• March 28, 2024

Liberal Loon Professor Says Electoral College is Unconstitutional

leon

Leon Friedman, “Distinguished Professor of Civil Liberties Law at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law, Hofstra University has declared that the electoral college is unconstitutional even though he admits it’s written into the constitution.  Try wrapping your head around that for a moment.  He claims the Electoral College was developed because of slavery and the 3/5ths solution.  That is patently false.  The Electoral College was developed before the 3/5ths solution.  (Ironically, a certain play’s cast called the Electoral College an abomination.  Someone should tell them that the Electoral College was the brainchild of Hamilton)

The real reason for the Electoral College was to prevent 4 states from deciding every presidential election.  At the time, Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland could have prevented the other 9 states for having a voice in selecting a president.  Remember, the country did not consist of 13 parts.  The proposed country would be a partnership between 13 colonies.  You couldn’t coerce them, you had to win them over.  The two houses of congress and the Electoral College did that.

Friedman writes, in part:

That [Electoral College] system has allowed the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency in five of our 56 Presidential elections. Such a system would be illegal in any state or local election.

But it is contained in the Constitution. Can a section of the Constitution itself be unconstitutional? The answer is yes.

We are all aware by now that we do not vote directly for a candidate in a Presidential election. We vote for electors who will (presumably) vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in the state, when the college meets after the election (Dec. 19, 2016).

The number of representatives was established in the Constitution by adding to the regular population, “three fifths of all other Persons.” The “other Persons” of course were the slaves.

That system entitled [slave] states to obtain fourteen more representatives than they would have obtained if the apportionment of representatives was based only on the free population.

That discrepancy carried over to the electoral college. Southern states also received extra electoral votes because it had additional members of Congress under the three/fifths system.

One candidate winning the popular vote and one winning the Electoral isn’t that rare.  Donald Trump is now the 45th president and 5 presidents have been elected without winning the popular vote.  Hillary now leads by 1.5 million votes but she won California by 2.9 million votes and New York by 1.5 million.  Therefore in just 2 states, Hillary won the popular vote by 4.4 million votes.  In the other 48 states, Trump won the popular vote by 2.9 million.  That’s why we have an electoral college.

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