Recently, Nevada became the 15th state to pass a measure granting its Electoral College votes to the candidate winning the nationwide popular vote regardless of how the citizens of their own State voted. This movement is being led by an organization called National Popular Vote. The organization's aim is to disrupt the balance between the States and have intentionally launched this arrow aimed at America’s Heartland. Their objective is to influence a group of States whose electoral votes total 270, which is the number needed to win the presidency, into an alliance binding them to follow a majority vote attainable by a combination of New York, New England, and the Left Coast without regard to how the citizens of the States voted. During the Constitutional Convention the Framers vigorously debated how the government they were designing should operate. When looking at the election of the chief executive they rejected direct democracy because they believed it was too prone to result in a majority that would act as a tyrant.
Looking back across time this collection of largely homeschooled patriots drew upon their knowledge of history and philosophy. Specifically they looked to the writings of Plato who wrote in the Republic that the people or the demos, as they were called in Greek could not be trusted because they would inevitably vote for whoever promised to meet their desires of the moment even if that meant taking from others or from the national treasury. Plato thought the majority would lack the knowledge and wisdom to make sound choices. Of course he didn’t know about our enlightened American education system that spends more time indoctrinating the young skulls about Al Gore’s Climate hoax religion than it does about the founding of this country.
When you read Federalist 9 (Hamilton), Federalist 10, and Federalist 51 (Madison), these deep thinking political theorists identified three key elements they felt existed to help give the new United States a chance for success: its population size, geographic size, and the differing interests of the independent States. In America today intolerant minority factions can be whipped up into tyrannical majorities in a way the Framers never imagined. At the very time in our history when we are more vulnerable than ever to manipulated majority rule the National Popular Vote movement wants us to embrace direct democracy at the presidential level. The Framers designed a system of government limited in scope and shackled by the Constitution. A system designed to do little as opposed to doing too much.
The Electoral College is the tool given to us by the Framers to make sure all of the States have a voice that is heard. However, if enough States adopt the National Popular Vote this safeguard will be neutralized, not through amending the Constitution but instead by doing an end-run around it. If this happens we’ll take a long step towards the dystopian vision our Framers sought to avoid: the tyranny of the majority.
How do these political manipulators convince people to vote to make their future votes irrelevant? Given today's media, you can probably fool enough people to convince a majority to vote themselves onto the sidelines of History. If this arrow finds its mark a bicoastal electoral juggernaut will trample the voice of the Heartland into the dust of History. - Dr. Robert Owens
