Patterico's Pontifications

11/25/2016

How to Destroy Arguments to Abolish the Electoral College — Plus, a Black Friday Deal

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:00 am



All the leftists want to abolish the Electoral College these days. If you want to beat down a leftist, it helps to know the history. You’ll have an advantage over leftists who don’t know it. Here’s a historical discussion of the origins of the Electoral College, from my three favorite history professors and authors: Tom Woods, Kevin Gutzman, and Brion McClahanan. It’s from Tom Woods’s podcast, a wonderful daily podcast I listen to regularly.

For those interested in learning more about the history and economics that leftist schools don’t bother to teach, you might consider checking out Tom Woods’s pet project Liberty Classroom. I am a lifetime member. He is having some steep discounts during this Black Friday weekend, beginning today. And I’m holding a contest myself (more about that below).

Tom Woods went to Harvard University, but resisted the siren call of the leftist elite there. For example, when one of his professors made it a requirement to buy his books from a store called Revolution Books — a place where portraits of communist mass murderers adorned the walls — Tom refused to do it. He debated communists at the dining hall. He managed to negotiate his way through the halls of leftism, ending up with a degree from Harvard in history with high honors, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Woods’s Liberty Classroom teaches history and economics from a liberty perspective that you probably didn’t get if you went to a traditional school. You’ll learn about the importance of the states to the Founding Fathers. You’ll learn about the presidents’ abuses of power, going back well before Barack Obama. You’ll get everything you need to bat down leftist arguments that, for example, the Great Depression helped our country, or that World War II brought us out of the Great Depression . . . or that the Electoral College is unfair and unAmerican.

Last year’s Black Friday sale is when I decided to become a lifetime member, after doing an annual membership for about 18 months. Over the last 2 1/2 years, I have listened to almost 450 lectures by Tom and his colleagues, on topics ranging from the History of Economic Thought, Logic, and Austrian Economics. So I’m a firm believer. There are 17 courses right now, and they add more regularly. And you can ask questions of the professors in the forums.

With his Master Membership, Tom is offering lifetime access to three courses he did on Government and Western Civilization — material I had already bought separately by the time I became a lifetime or “Master” member. So, if you become a lifetime member this holiday weekend, you’ll pay less than I did. Also, they offer excellent affiliate bonuses, so if you have a couple of friends you can refer using an affiliate link, such as those I am using in this post, your membership will pay for itself.

To help promote Tom’s Black Friday sale, I am holding a contest and providing some incentives of my own. Full details can be read at this page, including the chance to win a free year of Amazon Prime, paid for by yours truly. Also, you can commission posts by me, or submit guest posts, at this here blog.

To learn more about what Liberty Classroom has to offer, you can check out their free stuff here, including half of their course on U.S. Constitutional Law, taught by Professors Gutzman and McClanahan from the Electoral College discussion above.

So I hope you’ll take a moment to check out Liberty Classroom and take advantage of the deep discounts, starting today, through and including Monday, November 28.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

15 Responses to “How to Destroy Arguments to Abolish the Electoral College — Plus, a Black Friday Deal”

  1. So far two people — two! — have taken advantage of the opportunity.

    This means if you do as well, as of right now, you have a 1 in 3 chance of free Amazon Prime for year. The most basic membership is $62 today.

    So the question is: do you feel lucky?

    Well, do you?

    Patterico (d8dcea)

  2. I am giving this offer some very serious thought. Thank you for your prompts.

    felipe (023cc9)

  3. Weighing each state’s presidential vote by their congressional representatives makes sense as a way to keep populous cities from exploiting people who live in less-populated regions.
    However, I haven’t heard any good reasons for choosing electors, who then vote however they want, rather than simply counting up the electoral votes directly. Getting rid of that bottleneck wouldn’t change anything about the results, and would save a bit of time & effort.

    CayleyGraph (cab462)

  4. felipe,

    Yeah, I hate to feel like a nag, but I’d also hate for people to decide they would benefit from this, but forget about it until after the deals are over. It’s basically silly to join any other time of year. So, the prompts will continue until morale improves.

    My favorite professors are Woods himself, Gutzmsn, McClanahan, and Bob Murphy. I’m just about done with Bob’s History of Economic Thought Part 1. Can’t wait for Part 2. He is one of the more entertaining speakers I know.

    Herbener, who teaches Austrian economics, is a genius. But he’s more matter of fact and you have to pay a little closer attention. But he’s so logical and unflappable that he makes Austrian economics sound like the only reasonable way to look at economics. Far from fringe, it seems ulta-sensible and even irrefutable when he talks about it.

