"The Electoral College Is a National Security Threat,"declare Matthew Olsen and Benjamin Haas at Politico. Olsen was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Obama, which makes him the equivalent of the head of the EPA today.
In Federalist No. 68, his pseudonymous essay on “The Mode of Electing the President,” Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College could shield the United States “from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” Because of the “transient existence” and dispersed makeup of the electors, he argued, hostile countries would find it too expensive and time-consuming to inject “sinister bias” into the process of choosing a president. At the time, the new American leaders feared meddling from Great Britain, their former colonial master, or perhaps from other powers such as France, and they designed a system to minimize the prospect that Europe’s aging monarchies could seize control of their young democracy....
In Hamilton’s day, as he argued, it would have been nearly impossible for a hostile power to co-opt dozens of briefly chosen electors flung across 13 states with primitive roads. But in the social media age, the Electoral College system provides ripe microtargeting grounds for foreign actors who intend to sabotage presidential elections via information and disinformation campaigns, as well as by hacking our voting infrastructure. One reason is that citizens in certain states simply have more voting power than citizens in other states, such as Texas and California. This makes it easier for malign outside forces to direct their efforts...
Hamilton certainly deserves his towering reputation as “the most important Founding Father who never became president,” but at least on the supposed national security benefits of the Electoral College, his argument no longer holds. To help protect our elections from foreign interference, we should change the way we choose our presidents...
I'm sure that Olsen knows a lot about how Islamic terrorism is just a myth, but he doesn't know much about Hamilton or the Electoral College.
If Olsen really is seriously worried about foreign influence on our elections, he should embrace Hamilton's actual vision for the Electoral College, restore the original function of the Electoral College and end direct elections. The Founders were none too fond of direct democracy. And they didn't intend our system to be one.
As Hamilton put it, "The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity."
Here's Federalist Papers 68
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
Olson quotes from it, but seems rather uninterested in this part. And yet that was how the system is supposed to work. And it makes a lot of the handwringing over Facebook face news irrelevant.
The Electoral College, as Hamilton intended, is a safeguard. And the left, from the days of Aaron Burr, the evil forerunner of today's leftists, have been striving to corrupt it.
All we have to do is return to the system that the Founders intended. If that's what Olsen really wants. Unless he's just trolling while advocating a system that the Founders opposed and would have viewed as unconstitutional because it gives his corrupt faction, who have acted as agents of Iran, Cuba and China, a political advantage.