Irrelevant Electoral College

Looking at the epicenters of blue in a sea of red from last Tuesday that handed so many Electoral College votes to Barack Obama even as Mitt Romney seemed to have won the popular vote, the natural question is what happened?  Well besides such things as St. Lucie county in Florida having 141% voter participation which hints at major voter irregularities.

Since 2008 there has been a serious push to make the President of the United States be selected by the popular vote.  That push was lead by many on the progressive-socialist side.  If that had been true on Tuesday we would be talking about President-elect Mitt Romney instead of a re-elected Barack Obama.

Which lead me to look at the map of the results.  At those masses of blue in a sea of red.  Like in past elections, states like California that might have gone red went blue due to population density.  Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles nullified every bit of red.  Same in New York state, the deep blue of New York City outweighed the rest of the red state.  So both states went blue and all their Electoral College votes went to Barack Obama. 

Best way to truly prove what happened in California and New York is to look for large areas of blue but the states stayed red and gave their Electoral College votes to Mitt Romney.  Two such states are Texas and Mississippi.  Sparsely populated regions in both states went light blue to dark blue.  The more populated areas of both states went red.

This is how the Electoral College is supposed to work.  Each state being a battleground between the candidates.  To ensure each state has a voice and impact on the selection of a President.  But Tuesday it did not happen that way.

So what did happen?  This country has finally been defeated by Public Law 62-5 that was passed in 1911 and then made permanent in 1929.  Under House Speaker Cannon[R-IL] in 1911 the House fixed its size at 433 members plus 1 each for Arizona and New Mexico if those territories became states before the law went into effect in 1913.  In 1929, this law was re-authorized and made permanent by another Republican House Speaker Nicholas Longworth.

Public Law 62-5 fixed the maximum number of House seats and, until another state is added to the Union, set the maximum size of the Electoral College at 535 votes.  Even if Puerto Rico is added as a state, the 435 House seats will be re-apportioned among the 51 states while two more Senate seats will be added, thus raising the EC votes to 537.  Because the Constitution delegates to the House how it runs itself, there will be no change to that 435 number unless Congress changes it or another amendment is added to the Constitution.

The unexpected consequence of this law has, over the intervening decades, made the Electoral College a national popular vote by proxy.  When originally passed in 1911 California only had 11 votes [House + Senate seats = total EC votes] while Mississippi had 8.  In 2012 California has 55 votes and Mississippi only has 6.  So as the population densities migrated to major urban areas, the now limited number of EC votes also flowed there.  So it became possible to win the Electoral College vote by only winning in a limited number of states.

So where do we go from here?  Either we toss away the last bulwark against a scared voting populace and do away with the Electoral College to embrace a national popular vote.  Or the House is forced to add seats and thus re-balance itself and the Electoral College.

Judging by the Progressive Left's attempt to get a President elected by national popular vote or making each state apportion its EC votes according to the vote percentage each candidate received, I do not even think many of them realize what Public Law 62-5 did to the landscape of national politics.  Perhaps most have just assumed the House has always had 435 seats and never thought on it.  If this is true, then the Progressive Left is a very useful bunch of suckers.  And we truly no longer deserve a Republic.