by Erik Peake

Created on: November 13, 2007   Last Updated: September 10, 2009

We are the masses, you idiot

In the summer of 2000, a 90-pound, middle-aged schoolteacher threatened to beat me senseless. My trouble started when I was buying an old Maxfield Parrish print at an antique shop in Asheville, North Carolina. As I was waiting in line, the woman next to me asked me whom I was going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. When I told her that learning about the Electoral College system had thwarted my voting zeal, the schoolteacher's grimace made it clear that this answer was unacceptable. Although I escaped with my Parrish print (and my corporeal frame) intact, the lady's retort to my voting apathy has stayed with me. She told me, between growls, that the point of the Electoral College was to prevent something that she called the Tyranny of the Masses. The vehemence of her conviction compelled me to take a closer look at our election process.

When I espoused my non-voting opinion to the woman in the antique shop, I was referring to the fact that Americans are not casting votes for a president or a vice-president when they go to the polls. As Thomas H. Neale of the Government and Finance Division explained in a report to Congress, Americans instead are voting for a group of people known as the Electoral College. In election years, the political parties in each state nominate a group of people to be Electors. Each state is allotted two Electors for its two Senate members and an additional Elector for each congressman that it sends to the House of Representatives. When people vote, they vote for the group of electors that represents their preferred presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Whichever group of Electors receives the majority of the votes in a given state will then cast its electoral votes for the candidates it represents. Assuming that the Electors all actually vote for their respective candidates (they are, in fact, not required by law to vote for a certain candidate), the candidates who win the majority of the popular vote in a state will receive all of the presidential and vice-presidential electoral votes for that state.

According to my friend in the antique shop, the Electoral College system was designed to combat a phenomenon she lovingly referred to as the Tyranny of the Masses (or The Voice of the People, depending on how you look at it). William Norman Grigg talks about this theory in his article "Save the Electoral College!" Grigg claims that the Electoral College protects the states with smaller

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