Yesterday was election day. November 4th? That was just the day we voted on the electors. The electors we voted for, the Electoral College, gathered in the 50 state capitols yesterday and elected Barack Obama the next president of the United States. The Associated Press dubbed the vote "a largely ceremonial procedure, but one mandated by the Constitution." Isn't that the case these days with just about everything in the Constitution being that it's "largely symbolic"?

You could just as easily say that November 4th's vote was "largely symbolic" in that it merely symbolized to most Americans that they were choosing their next president. Instead, they actually chose who would vote for the next president. The Electoral College gets the silent treatment in the press because it offends leftist sensibilities in various ways.

First, we have to realize that a majority of voters in the United States do not elect the president. Americans rediscovered in 2000, a candidate does not need to even receive a plurality of the popular vote to win the presidency. As the examples of George Bush, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, and John Quincy Adams attest, a candidate can lose the popular vote and win the presidency because,surprise!!! The popular vote doesn't matter very much in our system. A candidate need only win a majority of votes in any combination of states that make a majority of the Electoral College, and not a single popular vote in any other state, and that candidate, barring the possibility of unfaithful electors, will find himself or herself in the White House.  The vote that matters is the Electoral College vote, the one that took place yesterday, and not the vote that took place on November 4.

Second, there is the annoyance of unfaithful electors. Every few years an elector freelances. In 1988, for instance, an elector flipped the Democratic ticket by voting for Lloyd Bentsen for president and Michael Dukakis for vice president. By allowing electors the leeway to buck the choice of the voters who selected them, the Founders put multiple buffers between the people and the president. Unfaithful electors are another way of the Founders reminding us that we live in a republic, not a democracy.

Third, the electoral college is a reminder that ours is a federal government. The states, more so than the people, elect the president. Just as it is the states rather than the people that are represented in the Senate, the states rather than the people vote in the Electoral College. The body votes in each state capitol, rather than in the Capitol in Washington. It is crucial that the state legislatures determine the manner of appointing the electors.

Leftists prefer a simplistic narrative of the people electing the leader. Buying into this notion romanticizes strongmen presidents as representing the will of the people rather than their own will. Reality is more complicated than that, and thwarts the rationalizations of sycophants to unchecked power in the hands of one man.

That ends today's reality lesson.