The Electoral College is a Process, Not a Place
The founding fathers established the Electoral College as a compromise
IT’S 3 A.M. and I’ve had the first slurps from my bowl of coffee and thought I’d tidy up the pile of unfinished drafts I have on my shelf here on Medium. I’ve been busy organizing and launching Tell It Like It Was, a new music publication on Medium and it has taken up most of my “creative” time for the past few months. Unfortunately, other projects fell by the wayside.
Most of the drafts were snippets of comments I intended to leave on another writer’s story and were easily deleted. But one contained six points on the nature of the Electoral College and the rules regarding its behavior. It was written as a follow-up to a conversation/argument that I was engaged in with another Medium member but have since lost the momentum to keep going. I decided not to toss it but turn it into this article you’re reading!
“In this country, we have one great privilege which they don’t have in other countries: when a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable, the people can rise up and throw it off! That’s the finest asset we’ve got — the ballot box.”
— Mark Twain
The Electoral College clearly baffles many of us voters, regardless of which side of the chasm we sit. It also confuses members of the mainstream media and the international blogosphere and makes for millions of arguments on social media every four years.
Here are six points about the Electoral College, each taken from the National Archives. Each of these points came into play in the 2016 Presidential Election(s):
- “The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The founding fathers established Electoral College in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.” (National Archives)
- “Some states require Electors to cast their votes according to the popular vote. These pledges fall into two categories — Electors bound by state law and those bound by pledges to political parties.” (National Archives)
- “The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require that Electors be completely free to act as they choose and therefore, political parties may extract pledges from electors to vote for the parties’ nominees.” (National Archives)
- “Some state laws provide that so-called ‘faithless Electors’ may be subject to fines or may be disqualified for casting an invalid vote and be replaced by a substitute elector.” (National Archives)
- “The Supreme Court has not specifically ruled on the question of whether pledges and penalties for failure to vote as pledged may be enforced under the Constitution.” (National Archives)
- “No Elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged.” (National Archives)
So, to personalize this piece, I can comfortably state that I believe that there should be just one election, not two — as did most voters did before 2016.
I believe the popular vote should be that one election — as did most voters did before 2016.
Of course, I don’t expect anything to change in my lifetime, but then I didn’t expect the Cubs to win the World Series in that time period either.
Note: The quote attributed to Mark Twain originally appeared in an interview in the Boston Transcript on November 6, 1905. During this interview, he also remarked that “[The United States] gave to the world the spirit of liberty more than one hundred years ago, and now we are giving the world the spirit of graft.”
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Thanks for reading! Below are links to three articles that are essential to knowing what the Tell It Like It Was publication here on Medium is all about. Hope you’ll give it a look-see!