Electoral College
While complaining about her loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton claims that the “Electoral College is an abomination” for “obvious reasons.”
IN FACT, the Electoral College is a safeguard against mobocracy, which the authors of the Constitution rejected because it allows the majority to easily violate the rights of the minority. Here are the specifics:
- Early during the convention at which the U.S. Constitution was written, James Madison, the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights, declared that the new government they were creating must provide “more effectually for the security of private rights and the steady dispensation of Justice.”
- He then stressed that violations of these ideals “had more perhaps than any thing else, produced this convention.”
- Madison then singled out “democracy” as the cause of those abuses and pointed out that all societies are “divided into different Sects, Factions, and interests,” and “where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.”
- Continuing, he stated that this is “verified by the histories of every country” and is the cause of slavery, “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
- Thus, Madison emphasized that it was the duty of the Convention to “frame a republican system” of government that would better “guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.”
- Elaborating on that point, Madison stated that the “only defense against the inconveniencies of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government” is to “divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties, that in the first place a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have a common interest separate from that of the whole or of the minority; and in the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it.”
- Other delegates to the Convention concurred, like Edmund Randolph of Virginia, who observed “that the general object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the U.S. labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
- For the purpose of curbing such evils, Madison and the other framers of the Constitution developed a system of checks and balances on the powers of the government that they formed, such as the separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the Constitutional amendment process, the Bill of Rights, and the Electoral College.
- The Electoral College was designed to prevent heavily populated states from dominating the election for president. As shown in the electoral precinct map from Washington State University professor Ryne Rohla, the vast majority of America’s communities voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet Hillary Clinton’s popular vote count was higher, mainly due to support in big cities.
- In essays explaining the Constitution’s protections against mob rule and government power, Madison wrote, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
- Those principles produced the U.S. Constitution, which is the world’s longest-standing written constitution and an exemplar for many other countries that have copied its provisions into their constitutions.
