Trump surrogate Ben Carson was on with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell today suggesting that the RNC election rules for some states are wrong and need to be reviewed. Carson said that just because they are the rules doesn’t mean they are right, pointing to the Jim Crow laws as a similar example.
But at the end of this clip Carson says something even more remarkable. He basically said that we need to get rid of the Electoral College because the circumstances under which it was implemented don’t apply any longer. No, I’m not kidding.
I’ve always thought of Ben Carson as an intelligent man, but his statement about the Electoral College is crazytown and it demonstrates that he doesn’t even understand why it was put in place to begin with.
Hans A. von Spakovsky from the Heritage foundation explains why the founders implemented this system, why the Electoral College was put in place to begin with:
In creating the basic architecture of the American government, the Founders struggled to satisfy each state’s demand for greater representation while attempting to balance popular sovereignty against the risk posed to the minority from majoritarian rule. Smaller states in particular worried that a system that apportioned representatives on the basis of population would underrepresent their interests in the federal structure.
Out of this concern arose a compromise proposed by the Committee of Eleven at the Constitutional Convention, which helped to balance the competing interests of large states with those of smaller states. By allocating electors on the basis of a state’s cumulative representation in the House and Senate, the Electoral College system avoids purely population-based representation but still gives larger states greater electoral weight.
Furthermore, the arrangement prevents candidates from winning an election by focusing solely on high-population urban centers and forces them to seek the support of a larger cross section of the American electorate. This aspect of the U.S. election system addresses the Founders’ fears of a “tyranny of the majority,” a topic frequently discussed in the Federalist Papers. In the eyes of the Founders, this tyranny was as dangerous as the risks posed by despots like King George and had the potential to marginalize sizeable portions of the population, particularly in rural and more remote areas of the country. The Electoral College was devised as a response to these fears as a means of “ensuring the participation of a broad regional diversity in the outcome of elections.”
How have these circumstances changed? Are all 50 states the same size now with similar population sizes? Absolutely NOT! The US is even more diverse demographically than it was then. This need for balance has not changed. So what is Ben Carson even talking about here?
Ugh. The things Trump supporters will say to defend their candidate is maddening.