted by the
end of November. But the election results should not
depend on how many votes a candidate can obtain in a
liberal, insolvent state like California, and our Nation
need not wait until all those votes are counted before
declaring the winner.
Our Electoral College prevents tyranny by the
majority, or giving one state so much influence over the
others. Instead, our Founders wisely compartmentalized
our Union such that each state, even tiny ones like New
Hampshire, has an influence all its own. This usually
ensures that one candidate attains a majority of the
Electoral College vote, even though none of the candidates
gamer a majority of the popular vote. In more than half of
the presidential elections over the past quarter century, no
candidate attained a majority of the popular vote.
Twice in the last five presidential elections the winner
of the Electoral College did not receive more popular votes
than his rival, but that is only because California is so
one-sidedly Democrat. Without including California, the
Republican candidates won the popular vote in three of the
past five elections.
Our Nation should not be hostage to California’s
refusal to enforce America’s immigration laws, even
refusing to take reasonable steps to prevent illegals
from voting. Likewise, we should not be victim to the
Democratic political machines in large cities that are
notorious for withholding their vote totals until late in the
evening, to see how many votes they need to flip a result
trending Republican.
Some fail to recognize that the Electoral College is the
single greatest safeguard against voter fraud and a potential
national crisis if there is a disputed presidential election
outcome. Chicago can cheat all it wants in voting, as it
has historically done, but that will not change the outcome
today under the ingenious system of our Electoral College.
Our Founders opposed tyranny by the majority, and
the Bill of Rights stands against allowing a mere “majority
vote” to impose its will on everyone else. The Electoral
College is there for the same reason, to provide a buffer
against the whims of the masses.
Opponents of the Electoral College could repeal it by
hijacking a Convention of States, which is a euphemistic
term for a new constitutional convention. While promoters
of the Convention of States deny repealing the Electoral
College as their goal, they do not disclose the identity of
their financial backers so there is no way to know for sure
what their real underlying intent is.
The wonderful Republican Platform of 2016, which
helped carry Donald Trump to his victory, rejects any
“scheme to abolish or distort the procedures of the Electoral
College,” including the National Popular Vote Interstate
Compact. That compact, enacted by ten states so far,
attempts to bypass the Electoral College without changing
the Constitution.
To the liberals demanding an end to the Electoral
College, why aren’t they also demanding that the
Chicago Cubs return their World Series trophy? For the
same reason it makes sense not to allow a baseball team
to benefit from running up the score in a single game
of the series, it also makes sense not to allow a liberal
presidential candidate to benefit from running up her vote
tally in a few liberal states.
Trump Has a Point About Illegal Votes
When Donald Trump boldly complained about the
“millions of people who voted illegally” in the presidential
election, he may not have been far from the mark after
California is considered. Most Americans are unaware just
how far California’s election procedures have drifted away
from the rest of our country.
In the 49 States other than California, Donald Trump
crushed Hillary Clinton by almost 2 million popular votes.
The claim that Hillary won the national popular vote is
due entirely to the huge run-up in votes that she claims she
received in California.
Hillary’s reported vote total in California is constantly
changing, even weeks after the election, so Donald Trump’s
skepticism about the popular vote total is healthy. A look at
rules in California which are rejected by nearly every other
state illustrates why California’s vote should not dictate the
future of our country.
For starters, California continued to accept mailed-in
ballots lacking in safeguards against voter fraud for days
after the rest of the country voted on Election Day. How
many of these mailed-in ballots, not received until days
after the election, are the result of fraud?
California does not require any photo identification
or comparable verification before allowing someone to
cast a ballot. This is in contrast to the states that do have
safeguards against voting by impostors, and most of the
voter ID states were carried by Trump.
California is one of only three states that allow
convicted felons to vote while sitting in jail behind bars.
In most other states, murderers and rapists are denied the
ability to influence the outcome of an election even after
they have been released from jail, unless they go through a
process to have their voting rights restored.
California harbors illegal aliens in far greater numbers
than other states, with several major cities in California
designated as “sanctuary cities.” The entire state was
declared a “sanctuary” by the Inspector General of the
U.S. Department of Justice, a decision which allows the
Attorney General to withhold federal funds from the state.
In 2013 the California legislature even passed a law to
allow illegal aliens to serve on juries, in contrast with all
other states. Democratic Governor Jerry Brown vetoed
that bill, but he signed a bill to prohibit state government
from using the word “alien” because, according to the
bill’s sponsor, state senator Tony Mendoza, it “has very
negative connotations.”
Illegal aliens have been given so many benefits and
protections unavailable to them in other states that the
term “California citizenship” has been used to describe
its un-American approach. Many of those illegal aliens
could have voted because in practice there is nothing to
stop them from doing so, and Trump is right to complain
about the unknown number who “voted illegally” in the
presidential election.
In addition, California did not allow any Republican to
be on the general election ballot for U.S. Senator this year,
due to an unusual process that eliminated the Republican
candidate in the primary. Given a choice between two
liberal Democratic minority females, California’s U.S.
