How the Electoral College Helps Protect Against Voter Fraud

From Daily Signal.com (October 26):

“Our new Constitution is now established,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a French physicist in 1789, “and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Perhaps Franklin should have added one more item to his list of certainties: dishonest people will always exist—and they will always cheat. It’s part of the human condition.

Unfortunately, no election system can turn dishonest people into honest ones. Where people are vying for power, there will always be motivation for fraud. The best that an election system can do is to throw up as many hurdles as possible to dishonesty and to minimize its effects.

The Electoral College accomplishes both of these goals far better than a direct national election can.

With the Electoral College in place, an election cannot be stolen unless a few factors come together simultaneously.

First, at the national level, the election needs to be close enough that altering the results in only one or two states would change the outcome.

Second, the margins in those contested states must also be very close. Such elections are fairly rare. The election of 2000 was one such election: Florida could have changed the outcome, and the margin in that state was vanishingly small.

The election of 1960 was another: Both Texas and Illinois had narrow margins—they could have flipped the election to Richard Nixon. Most elections are won by wider margins.

A third criterion may be the hardest to meet. Assuming the election is close, dishonest actors must be able to predict which state (or states) will be close enough to influence the final results.

This is harder than it sounds. In 2000, no one could have known in advance that a few hundred stolen votes in Florida could change the election outcome.

In fact, if the media had not called the state for Al Gore too early—before polls closed in the Republican-leaning panhandle—the result might not have been so narrow. [read more]