Why We Need the Electoral College

There's a lot of talk, as there is in any presidential election year, about abolishing the Electoral College. It always centers around "one person, one vote" and they way that the votes of the citizens of, say, Wyoming have more clout than those of, say, California. That the EC, in other words, dilutes the value of votes in the most populous states and increases the value of those in the least populous states.

Further, it is often said that the EC was created by the Founding Fathers to keep the Southern States from rejecting the Constitution and is, thus, inherently racist.

All the above may be true.

But it neglects the one problem with a direct popular vote for President: It would, effectively, disenfranchise the citizens of about two-thirds of the states. How? Let me explain: the bulk of the population of the United States now resides in the urban centers of a double handful of states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and California. There are enough voters in just the big cities and surrounding suburbs of those states, not even counting their rural and exurban populations (and two of them, NJ and CT, don't really have rural areas), to be a majority of voters in a Presidential election...in fact, to be an overwhelming majority.

It might be true that the two biggest cities in Texas--Dallas and Houston--would be outliers in that calculation, that they--unlike the other major metropolises--would be more likely to vote Republican than Democrat (but I'm not really sure of that). Still, the major metro areas of other states--Denver and Seattle, for instance--would likely take up the slack.

What do you think would happen if we elected a President in a system where only urban dwellers have a real voice in the result? How would the farmers of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas react? What would the miners and oil riggers of West Virginia and Oklahoma think? Do you think they would simply acquiesce in a system that essentially treated them as irrelevant?

And they would be irrelevant, at least politically. No President would feel any need to invite their representatives to the table. What they would not be is irrelevant in other ways. They would still be relevant economically....but their economic importance would not grant them any political power any longer.

No, the EC is now the way we keep the energy belt and bread basket of this nation as supporters of the Constitution...and we, who dwell in the big cities, better keep that in mind.