Readers Write: Debating the Electoral College, new state flag

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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If D.J. Tice’s recent defense of the Electoral College is the best that can be offered, then the case for retaining it is thin indeed (“Walz is wrong about the Electoral College,” Strib Voices, Oct. 14).

To Tice, it is somehow desirable that presidential campaigns must court support in — to use his example — Beaver County, Pa., at the expense of more populous, less narrowly contested locales such as California or Texas.

To begin, it should be noted that state boundaries are entirely arbitrary accidents of history. To give these boundaries importance in the election of a chief executive for the nation as a whole is, as we say in Minnesota, different. This fact alone should be sufficient argument for a switch to a national popular election.

But there is more. Given the significant differences in state populations and in the distribution of political sentiment, the Electoral College magnifies the votes of the few at the expense of the many. Tice sees this as a virtue. To him, the fact that Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in California was greater than her margin nationally is somehow meaningful, exactly as if those 4 million people mean less than a much smaller number of people in a battleground state. To Tice, garnering the support of American voters who happen to live in the wrong place is “running up vote totals.” Well, yes.

Finally, the Electoral College is not as robust to fraud as Tice seems to think. He argues that “one must win — or cheat — in many separate places.” The word “or” has a heavy lift here. In a tight Electoral College race, one might need to cheat in only one state. And as we have begun to see, this may not require the successful manufacture or disappearance of votes. It may only require sufficient administrative malfeasance — potentially at relatively local levels — to throw the result into doubt.

The “scholarly study” Tice cites contains no empirical analysis; rather, it propounds a model that supports the conclusion that more highly contested states naturally will provide less opportunity for fraud to succeed than in a state controlled by one party. Yet it is entirely possible for a state under one-party control to be tightly contested in a presidential election.

The time to eliminate this antidemocratic relic of 18th–century elitism is long past. Gov. Tim Walz is not wrong about the Electoral College.

Brad Peterson, Minneapolis

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Each presidential election is accompanied by calls for replacing the Electoral College with a more “democratic” system of direct popular election. An Oct. 13 letter writer laments the “silliness” of the current system (“More Electoral College absurdity”), including its state-centered winner-take-all operation (in 48 states), its limiting of campaign spending to a small number of swing states and its supposedly obsolete origin.

In fact, the principal reason for maintaining a state-based electoral system is as valid today as it was when the Constitution was ratified. This system lessens the possibility that a handful of the most populous states will perpetually decide our presidential elections. Direct popular election would turn this possibility into a certainty.

As the letter writer disapprovingly observes, presidential campaigns tend to be primarily focused on a small number of swing states. Direct popular election would permanently shift this focus to an equally small number of the most populous states. This shift would promote heightened feelings of neglect and disenfranchisement in the rest of the country that could indeed lead to the “next civil war” that the letter writer warns against.

While “one man, one vote” may be an attractive campaign slogan, its promoters would do well to heed James Madison’s admonition that the tyranny of the majority is the first step in the devolution of a representative democracy into a dictatorship.

Peter D. Abarbanel, Apple Valley

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Tice’s takedown of Walz’s criticism of the Electoral College states that Walz understands how, but not why, it works. Then, Tice lists conservative talking points about why Republicans should retain power when a significant majority of Americans do not support them. He states that because of the Electoral College, candidates spend time in small rural areas instead of large population centers. In reality, candidates now spend almost all of the campaign time and money in seven swing states, and the other 43 are forgotten.

But the biggest damnation of the electoral college is that in Wyoming, there is one electoral vote per about 194,000 residents, while in California, there is one electoral vote per about 723,000 residents. This gives each Wyoming voter nearly four times the voting power over a California voter. Whatever happened to the idea of one person, one vote? Four of the five smallest-population states are solid red states, giving them undue weight in any presidential election.

The Electoral College was formed so that uninformed frontier voters would not be deciding elections. Now we have just the opposite, except now they are misinformed.

Karl Samp, Brainerd, Minn.

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I agree with the Tice column on the validity of the Electoral College. I am a committed Democrat and will welcome a Kamala Harris win; I was heartbroken by Hillary Clinton’s loss; I rued Al Gore’s loss to George Bush. However, I feel that the Wyomings, Dakotas, Utahs and even the Maines and Vermonts need to feel that they are an integral part of the presidential election system and not just bystanders to California and New York — or to Philadelphia and Baltimore and Minneapolis.

David Kehm, Des Moines, Iowa

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I’m so tired of people arguing in support of keeping the Electoral College because without it, candidates would only care about campaigning in, as Tice described it, “densely populated areas,” while the existence of the Electoral College requires them to “seek to win in many different places.” He apparently doesn’t realize that because of the current system, campaigns are focusing almost entirely on seven swing states — Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. The fact that I can easily name them off the top of my head should tell you something. How is that any better? Our friends around the world have trouble grasping how one candidate can get more votes than the other but still not win. And I agree that it makes no sense. The time to end the Electoral College system is now.

Cyndy Crist, St. Paul

Enough already with all the agonizing over our new state flag. Politics aside, the original design was a total visual snoozefest. Viewed from a distance of more than 20 feet, it was nothing more than a field of blue with a blurry blob in the middle. Trying to find it among the rows of state flags lining the walkway to Mount Rushmore two summers ago was almost impossible, because our old flag was completely indistinguishable from dozens of other equally unimaginative designs. Despite all the objections to the new design or the reasons that it came to be, one thing is true: Our state flag will finally stand out and be readily recognized wherever it flies. Unfortunately, for some Minnesotans, standing out may be the greatest sin of all.

Rob Wallace, Bloomington