Letter: Electoral College set up for good reason

Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.

If only we had the benefit of the brilliant minds of today, who think the Electoral College is a bad idea, back when our Constitution was drafted. James Madison and the Founding Fathers, in their unenlightened primitivism, did not foresee the injustice that the Electoral College would cause.

The Fathers thought that states were not just collections of people living within arbitrary boundaries, but were the sovereign and constitutional members of the United States of America. How primitive. Today, we know that borders are meaningless divisions that artificially segregate people and generate animosity. We are enlightened. In fact, the name "United States" should be changed, maybe to something like "The People Living Mostly Between Canada and Mexico."

Equal representation of each state in the Senate protects the interests of the smaller states in national legislation, and the incorporation of that principle into the allocation of Electoral College votes ensures that smaller states' voices will be heard in national elections. This hybrid of proportional representation of state populations and equal representation of the sovereign entities was an original and unique innovation in constitutional government.

Before we change it, maybe we should understand the rationale for it - unless we're too brilliant to worry about that.

Richard D. McCord, Henderson