I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.
Reason The Third: It Reduces The Incentive To Commit Vote Fraud
Many areas of the country are solidly in one political camp or another. Texas is not in play this year. Everyone knows what Massachusetts is going to do.
When a place has one highly dominant party, that party naturally controls all of the voting machinery. All of the voting judges are of that party; all of the ministerial jobs at the state level are held by people who are members of the party. This makes voter fraud a lot easier than in a scenario where there the area is hotly contested, and people of both parties are in positions of authority.
Under a popular vote system, there would be a strong incentive for such one-party areas to run up the vote count through fraudulent means. It’s easy to get away with, and there’s a return on the “investment” - all those lovely additional votes.
The Electoral College serves to check this tendency. Once a state is in the bag for Candidate X, Candidate X’s partisans in the electoral machinery have no incentive to try and run up the count. They can settle for their honest victory and not feel any pressure (from the national parties, for example) to come up with more votes somehow.
