A House Divided Can Not Stand

The recent legal action by Texas maybe the most important Supreme Court case since the legal battle leading up to the United States Civil War of 1861. Not since that time has this nation been so divided, not since that time have we as a people been so ideologically polarized.

What follows are 6 pages of opening statements of the Texas suit against the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This suit is being encouraged by at least 17 other states and President Trump and being opposed by at least 22 states.

If there was ever a time to study and research current events, NOW is that time.

No. ______, Original

In the Supreme Court of the United States

STATE OF TEXAS,

Plaintiff,

v.

COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE OF GEORGIA, STATE OF MICHIGAN, AND STATE OF WISCONSIN,

Defendants.

MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION AND TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER OR, ALTERNATIVELY, FOR STAY AND ADMINISTRATIVE STAY

Pursuant to S.Ct. Rules 21, 23, and 17.2 and pursuant to FED. R. CIV. P. 65, the State of Texas (“Plaintiff State”) respectfully moves this Court to enter an administrative stay and temporary restraining order (“TRO”) to enjoin the States of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (collectively, the “Defendant States”) and all of their agents, officers, presidential electors, and others acting in concert from taking action to certify presidential electors or to have such electors take any official action—including without limitation participating in the electoral college or voting for a presidential candidate—until further order of this Court, and to preliminarily enjoin and to stay such actions pending the final resolution of this action on the merits.

STATEMENT OF THE CASE

Lawful elections are the heart of our freedoms. “No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.” Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1, 10 (1964). Trust in the integrity of that process is the glue that binds our citizenry and the States in this Union.

Elections face the competing goals of maximizing and counting lawful votes but minimizing and excluding unlawful ones. Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 554-55 (1964); Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 103 (2000) (“the votes eligible for inclusion in the certification are the votes meeting the properly established legal requirements”) (“Bush II”); compare 52 U.S.C. § 20501(b)(1)-(2) (2018) with id. § 20501(b)(3)-(4). Moreover, “the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.” Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 555. Reviewing election results requires not only counting lawful votes but also eliminating unlawful ones.

It is an understatement to say that 2020 was not a good year. In addition to a divided and partisan national mood, the country faced the COVID-19 pandemic. Certain officials in the Defendant States presented the pandemic as the justification for ignoring state laws regarding absentee and mail-in voting. The Defendant States flooded their citizenry with tens of millions of ballot applications and ballots in derogation of statutory controls as to how they are lawfully received, evaluated, and counted. Whether well intentioned or not, these unconstitutional acts had the same uniform effect—they made the 2020 election less secure in the Defendant States. Those changes are inconsistent with relevant state laws and were made by non-legislative entities, without any consent by the state legislatures. The acts of these officials thus directly violated the Constitution. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 4; id. art. II, § 1, cl. 2.

This case presents a question of law: Did the Defendant States violate the Electors Clause by taking non-legislative actions to change the election rules that would govern the appointment of presidential electors? These non-legislative changes to the Defendant States’ election laws facilitated the casting and counting of ballots in violation of state law, which in turn, violated the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution. By these unlawful acts, the Defendant States have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but their actions have also debased the votes of citizens in Plaintiff State and other States that remained loyal to the Constitution.

Elections for federal office must comport with federal constitutional standards, see Bush II, 531 U.S. at 103-05, and executive branch government officials cannot subvert these constitutional requirements, no matter their stated intent. For presidential elections, each State must appoint its Electors to the electoral college in a manner that complies with the Constitution, specifically the Electors Clause requirement that only state legislatures may set the rules governing the appointment of electors and the elections upon which such appointment is based. 1

Constitutional Background

The Electors Clause requires that each State “shall appoint” its Presidential Electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 2 (emphasis added); cf. id. art. I, § 4 (similar for time, place, and manner of federal legislative elections). “[T]he state legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary,” Bush II, 531 U.S. at 104 (emphasis added), and sufficiently federal for this Court’s review. Bush v. Palm Beach Cty. Canvassing Bd., 531 U.S. 70, 76 (2000) (“Bush I”). This textual feature of our Constitution was adopted to ensure the integrity of the presidential selection process: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” FEDERALIST NO. 68 (Alexander Hamilton). When a State conducts a popular election to appoint electors, the State must comply with all constitutional requirements. Bush II, 531 U.S. at 104. When a State fails to conduct a valid election—for any reason—”the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.” 3 U.S.C. § 2 (emphasis added).

