Let's Abolish The Electoral College Already!

Psst....wanna know a dirty little secret about the Electoral College?

As I had noted in a previous post back in 2016, one of the reasons that the Founders, especially Alexander Hamilton, had designed the Electoral College, was as a supposed fail-safe to prevent a dangerous and unqualified demagogue (especially one with questionable foreign entanglements) from becoming President of the United States. (The 2016 election most ironically proved otherwise, of course.) Hamilton basically laid out the Federalist case for the Electoral College thusly, albeit combined with the sort of sneering elitism that even the most rabid current (or former) Trump supporters would ironically claim to dislike today.

But there was also a much darker reason behind the creation of the Electoral College as well.  To put it bluntly, it was explicitly designed to protect--wait for it--SLAVERY.  In fact, that was literally the only way to get the Anti-Federalists in the southern slave states to sign on to the US Constitution at all.  That is why less-populous states get a disproportionately large amount of electoral votes (since slave states often had as many slaves as free citizens and each slave only counted as 3/5 of a person in the census and was not allowed to vote).  And to this day, the Electoral College still remains a bastion of white (sorry, "rural") privilege for the same reason.  Not all that surprising, really.

Thus, the Electoral College is specious, obsolete, outmoded, and currently serves NO useful purpose anymore whatsoever, if it ever really did.  In fact, the winner-take-all aspect, over and above the small state bias, was the primary reason Trump won the 2016 election despite getting nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary, so it actually does more harm than good to this country.  Allocating electoral votes proportionally in each state instead of winner-take-all would go a long way to fixing it, and indeed Hillary would have won the electoral vote by changing just this aspect of the system.  It would also make it harder to effectively cheat as well.  But it would NOT solve all problems, and would in fact create a new problem--third-party candidates throwing the election into the House of Representatives when no one gets a 270 majority--unless candidates with a de minimis amount of the popular vote (say, below 5%) are then denied any electoral votes and/or only the top two or three candidates actually counting. 

Therefore, all things considered, the very best and simplest solution of all is to abolish the Electoral College altogether, and elect the president by straight national popular vote going forward.  And yesterday is not soon enough, since it clearly gives Republicans an unfair advantage in 2028 and beyond as well.

Of course, abolishing it entirely would require a constitutional amendment, and would thus be quite a long shot indeed, but there is a way to make it irrelevant by 2028.  The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is the way to do it, making it so that that only the winner of the national popular vote would win 270 electoral votes and become President, while still technically keeping the Electoral College in place.  And now with the 2026 Blue Tsunami, at long last, it looks like we FINALLY will have enough states to sign on to meet or even exceed the 270 threshold and thus make it a reality by 2028!  Sign and share!

Politics In One Lesson

There is, in fact, an eternal law of nature that at once explains just about everything, and even makes politics possible to finally understand. It is called The Law of Eristic Escalation:

Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos

By that, it pertains to any arbitrary or coercive imposition of order, which at least in the long run, actually causes disorder (chaos) to escalate.  Fenderson's Amendment further adds that "the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, BUT the more it does when it does."  Finally, the Thudthwacker Addendum still further adds that this relationship is nonlinear, thus rendering the resulting escalation of chaos completely unpredictable in terms of the original imposition of order.

We see the real world consequences of this in everything from Prohibition to the War on (people who use a few particular) Drugs to zero tolerance policies to Covid lockdowns to sexual repression and so much more.  And especially in the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age in the USA.  Any short-term benefits that these arbitrary and coercive impositions of order may provide is entirely outweighed when they inevitably backfire in the long run.  For example, Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), Asch and Levy (1987 and 1990), and Males (1986) illustrate this very nicely in the case of the 21 drinking age.

(This same logic applies to practically every "victimless crime" law, and pretty much every other form of government overreach, as well as various excessive socio-cultural repressions of all kinds.)

Perhaps that is why most bans on various things have historically had a track record that is quite lackluster at best.  Ironically, bans tend to give more power to the very things that they seek to ban.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, you finally understand politics.

P.S.  The Dutch seem to understand this better.  They even have a proverb:  "when you permit, you control", which is the antithesis of the American proverb, "when you permit, you promote".  Carl Jung would also likely have a field day with that as well.