The left is getting Federalist 68 totally wrong
The Electoral College is designed to prevent one big, stupid state (ahem . . . California) from sticking the rest of us with a total fraud.
The so-called "Hamilton electors" were a total failure yesterday, as you certainly know by now. They fell 35 short of the 37 Republican electors they needed to persuade to deny Donald Trump the presidency. In fact, more Democrat voters rejected Hillary Clinton than there were Republican electors who refused to vote for Trump.
The whole thing was clearly going nowhere from the beginning, and didn't deserve the attention it got from the media. But the Hamilton electors didn't only fail to stop Trump. They also failed miserably in their understanding of Alexander Hamilton's writing in Federalist 68, which they offered as their rationale for pleading with electors to defeat Trump.
The Hamilton electors argued that the purpose of the Electoral College, as Hamilton discussed in Federalist 68, was to serve as a safeguard against electing a candidate with "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity." In other words, they claimed, Federalist 68 intended for electors to exercise their wisdom and reject a charlatan candidate who managed to fool the voters.
And of course, these people insisted that Trump was such a candidate.
But they didn't read Federalist 68 carefully enough. Take a look, especially to the part I've put in bold:
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,'' yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
The scenario Hamilton lays out here does not involve electors rejecting the choice the people made in an election. Rather, it speaks to what happens when a charlatan candidate fools the voters in one state. The purpose of the Electoral College is to give the other states a chance to serve as a check on the one state that was fooled. In other words, one complete fraud manages to fool the people of one large state - racking up a large margin of victory in that state. When the nation was founded, New York or Virginia could easily have been that state. There were only 13 states, and if one large state made a bad decision by an overwhelming margin, there might not have been enough votes in the other states to counteract it.
The purpose of the Electoral College was to give the smaller states more leeway in the event something like that happened. The charlatan fraud might take New York, but if the other states did not concur, he might not win enough electoral votes to take the election, even if he won the popular vote. Contrary to the current left-wing view that this is a bug of the Electoral College system, it's actually a feature. This is exactly how it's supposed to work.
So let's look at what happened in this year's election. As it turns out, we did have one candidate win one very large state by an overwhelming margin - such an overwhelming margin that it resulted in a popular vote pluraity (although not a majority) nationwide. And this candidate also happened to be a charlatan and a fraud - someone very much not wanted in the White House by the rest of the country. This candidate, of course, was Hillary Clinton. If winning a popular vote plurality had been enough to win the presidency, then California would have just succeeded at sticking the rest of the country with Hillary, even though 30 states did not want her, and Trump "won the popular vote" in the other 49 states combined.
This is exactly the scenario envisioned by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68, and the Electoral College served as a check on California's massive foolishness, exactly as it was supposed to do. It was not designed to have electors overrule the voters. It was designed so one state couldn't push around all the other states with a reckless act of idiocy.
Like electing Hillary Clinton. Nice job, Electoral College. Nice job, Alexander Hamilton.
I'm glad I had the opportunity to explain this to you liberals who've been getting Federalist 68 so abysmally wrong these past few days.
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