    Patterico (d8dcea)

  5. However, I haven’t heard any good reasons for choosing electors, who then vote however they want, rather than simply counting up the electoral votes directly. Getting rid of that bottleneck wouldn’t change anything about the results, and would save a bit of time & effort.

    Try listening to the podcast. It’s been a couple of days since I listened, but I’m pretty sure they address that early on.

    Patterico (d8dcea)

  6. @CayleyGraph:However, I haven’t heard any good reasons for choosing electors, who then vote however they want, rather than simply counting up the electoral votes directly.

    Do you mean today, or do you mean in 1789?

    In 1789 of course there was no universal suffrage. Only men owning property worth so much per year were allowed to vote at all. They were considered to represent the community, and so Electors chosen by state legislatures was not a stretch. Any number of historical precedents were in their minds then.

    As for today, it’s a path dependence. The Constitution says the Electors need to fill out the ballots. The electors chosen by the state legislatures are the ones representing the winner of the state election. If you want to open that process, you need a Constitutional amendment, and while the Electoral College is the most frequent topic of proposed amendments, no proposed change is less unacceptable to someone than the current system is, and so we’re stuck with it.

    Gabriel Hanna (9b1f4a)

  7. All the leftists want to abolish the Electoral College these days.

    Wrong.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  8. Patterico

    The $62, $85 and $327 prices the Black Friday rates?

    Thanks
    Karen

    Sunny (d7fa2b)

  9. Greetings:

    What about “Dancing with the gal what brung ya” as an argument ???

    11B40 (6abb5c)

  10. I’ll finish it for you: “punk”. Excellent post. But something tells me some people are way past the point of being swayed by reason or logic. Oh well, when I form my military junta and seize power, the electoral college will be the least of your worries you worthless sods….er, I mean my fellow Americans.

    Estarcarus (5252be)

  11. The simplest way to address this issue is to simply point out that anyone favoring abolishing the Electoral College should also admit that they would support wiping out the entire concept of a nation comprised of 50 states holding their own recognized sovereignty.

    Just admit that what they really one is a single nation-state comprised of 300 million people. Eliminate all governmental entities other than the federal government and submit to central planning.

    The functional equivalent would be China.

    shipwreckedcrew (56b591)

  12. If someone advocates selecting the President by popular vote, then we should follow the lead of Mexico.

    Mexico requires any voter to obtain a tamper-proof, photo-identification card. That card must be presented when voting to prevent any fraud. Right now each of the 50 states has its own criteria for registration of voters and determining which votes may be legitimately cast. California has an extremely lax system of registration and allowance of votes being cast by persons not on the voter rolls in a precinct that was certainly exploited by illegal immigrant voters. Don’t even mention the problem of mail-in ballots where you don’t even have to present identification to a live government official!

    So no way can you have a uniform counting of votes across all 50 states with 50 different voting systems.

    Also, a plurality of the popular vote is not a majority of all voters. Like France, we should hold runoff election until someone receives more than 50% of the vote.

    How many Democrats are in favor of adoption of a national tamper-proof identification card required for voting? Yeah, because it would be a racist policy to expect American minority groups to adhere to guidelines expected of Mexican citizens.

    Next time you hear a leftist excoriating the electoral college, just bypass the Founding Fathers stuff and cut to the chase of what it really takes to conduct an election using the national popular vote count.

    El Gipper (510612)

  13. Here is a post I had long ago on my old blog, updated for events since 2000.

    After the 2000 election, most Democrats, and many others, jumped all over the “anachronistic” Electoral College, decrying it as a vestige of the past that needs reform or elimination. Why not just have a national vote for President? After all states don’t mean all that much any more. Others asked “why winner-takes-all in each state?” Let’s divvy it up by Congressional seat, they suggested (Maine and Nebraska do just this (although it didn’t matter in 2000)). Or perhaps apportion the electoral vote to the percentage each candidate won in the state?

    I like none of these — of all the arrangements, the electoral college still seems best. While it has the obvious (and recently demonstrated) “defect” of deciding close elections differently than the popular vote, this effect is intentional, and serves a purpose.

    The Framer’s reasons for an Electoral College were several. In order to accomodate the small-state/big-state compromise that led to the 2-vote-per-state Senate, they needed a method to allow small states slightly greater weight in selecting a President. There was great fear that, in a strict popular vote election, the urban states would decide all contests, and no candidate would even consider the issues of the smaller and rural states. Yet they wanted the election conducted in the States, not in Congress. The EC solved this, providing a tie-breaker in close elections where the candidate taking the most states (of any size) has an advantage (the two “senate seat” votes). This is precisely what happened in 2000.

