October 4, 2024
A Conservative Case against the Electoral College
By Bradley Steffens
With the September 24 CNN/SSRS survey of likely voters showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a dead heat nationwide, a popular vote win and an Electoral College loss has become a real possibility for Republicans for the first time since 2004. In that election, an additional 118,602 votes for John Kerry in Ohio would have put the Massachusetts Democrat in the White House, even though he lost the popular vote to President George W. Bush by more than 3 million votes. This year, all the Democrats have to do is hold Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to retain the White House, even if Trump retakes Georgia and Arizona — states he won in 2016 — and adds Nevada to his total. Will Republicans continue to defend the Electoral College if it thwarts their presidential hopes while failing to reflect the popular will? I doubt it.
The Republican defense of the Electoral College has never been based on conservative principles. Indeed, the Electoral College is anathema to conservatism.
The heart of conservatism is the protection of individual rights. The Electoral College is not conservative, because it fails to protect the rights of individuals participating in presidential elections. Instead, it obliterates the votes of individuals in favor of a bloc-voting scheme that violates the principle of one person, one vote. Dividing the number of voters in a state by the number of electors they secured with their votes shows that in 2020, the vote of a person in Wyoming counted 3.45 times more toward the election of the president than did the vote of a person in California. Similar discrepancies occur across the electoral map.
The Republican defense of the Electoral College is rooted in partisanship, not conservatism. Republicans have come to think it provides the only path to the White House. Its supporters defend it with specious arguments connected to neither facts nor logic. Let us examine a couple of these fallacies.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/a_conservative_case_against_the_electoral_college.html
