Your letters: Electoral College still viable, writer says

Respectfully, having spent the past 15 years lobbying within a growing network of Electoral College supporters, permit me to offer responses to the following three comments from Mr. (Barry) Burden’s Sept. 18 opinion:

“Nowadays nearly every state has chosen to award all of its electoral votes to whichever ticket wins more votes in the state … .” The resolution to this challenge has little to do with the Electoral College. The states of Maine and Nebraska independently chose to award electors by congressional district. This maintains essential Electoral College safeguards while elevating the popular vote within the state. The correction resides in the other 48 state legislatures. While challenging, it’s no less so than amending the Constitution, as outlined in Article V. Remember, the Electoral College is embedded in Article 2 Section 1, and Amendment 12.

“The handful of battleground states are efficient targets for harmful efforts that would otherwise not have much success meddling in elections.” The flip side of the argument is that while legislative watchdogs make corrections within individual states, removing the Electoral College’s legal walls around each state is a recipe for chaos. To further complicate matters, states/localities that adopt the Ranked Choice Voting model, also, face colliding cutoff dates for reporting.

“Someone who wants to infiltrate the election system would have difficulty causing problems in a national popular vote because it is decided by thousands of disconnected local jurisdictions.” I submit the opposite would occur. If every vote were thrown into the national soup, it would all become invisible until it’s too late. In contrast, recall the 2020 election controversies in a handful of states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Thanks to Electoral College legal walls around the states, the 20 states that border the ones in question were unaffected by the disagreements.

Roberta Schlechter, NW regional volunteer for Michigan-based Keep Our 50 States

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