    Another reason is what we would today call a “firewall.” Even in 1787, state politics were dicey enough that no one in, say, Virginia, wanted to absolutely rely on vote-counting in, say, New Jersey. After all, Eldridge Gerry (inventor of the “gerrymander”) was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. In more recent years, vote-counting in Chicago and St. Louis has been quite suspect. In a close election for President, there would be great temptation for local officials to pad the vote if the election was strictly by popular vote. Even with the EC it happens (e.g. 1960 Chicago), but the damage cannot extend past the given state’s electors. Note that much of the controversy in Florida in 2000 involved local vote counting practices, state election official’s behavior, and the Florida Supreme Court’s wholesale rewriting of election law. Which brings up the next point…

    A third (and probably more modern) reason is that recounts in a close election are also limited to the state or states in question. Consider the mess in Florida. Then consider the mess of a nationwide recount, with 50 state Supreme Courts, 50 sets of state election officials, and tens of thousands of local election boards. Some of whom are going to cheat to get their man over. There is no natural closure in a close election in this kind of system. We’d still be at it.

    Lastly, there is the matter of needing a majority. In the electoral vote system, it is quite possible to have a majority of electoral votes without a majority of popular votes — the last President to be elected with a popular vote majority was George Bush the Elder*. Clinton, Carter, Nixon (1968) and Kennedy all were elected with less than 50% of the popular vote. But the EC all gave them a majority as the splinter party votes were eliminated at the state level. Of third-party candidates in recent history, only George Wallace in 1968 won any states. In a direct vote system, the requirement for a majority would be necessarily abolished. This is perhaps acceptable, but could lead to Presidents elected with over 60% opposition.

    Now, what about the “fairer” Congressional-district apportionment, or straight state-wide vote apportionment, rather than winner-take all? The first will be a non-starter until there is no such thing as a Gerrymander. It is easy to “fix” the partisan outcome in a congressional district by careful attention to district line drawing. Wonderously odd results can be manufactured. In 1988, the two major parties polled even for Congress, but the Democrats gained a large majority of seats due to gerrymandering. The second option allows significant third-party vote totals, or nearly any such vote totals in a close election, to throw the whole thing into the House of Representatives. Nader would have received enough electoral votes in 2000 in this system to throw the election into the House (and therefore to Bush). Historically, this has been a bad thing, so I see no reason to make it more likely.

    One last note, of the suggested alternate choices, only a popular vote method elects Gore in 2000. No matter how you apportion electoral votes (winner-takes-all, congressional district or statewise proportional) Bush wins (if only in the House), and in the congressional district system, Bush wins handily.

    ************
    2016 UPDATE:

    *Yes, Obama won a majority in 2008 and 2012, and W did the same in 2004. Before that the last majority was in 1988.

    In 2016, Clinton won about 1.7% more popular votes but lost the electoral college 306-232. In part this was because Trump won 30 states (plus a vote from Maine) while Hillary won 20 plus DC. But mostly it was becasue Hilalry’s popular vote came from landslide wins in a few large states (CA, NY, IL) while Trump was winning narrowly in many places.

    Allocating the 2016 electoral vote proportionately (and fractionally to avoid rounding issues), Hillary would lead slightly (259-256 with 23 votes going to others). The election goes to the House, where the GOP controls.

    Allocating the 2016 electoral vote the same way, but with the 2 “Senate votes” going to the state winner, Trump leads 265-254 with 19 votes going to the others. Again the election goes to the House, where the GOP controls.

    A detailed breakdown by Congressional district for 2016 isn’t available, but in 2012 if the election had been decided by Congressional District (again with the 2 extras going to the state winner), Romney would have won 274-264. This method seems actually worse. Considering the claimed GOP gerrymander of many states, it’s hard to see how this would help Hillary Clinton in 2016.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  14. Explain it in terms of baseball. Suppose one team in the World Series loses the first three games spectacularly, let’s say 5-0. Then they pick up their game and win the next four games by the skin of their teeth, 1-0. Who wins the series? The team that scored 15 home runs, or the one that only scored 4?

    Milhouse (40ca7b)

  15. The Constitution expressly favors the candidate who has the widest support. Trump won 9 more states than Clinton, and that’s 18 electoral votes right there. And election that was going to be 269-269 is now 287-251. Bush won for this reason alone. Trump was helped in that Hillary won overwhelmingly a a few places.

    In baseball, it’s like a word series won 4-2, but the losing team won those 2 games 13-2 and lost the other four 4-3.

    Kevin M (25bbee)


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