Wed 10/28 @ 7PM
The anti-democratic, obsolete Electoral College is the topic of a virtual talk by Supreme Court journalist and New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, hosted by the Hudson Library and Historical Society.
Twenty years ago, the Electoral College was an obscure constitutional provision to most Americans, who had reason to assume that whichever candidate got the most votes became president.
Then came Florida 2000. Despite Al Gore garnering half a million more votes than George Bush, Bush was declared the winner more than a month after Election Day, with the extended conflict seeing him inaugurated with historical unpopularity that only 9/11 rescued him from (Sadly, a recount of the Florida ballots, which found Al Gore actually carried the state, was buried by the media because it was completed just after 9/11 and the media felt we should be uniting around our president).
Could it get worse? It did! In 2016, 90,000 votes in key electoral states handed the presidency to the candidate who got nearly THREE MILLION fewer votes than the popular vote winner. That means that for 12 of the 20 years of the 21stcentury, our president has been someone the majority of Americans didn’t want. The U.S. is the only nation where a system exists that enables this.
Abolishing the Electoral College has been a topic of conversation for years, although given that the last two Republican presidents were only elected due to its existence, the right is framing its abolition as a “power grab.” It’s a relic of a time when all campaigning was face-to-face and results were slow to be tabulated, prior to the invention of trains and the telegraph (1860ish). It’s also a relic of a time when the largest states had about ten times more population than the smallest; now California has more than 65 times more people than Wyoming. That gives outsized influence to sparsely populated states.
Wegman will share the history of the Electoral College, and the not entirely laudatory reasons it was created (partly an inducement to slave-holding states), as well as why a functioning democracy depends on relegating it to history.
Copies of his book will be available for purchase courtesy of the Learned Owl Book Shop. Registration is required; registrants will get an email about how to log into the talk. Go here to register.
96 Library Street, Hudson, OH 44236
2 Responses to “Journalist Talks About Why We Need to Abolish the Electoral College”
Roger Hevessy
First of all, those that never heard of the Electoral College are not conscientious citizens and voters.
Where were they in government history classes?
Secondly, if the abolishment of the College occurs, politicians will campaign only in the most populous cities.
Outlying geography will never hear from a politician.
Chuck
Interesting.