Senate race was more like something found in Cuba or
other one-party systems.
Many local races in California also reflected a oneparty
system where voters were given a choice between
two different members of the Democratic Party, both of
whom generally supported the same political positions.
While Californians could vote for the Republican candidate
Trump for president, many could not vote for a Republican
candidate for other key offices in the general election.
Neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton spent much time or
money campaigning in California, which has expensive
media markets and a sprawling population nearly 800 miles
from north to south. The final vote tally in that state is as
meaningless as the final score in a sporting event where
one side continued to run up the score after the outcome
was already settled.
If the outcome of the election were based on who won
the most popular votes rather than who won the Electoral
College, then the candidate who spent the most money
would have an enormous advantage. The very problem
that liberals criticize so often – the influence of money in
determining the outcome of elections – would be far worse
if popular votes were all that mattered.
Instead, the Electoral College brilliantly allows a
less-funded candidate, as Trump was, to focus on a halfdozen
small-media states to take his campaign right to
the American people without relying heavily on negative
ads as Hillary Clinton did. How ironic it is that the critics
of negative campaigning and the corrosive effect of big
money in politics are not defending Trump’s victory based
on his large rallies with the people in a few swing states.
Was the Election Rigged?
Was the election rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton, as
Donald Trump repeatedly claimed? The mainstream media
have been in collective outrage since Donald Trump, in
the third debate, said he reserves the right to contest the
outcome on November 8.
Liberals insist that voter fraud is a myth invented by
conservatives as a pretext for voter suppression. By defining
voter fraud so narrowly as to mean only impersonation at
the polling place, liberals ignore other serious threats to the
accuracy and legitimacy of our elections.
In a press release dated October 1, Obama’s secretary
of homeland security Jeh Johnson publicly warned
that the potential for cyberattacks from overseas could
disrupt the administration of this year’s presidential
election. “In recent months,” Johnson said, “we have
determined that malicious actors gained access to state
voting-related systems.”
Cyberattacks get headlines, but there are many other
ways our electiaons can be stolen. One of the most common
is the risk that your vote could be cancelled by the votes of
people who are legally ineligible to vote.
Felons are one large category of people who, in many
states, are prohibited from casting a ballot unless they regain
that privilege by going through a process of application
and approval. But that didn’t stop felons from illegally
voting in close elections, including the 2000 presidential
race in Florida (decided by 537 votes out of 6 million cast)
and the 2008 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota (decided by
312 votes out of 3 million cast).
A1 Franken supposedly won that U.S. Senate race,
which led him to become the 60th and deciding vote for
Obamacare. But as John Fund said on C-SPAN on October
23, “we have proof that 1,200 felons voted illegally in
that election, and 200 of them were actually convicted of
easting a fraudulent ballot, and the election was decided by
312 votes.”
Virginia, where longtime Clinton fixer Terry
McAuliffe is now the governor, is another state that
bars felons from voting until they apply for and receive
restoration of their voting rights. Saying he “cannot
accept” a ruling of the Virginia Supreme Court which
struck down his unilateral action to give voting rights to
206,000 felons, Gov. McAuliffe reinstated voting rights
to 13,000 felons – which is enough to swing an election
in that battleground state.
Besides felons, an even larger category of persons
ineligible to vote is non-citizens. Surely we can all agree
that U.S. citizenship should be required for anyone to vote
in U.S. elections. Yet most states do not demand proof of
U.S. citizenship from persons voting or registering to vote.
No one denies that our registration rolls include
millions of non-U. S. citizens, both legal and illegal, who
have accidentally or intentionally registered to vote while
applying for public assistance or a driver’s license. But
how many of those aliens actually voted, and how many
elections were swayed by those fraudulent votes?
A study published in 2014 by researchers at
Old Dominion University provides some answers.
Using standard statistical techniques, the ODU study
extrapolates from surveys to conclude that tens of
thousands of illegal votes were cast in recent elections
by citizens of other countries.
In the 2008 Minnesota Senate race that A1 Franken
supposedly won by 312 votes, the ODU researchers
estimate that 3,000 votes were cast by persons who were
not U.S. citizens. The study also concludes that in the 2008
presidential election in North Carolina, Obama’s narrow
victory margin of 14,177 votes was made possible by noncitizen
voters.
Remember the 5 million illegal aliens who received
temporary legal status under the DAC Aand DAPAprograms
because of Obama’s unilateral executive action? Some of
them went door-to-door to help elect Hillary Clinton and
other Democrats, especially in northern Virginia.
Although felons and non-citizens are obvious sources
of voter fraud, they are just the tip of the iceberg. According
to a study by the Pew Center on the States, published in
February 2012, more than 24 million voter registrations are
invalid or seriously inaccurate.
