A Blog Posting by Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from January 8, 2017.
In stunned abhorrence of president-elect Donald Trump, many people sought some recourse to block him from becoming president. They sought some silver bullet, some mechanism in our system of governance to prevent a presidential candidate who appeared to win the presidential race from actually becoming president.
Their salvation: the electoral college. The electoral college is a handful of elite party delegates who actually cast the real votes for president. Many people advanced the idea that these delegates have the power to be a final check on the popular will of the people, who supposedly lost their senses when voting for Donald Trump. They liked this idea, because it meant there was some hope to stop Trump from becoming president.
But using the electoral college in this way struck many of these same people as highly undemocratic. And rightly so. The proposal they supported was for the electoral college delegates – political party insiders – to ignore the popular vote of the people of their state and cast their vote for whomever they wanted.
This is, of course, the antithesis of democracy. The folks advocating this electoral college end-run around the election results knew this. They knew they were pursuing an aristocracy to achieve their ends. So – as “good democrats” – they struggled with making sense of their willingness to make the ends justify the means.
To read the entire Blog, click HERE.