Baseball and the Electoral College

I sometimes get a little tired of folks thinking we should abolish the Electoral College. It's my belief that the founding fathers were wise to fear the "power of the majority." Here's an excerpt from a column I found in the St. Petersburg (FL) Times - simple, clear, & understandable:

Wisdom of the founders keeps things in balance
Note: This is not about baseball.
By HOWARD TROXLER, Times ColumnistPublished July 4, 2004

The other day our baseball team, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, lost a game to the visiting Toronto Blue Jays by the impressive score of 14 runs to zero. In case you do not follow baseball, 14 is a lot.
"This just goes to show," I remarked glumly while filing out of the stadium, "exactly why we need the Electoral College."

Defending the Electoral College is one of my favorite arguments, and so I choose Independence Day to renew it. (By the way, forget the puny name "Fourth of July." This is Independence Day, complete with rockets' red glare and the right to overthrow an unjust government.)

Anyway, back to the baseball analogy. They don't decide the winner of the World Series simply by adding up who scored the most overall runs during the year. Nope. What matters is how many separate games a team wins. The total number of runs racked up along the way doesn't mean squat. Okay, now let's compare that to how we elect the president of the United States, with the emphasis on the second word, "States." The election for U.S. president is an election of the states. The various states represent the individual "games." To be elected president, you don't just rack up the most popular votes nationwide. You have to prove yourself acceptable in enough states around the country. In a direct popular election, a candidate could just get enough votes in, say, Florida, Texas and California, and say the heck with everybody else, and still win. But in the Electoral College, it still matters what the individual states say. It is a national dialogue, and each state has a voice: How does Tennessee vote? How does Colorado vote? How does New Jersey vote? You can't "carry over" a big popular majority in one state to ram through a victory in another state, no more than the Blue Jays can take their "surplus" of 14 runs and use them in the next day's baseball game.

Bottom line: It is that much harder for a few big states, with big-state interests and agendas, to gang up on all the little guys and take over the country.

Smart folks, those Founders.