Capitol Report
By State Representative, Leon D. Young
Leon D. Young
I hear it all too often, as I make my rounds throughout my district: “My vote doesn’t matter, so why should I make the effort to vote?” Following last week’s shocking election, there is considerable anger and fear being felt across the nation. And, many feel that the Electoral College is a relic that has seen its day.
This sense that the election was rigged, or stolen, from Hillary Clinton has been heightened by the fact that she won the popular vote convincingly – 1.5 million votes.
But, as we have seen twice in the last sixteen years, and now have come to understand, the candidate who receives an absolute majority of electoral votes (currently 270) for the office of president or of vice president is elected to that office.
This begs the obvious question: Why was the Electoral College necessary in the first place? The truth of the matter is this: The founders struggled for months to devise a way to select the President and Vice President.
The Electoral College resulted as a compromise from this debate. Several formats were considered for electing the president and vice president — having Congress vote, having the state legislatures choose, using a direct popular vote — before deciding on the present Electoral College format. And, as we now know, the Electoral College was established in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the Electoral College is the formal body which elects the President and Vice President of the United States.
Each state has as many “electors” in the Electoral College as it has Representatives and Senators in the United States Congress, and the District of Columbia has three electors. When voters go to the polls in a Presidential election, they are voting for the slate of electors vowing to cast their ballots for that ticket in the Electoral College.
This raises another intriguing question: Is the Electoral College system fair? Just look at the impact this system had on the 2016 race: Donald Trump won Pennsylvania and Florida by a combined margin of about 200,000 votes to earn 49 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, won Massachusetts by almost a million votes but earned only 11 electoral votes.
Depending on how your candidate fared in this recent presidential election, you may, or may not, subscribe to the Electoral College process. Alexander Hamilton, a proponent of the Electoral College system, wrote in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”
With I wonder what Hamilton would say now in the wake of last week’s stunning presidential election?