Noemie Emery: The old college try
by Noemie Emery
| March 26, 2019 12:00 AM
No, the Electoral College isn’t a plot. Yes, it is needed.
Without it, the recount in the 2000 election could have gone on forever. Without it, we could never have founded the union, as the small states would have never accepted the loss of their power. Without it, candidates could win by running up numbers among their own backers, whereas now it takes a diverse coalition with backing both deep and wide.
This isn’t to say that we haven’t seen oddities, such as for instance in 2016. Never had two candidates been so disliked and dishonest, never were votes cast with such apprehension, and never had the gap between the electoral vote and the popular vote been so wide and so glaring, or so entirely caused by one state.
The claim of the Left, from Nov. 9 onward, has been that the Electoral College defied the will of the nation by giving the White House to Trump. But this isn’t quite accurate. The will of 49 of the 50 states of the union combined was to elect Trump by a popular vote margin of about 1.5 million. California, the biggest and most populous state in the union and a political and cultural outlier by anyone’s standards, voted for Democrats by a massive two-to-one-margin, giving Clinton her popular vote win.
more
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/noemie-emery-the-old-college-try
