Abraham Lincoln:
I now wish to
submit a few remarks on the general proposition of amending the
constitution. As a general rule, I think, we would much better let it
alone.
… I
was once of your opinion … that presidential electors should be
dispensed with; but a more thorough knowledge of the causes that first
introduced them, has made me doubt.
The New York Post's
Mark Cunningham:
[Hillary] Clinton “won” an election we didn’t have. Neither side was focused on a national-popular-vote win, because both knew the rules.
And if the rules were different, the whole campaign would’ve differed, too.
… The thing is, every one of these features is vital to securing our
great democracy, which is actually, in the famous 1787 words of Benjamin
Franklin, “a Republic — if you can keep it.”
And the whole anti-democratic package is what has allowed us to keep it these 200-plus years.
Let’s go back to “republic”: Democracy is all about majority rule;
the word actually means “rule of the people.” A republic is about the
self-rule of a nation of free people.
Investor's Business Daily:
… from the 1787 crafting of our Constitution, our
presidential elections were never designed to be popularity contests.
They were designed to give the individual states a voice in who would
lead them. There would have been no United States of America without
this provision, since from the beginning the small states were terrified
of being dominated and bullied by the bigger states if they joined the
union.
The genius of this system is that it gives everyone a voice and everyone a stake in the election's outcome.
… With our current system, candidates have to take even small states
seriously. They have to run as national candidates, not as "California"
or "New York" or "Florida" candidates.
Reason's
John Yoo:
Democrats attack the
Constitution’s method for selecting the president as fundamentally
undemocratic. … These
liberal officials have a point. The Electoral College is not democratic,
if by democratic they mean rule by simple majority.
… The Electoral College further encourages candidates to
campaign state by state, particularly in the large “battleground” states
that Clinton ultimately lost, such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Michigan, and Wisconsin. If Democrats had their way, candidates would
ignore the states and campaign solely in the population centers that
Clinton easily won, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
But
the Electoral College’s exaggeration of the power of the states is not
some bizarre mistake or a constitutional version of the appendix.
The
Framers specifically designed the Electoral College to dilute democracy
and favor the states.
Reason's
David Harsanyi: "so that
every part of the nation has some kind of say over the next executive while preventing large swaths of the nation
from being bullied"
We have 51 separate elections. This is done so that
every part of the nation has some kind of say over the next executive.
The president, after all, is not a monarch. He does not make laws. Not
even President Barack Obama was supposed to do that.
… Diffused democracy weakens the ability of politicians to scaremonger
and use emotional appeals to take power. It blunts the vagaries of the
electorate.
… Need it be repeated again, the Electoral College, and other
mechanisms that balance democracy, create moderation and compromise—they
stop one party from accumulating too much power. It is certainly
possible that Obama's unilateral governance over the past eight years
had a lot to do with the pushback of three consecutive losses in the
Senate and Congress, and the election of Donald Trump.
To some extent, the Electoral College impels presidents and their
political parties to consider all Americans in rhetoric and action. By
allowing two senators for both Wyoming, with a population of less than
600,000, and California, with a population of more than 38 million, we
create more national cohesion. We protect large swaths of the nation
from being bullied.
No Pasarán's
Erik Svane:
To better understand the 2016 election results in the United States,
it is perhaps helpful to make a comparison that brings in
the European Union.
… the United States of America is not a country, not in
the same sense as Denmark or France or Columbia is;
it is a federation, a union (50 states), somewhat like
the European Union (28 nations), but in the final count
somewhere in-between a country and the EU.
… Try to imagine this on a European level.
Imagine that in a more unified European Union,
a continental vote has one of two EU candidates win
the popular vote in, say, 20 nations out of 28,
from Denmark and France to Estonia and Greece.
But because the 28th nation is the most populous, the candidate
who wins in Germany wins the whole game, meaning the
seven nations "allied" with it (so to speak) beat out
the 20 lesser-populated countries' choice.
How many times would there be elections,
how long would the EU endure, before all other nations
woke up to the fact that their votes didn't matter, that Germany
(like California in the U.S.) was the dominant member, and indeed,
that they started growling about getting ready to follow the UK in its Brexit vote?!
No. The above scenario shows why, if
the EU did want to go ahead with "a more closer union",
countries like Denmark, Belgium, and Portugal would
refuse a system based on the one-man-one-vote, because
they would become totally subjugated by the more populous
countries — and who could blame them for that?
Countries like France, Germany, and Italy, on the other hand,
would counter that a system in which each country has the
same amount of votes is ridiculous and unfair, amounting to
the loss of rights for tens of millions of people when their
nations have five to 10 times the populations of their smaller
neighbors — and who could blame them for that?
This is precisely the debate that occurred
between the 13 former colonies, the small
states (Delaware, Connecticut, South Carolina…)
and the large states (Pennsylvania, Virginia,Massachusetts…), in the 1780s. …
The difference between a democracy and a republic, wrote
Harry Jaffa, is that the first is majority rule while the second is majority rule
coupled with the defense of minority rights. He also has this choice quote, the best ever that defines the government of a free people:
Those who live under the law have an equal right in the making of
the law, and those who make the law have a corresponding duty to live
under the law.
