Last updated on January 14th, 2021 at 06:09 am
There are more Democrats than there are Republicans. This is not only borne out in the number of registered voters. Democrats have consistently won presidential elections by wide margins.
The thing that has allowed Republicans to take office despite losing popular votes is the electoral college. There have been frequent calls for Democrats to abolish the practice. The GOP, unsurprisingly, is against this.
Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, is leading a small group of GOP lawmakers asking asking their colleagues to end their attempts at overturning the election. If they don’t, the group said in a statement, it could destroy the Electoral College.
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The congresspeople advised, “To take action otherwise – that is, to unconstitutionally insert Congress into the center of the presidential election process – would amount to stealing power from the people and the states. It would, in effect, replace the electoral college with Congress, and in so doing strengthen the efforts of those on the left who are determined to eliminate it or render it irrelevant.”
The statement continued:
“From a purely partisan perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years. They have therefore depended on the electoral college for nearly all presidential victories in the last generation. If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes — based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election — we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.”
Todd Neikirk is a New Jersey based politics and technology writer. His work has been featured in psfk.com, foxsports.com and hillreporter.com. He enjoys sports, politics, comic books and spending time at the shore with his family.
