To The Reader’s Forum:

Big government, Washington DC; Big Education, Boston; Big Wealth, New York City; Big Tech, Silicon Valley, name some others, like Big Welfare, Big Media, and Big Celebrities and their Bigness metastasizes in mega-cities where power, status, and money morph into a potent political machine making vast swaths of rural, small town and thinly populated areas of the nation politically irrelevant, if it were not, in part, for the Electoral College. The Electoral College pulls in the entire nation: rural communities, small cities and flyover country included. Every region of the nation bound together through the Electoral College is inclusive. The popular vote… not so much. It would turn the election into a contest focused only on densely populated areas to the exclusion of the rest of the country. Aren’t liberals for inclusion?

To take an analogy from sports, many people mistake the Electoral College for the Super Bowl. They want a single-game, winner-take-all result, but the Electoral College is not like that. It’s a World Series. More than just one game, it involves a series of contests with 50 states and the District of Columbia in the mix. Like the World Series in which the champion is the first team to win four games, the candidate which reaches 270 votes in the Electoral College is the president-elect. Typically the team with most runs wins the series, but that isn’t always so. The 1960 World Series was lopsided with Yankees outscoring the Pirates 55-27, but the Pirates won the series 4-3. Likewise, in the series of contests throughout the Electoral College, the candidate with the most popular votes almost always wins, except in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and, of course, 2016.

Tim Hoyer in the P-J (12/10) decried the Electoral College for it’s alleged origin in slavery. However, in the Federalist Papers which explained the Constitution to the average person, no mention of slavery was made as being a reason of origin for the Electoral College. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper 68 makes clear that the reason for the inclusion of the Electoral College was to avoid “tumult and disorder,” as well as “cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” It was yet another wise check and balance for our exceptional federalized system as it respected the diversity and sovereignty of each state within its participation of a national election. What’s there for liberals not to like about the diversity and inclusivity in the Electoral College? When the Electoral College trumps Hillary!

The Rev. Mel Mel McGinnis

Frewsburg