Re: Nov. 19 David Harsanyi column.
It was interesting to see David Harsanyi lauding the foresight of the Founding Fathers in setting up the Electoral College. Sadly, he wasn’t around when that train left the station.
If the Electoral College they created were in effect in 2016, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton, nor any other presidential candidate, would be on your ballot. You would choose people from your district whose judgment you trusted, and they would go to Washington and elect a president on the basis of that judgment. This year, both Trump and Clinton would have been eliminated in their first round of voting.
But that system lasted only a couple of decades, before states began holding statewide popular elections and binding their electors to those outcomes, effectively short-circuiting the Founders’ plan. What we have today is neither fish nor fowl, and Alexander Hamilton was so outraged he tried to propose an amendment to put a stop to it.
Ralph Jones, Aurora
In the debate concerning the Electoral College, there has been little discussion about the expectations of the framers who devised this method of electing the president. Clearly, they rejected a popular vote. However, they never expected any candidate to win a majority of the electoral vote. They thought that voters would support favorite sons who would have little appeal in other regions of the nation. As a result, the outcome of the election would be determined by the House of Representatives. It did not turn out this way, except in 1800 and 1824, because of the creation of national political parties. Until the 12th Amendment, electors could vote for any two candidates, which led in 1796 to the election of a president (John Adams) and a vice president (Thomas Jefferson) from different parties.
Clearly, at its inception, the Electoral College was not a work of genius. Nor, if genius is the ability to see into future, did the framers anticipate the democratic drift of the nation. They would be surprised to learn that Congress and the Supreme Court included women, all races and religions, or that an African-American had served two terms as president and that a woman had won the popular vote in 2016.
Dolph Grundman, Arvada
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