Defendant States’ Violations of Electors Clause

As set forth in the Complaint, executive and judicial officials made significant changes to the legislatively defined election laws in the Defendant States. See Compl. at ¶¶ 29-134. Taken together, these non-legislative changes did away with statutory ballot-security measures for absentee and mail-in ballots such as signature verification, witness requirements, and statutorily authorized secure ballot drop-off locations.

Citing the COVID-19 pandemic, Defendant States gutted the safeguards for absentee ballots through non-legislative actions, despite knowledge that absentee ballots are “the largest source of potential voter fraud,” BUILDING CONFIDENCE IN U.S. ELECTIONS: REPORT OF THE COMMISSION ON FEDERAL ELECTION REFORM, at 46 (Sept. 2005) (hereinafter, “CARTER-BAKER”), which is magnified when absentee balloting is shorn of ballot-integrity measures such as signature verification, witness requirements, or outer-envelope protections, or when absentee ballots are processed and tabulated without bipartisan observation by poll watchers.

Factual Background

Without Defendant States’ combined 72 electoral votes, President Trump presumably has 232 electoral votes, and former Vice President Biden presumably has 234. Thus, Defendant States’ electors will determine the outcome of the election. Alternatively, if Defendant States are unable to certify 37 or more electors, neither candidate will have a majority in the Electoral College, in which case the election would devolve to the U.S. House of Representatives under the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

1 Subject to override by Congress, State legislatures have the exclusive power to regulate the time, place, and manner for electing Members of Congress, see U.S. CONST. art. I, § 4, which is distinct from legislatures’ exclusive and plenary authority on the appointment of presidential electors. When non-legislative actors purport to set State election law for presidential elections, they violate both the Elections Clause and the Electors Clause.

Link To Full Text

What is Your Political Philosophy? Part One

Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, Social Liberal or Classical Liberal, Libertarian or Anarchist? What political philosophy do you follow and does it really matter?

This is an important discussion because it is possible to promote or support a way of thinking that doesn’t actually align with a person’s moral code. And what if a person doesn’t have a defined moral code? Then they are very easily swayed by the prevailing opinion or social media.

Words have meaning and ideas have consequences and as a result, what we do and agree to over the next 12 months will set the stage for how our nation functions for the next decade or more. My primary purpose for writing this is to help us all make better and more informed personal and political decisions.

This series of blogs will demonstrate different political philosophies with the desired end result of helping one to clarify a personal moral code and to determine which philosophy best fits that moral code.

To talk about political philosophy, first we need a good working definition of philosophy:

Philosophy, done well, should be a rigorous, structured, sequential conversation (with others or oneself) that is both collaborative and oppositional, that attempts to explore, explain and justify the
structure and content of our thoughts in response to perceived problems and puzzles about reality, knowledge, value and meaning. Philosophy employs a method/process (more often than not ongoing) of reflection, reasoning and re-evaluation, by employing the appropriate intellectual
virtues or excellences, in order to make good, though provisional judgements about what seems possibly (metaphysically) true, possibly (morally) right, and (logically) coherent. The aim is to improve our understanding (also understanding what we don’t understand) of: the world, ourselves, our experiences and other people, by refining how we think about those things. The hope is that by doing philosophy we learn to think better, to act more wisely, and thereby help to improve the quality of all our lives.

