{"id":17918,"date":"2016-11-12T01:05:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-12T01:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=17918"},"modified":"2016-11-12T01:05:30","modified_gmt":"2016-11-12T01:05:30","slug":"now-about-the-electoral-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=17918","title":{"rendered":"Now … about the Electoral College"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Election Night 2016 proved to be one for the books.<\/p>\n

Donald J. Trump got elected president of the United States despite being outvoted by Hillary Rodham Clinton.<\/p>\n

But wait! He won more electoral votes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

They’re still counting ballots and it appears that Clinton’s vote lead will expand before they’re all done.<\/p>\n

Then came the question from one of the folks attending\u00a0an election watch party at some friends’ house: Is the Electoral College in the U.S. Constitution?<\/p>\n

Yes it is. Article II lays out the rules for the Electoral College. You know how it goes: We aren’t voting directly for president; we’re voting for electors who then meet in December to cast their votes for president in accordance — supposedly — with the majority of voters from their respective states.<\/p>\n

I’ve found myself defending the Electoral College to people abroad who cannot understand how it works, or why the founders created the system. In November 2000, for example, my wife and I were in Greece, the cradle of western civilization and the birthplace of democracy. The Greeks are quite sophisticated about these things. However, they couldn’t quite grasp the idea of one candidate — Al Gore — getting more votes than George W. Bush, but losing the election.<\/em> The 2000 presidential election was still in doubt while my wife and I were touring Greece. I defended the Electoral College as best I could.<\/p>\n

Sixteen years later, we’ve had another circumstance with the “winner” getting fewer votes than the “loser.”<\/p>\n

It’s the fifth time in our nation’s history where this has occurred. Three of them occurred in the 19th century; two of them have occurred within just the first\u00a0two decades of the 21st century.<\/p>\n

I’m not yet ready to jump on\u00a0climb aboard the dump-the-Electoral College bandwagon. I have to say, though, that that I am beginning to grow less enamored of the archaic system that was devised by men who — in their time — didn’t grant rights of full citizenship to women or to blacks. Women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920<\/em>, for crying out loud and it took landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s to guarantee full citizenship rights to African-Americans.<\/p>\n

The gap in time — just 16 years — between the last two elections in which one candidate wins the “popular vote” but loses a presidential election is giving me serious pause about the wisdom of a system that hasn’t changed with the nation.<\/p>\n\n

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Election Night 2016 proved to be one for the books. Donald J. Trump got elected president of the United States despite being outvoted by Hillary Rodham Clinton. But wait! He won more electoral votes. They’re still counting ballots and it appears that Clinton’s vote lead will expand before they’re all done. Then came the question … Continue reading Now … about the Electoral College<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[217,1424,1551,1782,1899,2139,5043],"class_list":["post-17918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","category-political-news","tag-al-gore","tag-donald-trump","tag-electoral-college","tag-founding-fathers","tag-george-w-bush","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-us-constitution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17918"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17920,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17918\/revisions\/17920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}