Electoral College: Bad or good?

Electoral College: Bad or good?

Dec. 7, 2000

STRAIGHT TALK
By Muriel Sluyter

Greetings, Gentle Reader,

The courts are putting an end to this election mess, but, wow! Have we ever been getting an education!

Now there is a renewed attack on the Electoral College. It is logical for people living in "ant colonies" to want to abolish it, especially if they live on a coast. Ninety percent of Americans live within 200 miles of a coast, and without the Electoral College, they would elect our presidents and we would have nothing to say about it. In fact, in Southern California, our presidents would be elected by people living within 100 miles of the coast. Isn’t that great? They think so.

So, what does that mean for the 10 percent of us who live in the other approximately 2,600 miles of our country (going from east to west)? We would still be expected to grow food, but we would have to do it under rules established by ant colony occupants. Do they know anything about growing food? Not much, but are we foolish enough to think that would keep them from deciding how it is to be done?

Let’s consider lawsuits filed against ranchers by hikers, offended by both cows and their manure. Their goal is to get cows out of forests. They eat hamburgers, hotdogs and steaks; they wear leather hiking boots, but hate the cows that provide them. Lawsuits permit the 90 percent to ride roughshod over the 10 percent.

How about the wildfires that burned up half the West last summer? Many were caused by foolish management practices of government people. Since most of the West has been confiscated by the federal government, they had a great opportunity to show us just how good they are at that sort of thing.

Back to the Electoral College: How does it really work? Every state gets one vote for each of its two U.S. senators and one for each of its U.S. representatives. We have Sens. Allard and Campbell (two votes), then we have six representatives (six more votes). Our districts have fewer people than do districts in heavily populated areas of California, Florida or New York, but we still get one vote for each of our districts, just as they get one vote for each of theirs.

North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming each have two senators and one U.S. representative district, giving them three votes apiece. Without the Electoral College, using a one man, one vote system, they would only have as many votes as they have voters, and they don’t have enough voters to give them any political power at all.

To put it succinctly, because of the Electoral College, the vote of one in Wyoming carries as much weight as the votes of about five men in heavily populated southern California. Do they need that extra political clout to protect themselves from the unrealistic demands of ant colony inhabitants? Oh, yes! They surely do, as do we.

Those who want to abolish the Electoral College know precisely what they are doing. They know that they, the 90 percent, could take all political power away from those of us who live in the interior of this country. That’s why they are doing it.

Too few of us interior types vote the way the ant hill people want us to vote. They have moved into our Western states in droves, establishing ant colonies out here, but too many of us still vote contrary to their wishes, so the next step is to abolish the Electoral College.

PS: Too much has been going on to publish answers to last month’s test. If you still want them, give me a call.