This is perhaps the best general definition I have found and it immediately brings up a couple of issues regarding how the average person uses the word “philosophy” today. First, we are probably using the term “philosophy” incorrectly. When we say “political philosophy,” I think we actually mean ideology: A set of doctrines or beliefs that are shared by the members of a social group or that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

Most people I think, use the idea of “philosophy” as more of a code of conduct than a system of learning. The reason I say this is how often I have heard people use their “philosophy” to defend actions or a position; “because I’m a democrat” or “because we are a progressive society,” or “because my dad was a republican.” In general we see very little “thinking” or trying to evaluate the merits of one ideology over another. As you have undoubtedly seen or experienced, political philosophies or ideologies are more often used in political battle than intellectual comparison.

As mentioned above, the process of philosophy is a rigorous and structured process, it takes time to evaluate what others are actually saying and what the consequences are of acting on those ideas. It takes time and serious energy to ferret out the facts and shrug off all the non-facts in our information age. It takes time and concerted effort to evaluate why you feel the way you do about certain ideas and concepts. It is highly rewarding and clarifying to take the time and effort to be philosophical, but alas, in our fast paced world, few ever experience this level of enlightenment.

Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned during my college experience was the concept of ideologue vs truth seeking. My mentor spend significant time on this concept, explaining that we are either ideologues–hiding behind a set of ideas, disregarding anything that does not easily fit into that orbit–or a truth seeker or philosopher–honestly evaluating new ideas and trying hard not to dismiss them immediately if they seem not to fit at first blush. In “philosophical fairness,” one must at least give the new idea a full and unbiased hearing before dismissing it.

The idea of philosophy is that one tries to approach something like politics with an open mind and take each strand of reason or principle or idea and follow it to its conclusion and then determine if that gives us the best results regarding what we understand as what’s best for ourselves or humanity.

But most people rarely if ever experience this process. It is all too common for the vast majority of Americans to never engage in such a philosophical pursuit anytime during their lives. Those Americans who are politically active, (and I am defining this on a spectrum of anywhere from staying up to date by reading/watching current affairs to participating in rallies and peaceful protests to working on political campaigns) generally have not come to their convictions through philosophical analysis but are simply following a party or an ideologue and castigating all other ideologies without having the benefit of fully researching either the one they are following or the one they are against.

It is not common nor is it taught in public education to systematically and philosophically study out these issues by reflection, reasoning, and re-evaluating our position with absolute honesty. We as a nation do not have a common eschatology nor do we, I think, consciously operate from such a high ground, rather most Americans make political decisions based on their feelings with very few facts.

In my own political experience, which did not actually begin until I was 28 years old, I began to notice some differences between what people said they believed in and their actions, mostly by seeing this phenomena in myself. During this time, I also really came to grips with the fact that I had deeply embraced conservatism based on my emotional response rather an in-depth comparative analysis of all the mainstream ideologies. It wasn’t until my mid 30’s that I seriously attempted to engage in philosophy to determine what is right and best for humanity.

What follows over the next couple of blogs is a summary breakdown of a number of political philosophies or ideologies. It is my hope that in this very divisive time, that we can take a stand for what we believe is true, based on an honest philosophical analysis, on an educated not emotional evaluation of the facts. This will make us more informed and when necessary, more tolerant, and help us to be conscientious citizens so that when we take that stand and put our foot down, we are doing so on the solid ground of honest intellectual prowess.

America at a Crossroads

The modern threat of communism was explained in detail during the first half of the 20th century by the likes of Eric Vogelin, G.K. Chesterton, Friedrich Hayek, and C.S Lewis and dramatically displayed in works such as Brave New World (1932), Anthem (1938), Animal Farm (1945), Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), etc.

In 1956, James Michener chronicled the horrific acts of retaliation against the Hungarian people by the Soviet Union in his globally acclaimed book, The Bridge at Andau. Perhaps the most notable anti-communist voice during the 1970s was that of Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn echoed by a chorus of others including Erza T. Benson, Larry Abraham, President Ronald Reagan, Gary Allen, Cleon Skousen, etc.

