Mark Levin likes to boast that
his radio talk show is the most substantive of the genre, and by and large he
has a point. However, when it comes to his trite and tedious apologetic for the
Electoral College (one which he apparently shares with his comrade at
Hillsdale) I must say, I was very disappointed.
It is the same one that has been making the rounds at least sense I was
in the fifth grade. Supposedly, according to this theory, the founders came up
with the Electoral College as a means of keeping the presidency from becoming
the plaything of a few large population centers, and including a larger
sampling of the American constituency in the process. Excuse me, but where are they getting this?
“Oh, well, you see, in Federalist
something something Hamilton clearly thought
that pig farmers in Iowa
should pick the President…”
Umm, yah, I don’t think so. Why would the
founders be concerned about the presidency being monopolized by major
population centers when, at the time of the founding, America’s rural
population dwarfed its urban population? Such a concern would have been further
mollified by the fact that many states only gave the vote to landowners. But
supposing for the sake argument that the founders did want to thwart major
population centers, such as we have today, from having plenary influence on
presidential elections, the Electoral College was certainly not a consistently
effective way of doing that. The current configuration of “swing states” scattered hither and yon
across the American landscape with relatively few of the first order population
centers in the mix, is a fairly coincidental and probably transitory set of
circumstances. It could just as easily have transpired that; Massachusetts,
New York, Illinois,
Texas, California
and Washington
were the swing states with all those in-between being firmly in one camp or the
other. Who would bother to campaign outside the major population centers then? Hint, nobody. On the other hand if the founders had decided
to have the President elected by a “national popular vote”, yet statistics
showed that urbanites were recalcitrant in their voting habits but voters in
rural areas were easily swayed, it would be the rural areas that receive the
lion’s share of the attention. The bottom line is, politicians will go where
ever they have to to get the votes they need. In a dynamic situation any
attempt to “fix” the system to favor/protect a given group will be transitory
at best.
Now it is true that states with
fewer people have a higher per-capita number of electoral votes, but even so it
is not always rural states that reap this benefit. In fact, in the east, the
smaller states are basically just smaller slices of the vast coastal urbia. If
we were drawing the lines today we would probably just make Delaware
part of Maryland and perhaps not feel the need
for two Dakotas, on the other hand California,
Texas and even Florida could probably be made into multiple
states each. However, even though it is constitutionally permissible to combine
and divide states, the last time we did so over half a million people died, so
perhaps we should stick with the map we have. In this map few stats are purely
urban or purely rural but rather some mixture of the two.
So dispensing with talk radio’s
argument of third grade drivel (that’s right, I said it! or rather typed it)
let us look for a moment at the real reason for the Electoral College – it is
an elegant reason…from a more civilized age. It is of course Federalism. That’s
right Federalism.
Fed-er-al-ism
Federalism is the principle that
we are a federation of sovereign states rather than districts of a national
unity government or provinces of an evil continental empire. Federalism has
been under attack from nationalist and imperial forces for over a century but elections;
with the over arching backbone of the Electoral College remains one of
federalism’s last real strongholds. Although there have been some
constitutionally mandated universal expansions to the franchise, states
continue to hold fundamental control over their own elections – something that
is inherently foundational to any form of self governance. However, if states
are truly to have control over their elections they must be insulated from the
influence of other states, and to this end the Electoral College is an
ingenious interment. If Wyoming
wishes to give women the vote, the other states have nothing to complain about
as they still have only the electorals they are entitled to under the
Constitution to do with as they see fit.
This same principle holds true for; felons in Virginia,
illegals in California and aliens New Mexico. States are
also free to keep the polls open late or not, indulge in early voting or not, as
they see fit. A state could even let children vote if in wanted to. Since none
of these things has any affect on anyone in any other state.
Some like to talk about the
“national popular vote”, but this is simply a media fiction. There can be no
national popular vote because there is no national voting standard. But if
there were such a thing, we might all be highly suspicious of California taking two weeks to count their
votes when the other states took less than two days. Fortunately, thanks to the
Electoral College, its nobody else’s business what they were really doing for
those two weeks. As far as I am concerned, California can keep counting their votes
until next election if they like – federalism, it is a beautiful thing.
