Graham: Electoral College serves us well
Dave Graham of Smyrna was a candidate in the 2000 Republican primary for governor of Delaware. In 2014, he was the Independent Party of Delaware candidate for state attorney general in the general election.
“No country but US uses an electoral college” by Joshua Holzer was extremely well written from a historical perspective.
The Electoral College vote by state electors to select the president of the United States, as used with slight modifications since the founding of our republic, has served us well.
Of particular interest are the 2000 and 2016 results cited in the article, inasmuch as the Electoral College voted for the candidate who did not win the national popular vote.
In 2000, sitting Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat, won the national popular vote by less than 550,000 votes over George W. Bush, the Republican, yet lost the Electoral College vote 264-271, after the state of Florida “hanging-chad” controversy was decided 5-4 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Of particular note about that hotly contested 2000 presidential race is that, never in history up to that point, had a presidential candidate failed to win his home state — in this case, Tennessee, with 11 electoral votes, where Mr. Gore had served as a U.S. senator — thereby denying him the electoral ballots needed to win the Electoral College vote by 275-260 over Bush.
In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party, lost the Electoral College 227-304 to Republican Donald Trump, while winning the national popular vote by less than 2,900,000 votes, boosted by an over 4,200,000 popular vote margin in California.
However, if Hillary Clinton had followed the sound advice of her politically experienced husband, former President Bill Clinton — who told her it was a mistake not to physically campaign more in the historically blue states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, with 20, 10 and 13 electoral votes, respectively, in late October 2016, and where she subsequently lost by over 45,000, 23,000 and 11,000 votes, respectively — Mrs. Clinton could possibly have won the Electoral College over Trump 270-261.
In 2016, the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton was hampered by publicized allegations of having an unsecured server installed in her New York home, through which highly classified documents passed when she served as secretary of state, putting many at risk.
It is also alleged that, had she named and installed an inspector general for the Department of State, during her tenure from 2009-12 — a person who possibly would have enforced the policy against such dangerous, unsecured private servers — the United States would have had its first woman chief executive installed as President Hillary Rodham Clinton in January 2017.
Of particular interest and historically notable is that secretary of state Clinton’s Democratic successor, former U.S. senator from Massachusetts and 2004 Democratic candidate for president John Kerry, as one of his first acts as newly installed secretary of state in 2012, named inspector general Michael Horowitz.
During this contentious 2024 election year, the topic of the propriety of having an Electoral College versus a popular national vote to decide to winner of the U.S. presidential election, as demonstrated in the aforementioned published Opinion, has once again been broached in the media.
A review of the history of how the will of the governed in the United States of America is carried out by our Electoral College system appears to demonstrate that it serves us well.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
