The purpose in the Electoral College, as the Founding Fathers foresaw, was to ensure that small, rural states would retain importance in national elections, explains Victor Davis Hanson in NRO.
What the Electoral College Does
- The Electoral College lessens the chance of voting fraud affecting the outcome of a national vote by compartmentalizing the outcome among the various states.
- It usually turns the presidential election into a contest between two major parties that alone have the resources to campaign nationwide.
The EC is antithetical to the parliamentary systems of Europe, where a multiplicity of small extremist parties “form and break coalitions to select heads of state, often without transparency.”
Hard to Change the U.S. Constitution
Historically, an amendment has required a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and an additional ratification by three-fourths of the states through votes of their legislatures.
There is a chance that some states could render void the Electoral College without formally amending the Constitution.
To circumvent the Constitution, Democrats have pushed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among a group of states that would force state electors to vote in accordance with the national popular vote and ignore their own state tallies.
Already, 15 states totaling 73 percent of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency have joined.
Constitutional Republic, not a Radical Democracy
In order to check and balance popular and often volatile public opinion, explains Mr. Hanson, the Founders created an upper-house Senate that would slow down the pulse of the more populist House of Representatives.
