Letter to the Editor: History fact-check
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The News and Sentinel printed a letter to the editor on Dec. 18 titled "Reform ensures vote integrity." Nearly everything in that letter was nonsense.
The author told us the Electoral College was created by the founding fathers to prevent states with large population centers from deciding who would be president. The author said the founding fathers wanted the small states with small populations to have a strong say in who gets elected to the top job.
That absurd "history lesson" is best described as … total garbage.
The Electoral College was created in 1787 as part of the Constitutional debate. In 1787 we only had 13 states with less than 4 million citizens. Our founding fathers couldn't possibly have foreseen the 50-state wonder we became 200 years later with 330 million citizens. Those Constitutional debates happened 15 years before Tom Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to map the Louisiana Purchase and give our people some idea just how big this nation might become.
Alexander Hamilton was the main driving force behind the Electoral College. Hamilton didn't trust the "well-meaning but uninformed voters" to elect the "right leader" to the presidency. Essentially, our founding fathers were not impressed with the "intelligence of many voters." Hamilton was concerned some unscrupulous politician might turn the race into a popularity contest. Heaven forbid!
Nevertheless, Hamilton thought our "responsible" leaders would need some legal means to influence the election results if the wrong type of presidential candidate hit the jackpot.
Hence, the clumsy, confusing and dangerous Electoral College was created, which ultimately resulted in the clumsy, confusing and dangerous criminal activities of Jan 6, 2021. The Electoral College has come into play five times where the actual vote count didn't match the results of the Electoral vote: 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.
Nearly everything else in that 12/18 letter was similar to the Electoral College comments. In other words, it didn't include much of anything factual. The author's parting sentence was, "I'll write more on this subject later."
Gee! I can't wait to read more made-up pseudo-history. That letter writer should buy some good history books and do a bunch of serious reading before writing any more foolish letters about our national history.
Ralph Chambers
Parkersburg