Regarding the letter (“Letters draw disagreement,” Sept. 15) in which the writer sides in favor of the Electoral College by asking, “Do you want 40 million residents of California making laws you should live under?” I have a couple of responses.
I’m not sure how electing a president by popular vote has much to do with California making the laws I live under — I kind of thought Congress did that. However, for the sake of argument, if elimination of the Electoral College prevents the hypothetical future election of a sociopathic, pathologically lying, egomaniacal, amoral con man to the office of president, then by all means, California, take over.
Perhaps a more serious argument, one that I rarely hear, is the fact that no state is 100% red or blue. The 420,000 people in Oklahoma, arguably the reddest state of all, who voted for Hillary Clinton had their votes nullified just as well as was mine and eight million-plus California voters. Because of the Electoral College, the equivalent population of a couple of football stadiums in the Midwest nullified the votes of 65 million fellow Americans spread out in every state in the union, and it happened just because they live a couple hundred miles on the other side of some arbitrary lines drawn over 150 years ago.
I won’t debate the writer calling the 55 (out of the 70 who were supposed to be there) members of the constitutional convention “geniuses.” Some obviously were and some, I presume, weren’t. Even geniuses can make mistakes. They all put on their breeches one leg at a time.