Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: How Can America Prevent Republicans From Stealing the 2024 Election?

November 11, 2020

The Electoral College is an impediment to democracy (Geoff Livingston)

By Thom Hartmann

Republican threats to have individual states choose electors for Donald Trump even though their citizens voted for Joe Biden are not about this election; they’re about putting a fascist in the White House in 2024.

And the reason Republican elected officials across the country are letting this drag out, even though they know Trump has no chance because Biden‘s margin of victory is so large, is to see how far they can push this in anticipation of 2024. This is a test.

The next election will not feature a failed, indebted businessman buffoon at the top of the Republican ticket; instead, it will almost certainly be a very competent neofascist, someone like Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz.

And their strategy to put him in power won’t be to win the majority of the votes: it will be to take the electoral college, either outright or through Republican-controlled state legislatures simply making it happen.

Thus, America is at a crossroads. Either we believe in “majority rule” democracy or we don’t. And for America to achieve actual full democracy, we must eliminate the electoral college as soon as possible.

Al Gore won the majority of the national vote. Hillary Clinton won the majority of the national vote. Neither became president because of the electoral college: the last first-time Republican presidential candidate won the national vote was 1988.

This year Joe Biden won the national vote in America, and right now Trump and the Republicans are saying he shouldn’t be president because of that same electoral college loophole.

The electoral college was put into place in 1789 because, as Alexander Hamilton pointed out in Federalist 68, in a geographically huge country it was very difficult at that time for voters to know the true nature of candidates.

Thus, Hamilton said, “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 ...[as] President of the United States.”

Thus, he said, states must appoint “wise elders” to go to Washington DC, meet the candidates, and either vote for the candidate their state had selected or, if he was a “drunkard or a person of low morals,” they could choose somebody else.

By the 1850s, the electoral college was already obsolete. We had the pony express and railroads were starting to transport news; the first national newspapers were emerging.

But today, Republicans are doing everything they can to cement and hold anti-democratic minority rule. Democrats in the United States Senate represent 15 million more people than Republicans, but the GOP controls the Senate. George W. Bush and Donald Trump became president, even though they both lost the national vote.

If Democrats don’t make getting rid of the electoral college their top priority, and soon, the threat of fascistic rule will once again overshadow America.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute

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