Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Clinton, to name two, are advocating scrapping the Electoral College and implementing a direct democracy. Yet as Roger Kimball outlines in Spectator.us, our country’s Founders feared the encroachment of the mob and constructed the EC as a buffer between that ‘blunt monster with uncounted heads/the still-discordant wavering multitude’ and its leaders.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, history’s pages were littered with experiments in direct democracy, which tended to be ‘as short in their lives’ as they were ‘violent in their deaths.’
From Mr. Kimball:
The distribution of an equal number of senators to the states was a brilliant device to filter the passions of the people and, moreover, to protect the interests of minorities in the smaller states.
Why should Rhode Island, say, join a union in which rich, populous, and powerful Virginia would threaten its independence and sovereignty? Endowing each state with an equal number of senators while varying the number of House Representatives by population was a clever compromise to equalise influence while still giving voice to the people.
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