Speaking in Mississippi last week, Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren called for a change to the method the United States has long used to select its presidents.
During a televised CNN Town Hall at Jackson State University, Warren proposed an elimination of the Electoral College.
“I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and to make sure that every vote gets counted,” Warren said in response to a question about expanding voting rights.
“.We need to make sure that every vote counts. And I want to push that right here in Mississippi because I think this is an important point. Come a general election, presidential candidates don’t come to a place like Mississippi. They also don’t come to places like California and Massachusetts because we’re not the battleground states. Well, my view is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the electoral college.”
We support the general sentiment of protecting voting rights. The irony of Warren’s comments, however, is the fact that the electoral college is built on the principle of protecting rural states like Mississippi. Its creation resulted from a compromise made by our founding fathers in order to ensure the views of states with small populations were not overshadowed by their larger brethren.
Warren’s criticism is that the current system focuses too much attention on states with competitive presidential races, the so-called battleground states. Going to a true popular vote, however, would shift all of the power to the major population centers. Candidates would quickly find they had a much greater return on their time by focusing on dense cities. New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Philadelphia — which are already financial and cultural hubs — would also dominate the political arena. Not only would candidates overlook small states like ours, they also wouldn’t be likely to spend time in rural areas of larger states like New York or California.
And the shift would go deeper than where presidential candidates spent their time. Such a system would also incentivize peddling influence in the places that pack the most people — those are the areas that would receive the bulk of federal spending, would be the beneficiaries of favorable policies and would produce all of our Supreme Court justices, cabinet members and presidential running mates. In short, rural America would become virtually irrelevant on the political stage.
The current system is not broken. It is a carefully devised strategy to preserve the power of states like Mississippi. Its elimination would be a grave and costly mistake.
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