Electoral College has long history

I wish to correct the misinformation recently offered by Dale Putnam.

The Electoral College was not created to ensure that the president represented all parts of the country. It exists for two reasons. First, the founding fathers feared that a direct popular vote would allow a demagogue to win the presidency by manipulating the people. They thought the Electoral College would ensure that only a qualified person could win the office. Read Hamilton’s Federalist Paper 68 to confirm this. Our last election kind of blew up that idea.

Second, the smaller states were given more voting clout than larger states as an act of compromise at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. That compromise convinced those smaller states to join the union. There is nothing that requires presidential elections to be “winner take all” at the state level and that is what needs to change. It should be proportional.

The principle of “One Man, One Vote” is in our constitution and has been upheld by the courts many times. It doesn’t allow us to exclude California from the count as Putnam hypothesizes. If it did we could exclude Texas which would give Clinton the election.

Our system of government does not permit less populated areas of our country to be ignored. That is why each state has an equal number of senators. Twenty-six states that hold only 18 percent of the American population can block legislation in that body. The same principle is true at the state level.

This story was originally published February 10, 2017 at 6:39 PM with the headline "Electoral College has long history."