THE PURPOSE OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Comes now the inevitable pack of morons with their utterly predictable bitching about Hillary Clinton having been "cheated" out of the Presidency by the "antiquated" "outmoded" "un-democratic" Electoral College. This, in the face of the fact that Clinton's alleged "popular majority" was smaller than the margin of error contained in our vote-tallying methods and technology.

There are many false assumptions about the Electoral College. In 2000, when everyone knew the Bush vs. Gore vote was going to be close, the Washington Post newspaper's "Kids' Post" section told its young readers that the Electoral College existed to cancel out the votes of those who elected an "unacceptable" choice of the voters. But when Bush won the College but not - and by the way by the same inside-the-margin-of-error amount as this time - the popular nationwide vote, the "Kids' Post" was quick to explain that the Electoral College was an antiquated and obsolete method of choosing a President. 

Actually, the Electoral College was designed so that candidates for President would have to woo more than just the residents of the largest population centers of the nation. The College is made up of the number of members of the House and the Senate from each state, plus three each from the District of Columbia and some other American territories and possessions. Thus, you cannot take Ohio just by getting votes in Cleveland, you also must convince Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, and even itty-bitty Chilicotthe and Vandalia. Because of the Electoral College, every four years "flyover country" becomes VERY important. Without it, one party would have only to clench the vote in four or five major population centers, and to hell what the people in "flyover country" want or need. Their votes would be a mere formality for appearances sake. 

Now there is a petition circulating demanding that the Electors change their assigned votes when they meet to formally elect the President. The riots in the streets right now are part and parcel of an effort to intimidate them into doing just that. Not bloody likely, in our opinion, because most states have laws on the books to make breaking faith as an assigned Elector a felony offense. 

But these riots against President-Elect Trump only serve to show that without the Electoral College, we would be reduced to a direct democracy, which in the end is nothing but mob rule. Which is why the Founders put the College in place: to prevent the U.S. from becoming what Venezuela is today. Thank God for that.