Among the 24 million bad registrations are 1.8 million
people who are dead and 2.8 million who are registered
in more than one state (including 70,000 people who are
registered in more than two states). About 12 million
registrations had incorrect addresses, which suggests that
the voter no longer lived at the address where he registered.
Every bad registration creates the temptation to cheat
by someone casting a ballot in the name of a voter who
has died or moved away from the precinct. Liberals claim
such impersonation is rare because it is rarely punished,
but with 24 million bad registrations, many close elections
can be determined by fraudulent votes.
In September of this year, a judge in St. Louis threw
out a Democratic primary election for state representative
because of absentee voter fraud and ordered a do-over.
The do-over was held September 16, and this time the
challenger (the victim of voter fraud) won in a landslide.
The liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch has strongly
criticized Trump’s talk of a rigged election, but when it
came to the Democratic primary in its own back yard, the
paper interviewed dozens of people, reviewed thousands
of documents, and found “numerous irregularities.” For
example, “Many voters said they were duped into filling
out absentee ballots and were told to mark that they were
incapacitated when they were not.”
The Dangers of Early Voting
When FBI Director James Comey announced on
October 28 that his agents were reviewing 650,000 emails
on a computer belonging to Hillary Clinton’s closest aide,
Huma Abedin, political pundits immediately speculated
about how this “October surprise” would affect the election.
But the shocking news came too late for many Americans,
because they already voted.
The day after Comey’s announcement, the New York
Times reported that 22 million Americans had already
voted in this year’s presidential election. That’s more than
one-sixth of the expected turnout.
To put that number in perspective, 22 million is more
than the margin of victory in every presidential election
in American history. President Obama’s 2008 margin
of victory was only 10 million votes, and even Ronald
Reagan’s “morning in America” landslide was only 15
million votes.
Early voting began when a few states stopped requiring
voters to provide a good excuse for obtaining an absentee
ballot. Then a few more states began to set up special
polling places for no-excuse early voting. In several states,
most ballots are returned by mail long before Election Day.
Like so many bad ideas, early voting began as an
accommodation for a small number of sympathetic people
who were inconvenienced because they were elderly,
disabled, or needed to be away from home on Election
Day. The exception widened in a gradual creep, until early
voting became taken for granted, and then claimed as a
right belonging to everyone.
Early voting is not a constitutional right, as proved by
the fact that Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan still
allow no early voting at all. Unfortunately, some federal
courts have ruled that once a state allows early voting, that
practice can never be curtailed because of its “disparate
impact” on minority voters.
A federal court ruled that Ohio could not reduce its 35
days of early voting, and another federal court ruled that
North Carolina could not cut back its 17 days. The U.S.
Supreme Court has never addressed the claim that early
voting, once allowed, can never be limited.
Before 2008, when Obama exploited early voting
so sucessfully, many Republicans were lulled in the
complacent belief that both parties would benefit from the
added convenience of early voting. Republicans failed to
foresee how labor unions and other interest groups could
turn early voting into a powerful and one-sided engine for
turning out Democratic votes.
Early voting enables Democrats to badger, berate,
bribe, or bamboozle reluctant, low-information voters to
the polls. Democratic Party and union workers can identify
reluctant voters and harass them until the party worker
verifies that they have actually cast their ballot.
Democrats no longer hide the advantage that early
voting gives them. In October, according to Politico,
Democrats were going “pedal-to-the-metal” in “an allout
blitz to turn out the early vote, hoping to bank enough
votes to overwhelm Donald Trump even before the polls
open on Election Day.”
Democrats made a special effort to win the swing state
of North Carolina, where a federal court overturned needed
election reforms passed by the state legislature and signed
by the governor. It’s no surprise that the African-American
early vote for Hillary ran behind what Obama achieved
four years ago, but Democrats were trying to make up that
lost ground in the final 7 days.
It’s time to enforce the federal law which provides
that federal elections take place in even years on the
Tuesday after the first Monday in November, also known
as “Election Day.” With a few exceptions for good cause,
such as active-duty military service, all votes should be cast
in your home precinct on that one day, all across America.
The U.S. Constitution requires that the delegates to the
Electoral College cast their ballots for President on the same
day, which is the third Monday in December following
Election Day. By requiring each state’s presidential electors
to meet on the same day at their respective state capitols,
the Constitution prevents any state from interfering with
another state’s election process.
We can all agree that no member of a jury should
vote on guilt or innocence until all the evidence has been
presented at a trial. By the same token, voters should not
cast their ballots before the political campaign is over.
The integrity of elections is just as important as the
universally accepted rules for jury trials, whereby jurors
are asked to keep their minds open and withhold judgment
until after closing arguments. Spreading out voting over
an extended period of several weeks, or even a month or
more, makes it impractical for poll watchers to monitor the
voting for fraud.
Internet searches on “can you change your early vote”
spiked after the FBI reopened its investigation of Hillary
Clinton. Voters obviously did not want another Watergate,
which is what Hillary would have been. Early voting
should be replaced by traditional, informed voting on
Election Day.
