June 2019.

     It was another Fourth of July weekend in Portsmouth-Norfolk, so there were editions of The Virginian-Pilot to read.  In a letter written to respond to another letter, a gentleman named Ed Harvey defended the Electoral College’s antidemocratic bent.  Mr. Harvey seemingly suffers existential dread of being ruled by California and was unconcerned with the distorting effects of the Electoral College on the heft of the individual ballot from state to state.  One must wonder whether Mr. Harvey would feel the same if Ronald Reagan were still ensconced in the Golden State’s executive mansion.  Cue the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles.”  The Virginian-Pilot didn’t print my explication of the Electoral College’s perverse math.

Here’s Ed Harvey’s letter:

Ed Harvey, “Thank Founders for Electoral College,” The Virginian-Pilot, 4 July 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_aed183e8-9d08-11e9-9483-7bd082037a0b.html).

Here’s the unpublished letter:

     Behind Ed Harvey’s support for the Electoral College’s anointing of Donald Trump as president in 2016 lurks a morass of undemocratic assumptions.  Mr. Harvey blithely casts aside the ideal of one person, one vote without explaining why a vote cast in California should have only one third the value of one cast in Wyoming, the product of the Electoral College’s distorting impact on democracy.  Is Mr. Harvey pleased that a vote cast in our own Commonwealth likewise had only a third of the weight of a Wyoming vote? (“Population vs. Electoral Votes,” FairVote [https://www.fairvote.org/population_vs_electoral_votes]).

     Mr. Harvey’s apparent embrace of minority rule is troubling in an age of efforts to distort yet further electoral outcomes through high-tech gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation of social media, and meddling by malign foreign powers.

     Mr. Harvey should bear in mind that the arc of the nation’s history bends toward the forging of a more inclusive democracy, whether through the Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery), the Fourteenth (Black suffrage), the Seventeenth (direct election of Senators), the Nineteenth (women’s suffrage), or the Twenty-Sixth (suffrage for eighteen-year-olds).  The Electoral College has subverted the will of the majority twice in the past two decades.  Wouldn’t any thinking citizen want every voter to have an equal say in the outcome of the democratic process?  Or are we to assume that Mr. Harvey’s attitude toward the Electoral College would be less sanguine if it had yielded a different result in 2016?