Electoral College has its faults but it's not ready to be replaced

Colorado just passed a state law where its electoral votes will go to the winner of the national popular vote.

As you probably know, the Electoral College is used only to elect the president. In the past 30 years we’ve twice elected a president who did not receive the majority of the popular vote. This rankles some people, who believe the popular vote is the most democratic way to elect a president.

They are right: it is the most democratic way. In a democracy, a simple majority of the people decides who the president will be.

But the founders did not create a simple democracy. They carefully considered all sorts of problems and issues that could damage our country and ruin this Great Experiment.

And they came up with a pretty odd, but simple, solution: Each state would vote to elect the president, and each state would be allocated at least three electoral votes — one for each senator (every state has two) and one for each representative (each state is entitled to at least one, based on population).

This creates a balance between federalism — which the founders feared — and sovereignty of each state, which impedes effectiveness of the federal government.

The result: an imperfect but pretty good system that helped our country become the greatest nation on Earth in modern times.

Just because the Electoral College gave us a president who didn’t win the popular vote doesn’t mean the system is wrong. In fact, it worked exactly as it was supposed to work: as a buffer between the popular vote and states’ rights.

The Constitution also gives states the right to determine how their electoral votes are applied. There are states which apply all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes in their states. That’s true democracy at the state level, tempered by the Electoral College at the federal level. Maine and Nebraska allocate their electoral votes a little differently: the most votes statewide get the two votes each of those states is allocated, and the rest are determined by the majority vote in each congressional district. In Minnesota, our 10 votes went to the Democratic Party candidate last time; but if we had such a system, each candidate would have received five electoral votes.

The flaw in Maine and Nebraska’s system is that our country is pretty evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, so if every state had the same system as those two, every election would result in recounts, litigation, tie-breakers and uncertainty. At some point, someone has to win the election; no one benefits from the delay, except the major party that eventually wins those close elections.

Colorado’s new system has similar odd consequences. It’s a solution in search of a problem — except in this case, the problem is that the popular vote winner actually lost the last election, and some see that as a problem.

I disagree. Surely, regular viewers of Harry’s Gang and readers of this column know I am no fan of our current president, neither politically nor honorably. But I am a fan of the Constitutional system of electing our president.

Colorado’s system won’t actually be implemented until a few more states pass similar laws, joining 11 states that have already passed it.

For the sake of our country, I hope it stops in Colorado.

Pete Radosevich is the publisher of the Pine Knot News community newspaper and an attorney in Esko who hosts the talk show Harry’s Gang on CAT-7. He can be reached at [email protected].