In 2003, Jung Chang published her account of living under communism entitled Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. I found this book to be an excellent tool to explain the horrors of communism to Millennial and Gen Z students, I highly recommend reading this book.

Today this threat is as real as it has every been with the single difference that rather than communism being a developing threat to liberty, socialism/communism is now a part of the very fabric of American life. For those of you who may be thinking that this is a stretch, I challenge you to compare the Antifa and BLM riots (and lack of intervention by elected officials) to the 1966-1976 Chinese Culture Revolution.

Below is a Nov. 25th editorial piece from the Epoch Times:

America’s Critical Point in Time

From its founding up to the present, the United States of America has represented a beacon of light that has shone forth, with religious freedom and freedom of speech not witnessed in other parts of the world.

What many have failed to realize, however, is that over the past several decades, this great nation has slowly been infiltrated by the communist specter.

Amid credible allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, America is now on the brink of falling into the communist abyss.

The communist specter gave rise to the regimes in the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, and China. Its ideology of totalitarianism seeks control over, rather than the flourishing of, mankind.

The Squad – Freshman (2018) Congresswomen promote marxist policies and laws.

Its gradual takeover of the West has been carried out in broad daylight. As French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote back in 1864, the “greatest trick of the Devil” is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.

During the Cold War, the world was divided between two military and political camps. Yet, while their social systems appeared to be diametrically opposed, the same process was taking place on both sides, in different forms.

Many revisionist Western-style communists, socialists, Fabianists, liberals, and progressives publicly rejected the Soviet and Chinese models while their efforts led society on a path toward a social structure no different from those of the Soviet Union and China. And so it has been for much of the Western world.

The West was relieved at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union just a few short years later.

The specter of communism, however, never died.

It continued to thrive in China, the world’s most populous nation. And while the Cold War ended, the international communist movement never ceased its efforts to achieve its global goal of communist domination.

While communist regimes have continued with their rigid dictatorships, party politics in free societies have come to a point of crisis. Communism has exploited loopholes in the legal and political systems of democratic nations by manipulating major political parties.

This decades-long effort has now nearly succeeded.

Socialism

Socialism has always been part of Marxism and the international communist movement. As Vladimir Lenin stated, “The goal of socialism is communism.” In democratic states, socialism slowly eats away at people’s freedoms through legislation.

In the West, the process of establishing a socialist system takes decades or generations, leaving people gradually numb, oblivious, and accustomed to socialism. The endgame of socialist movements implemented gradually and through “legal” means is no different from that of their violent counterparts.

Socialism inevitably undergoes a transition to communism, with people continually stripped of their rights until what remains is a tyrannical, authoritarian regime.

Socialism uses the idea of guaranteeing equality of outcome through legislation, but this seemingly noble goal goes against nature. Under normal circumstances, people of all kinds naturally vary in their religious beliefs, moral standards, cultural literacy, educational backgrounds, intelligence, fortitude, diligence, sense of responsibility, aggressiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, and more.

In actuality, socialism’s pursuit of equality drags down morality and deprives people of the freedom to incline toward goodness.

Socialism uses “political correctness” to attack basic moral discernment and artificially force everyone to be the same. This has come along with the legalization and normalization of all manner of anti-theist and profane speech, sexual perversions, demonic art, pornography, gambling, and drug use.

The result is a kind of reverse discrimination against those who believe in God and aspire to moral elevation, with the goal of marginalizing and eventually getting rid of them.

Leftist and other pernicious agendas have been able to acquire so much mainstream influence in Western countries largely due to the help of mass media. In countries run by communist regimes, all outlets are subject to state censorship, if not directly controlled by the communist party. Elsewhere, the media has been brought under the sway of financial and partisan bias. Honest reporting and discourse are buried by an avalanche of sensationalism, political virtue-signaling, and outright fake news.

All around the world, socialist and communist movements have taken advantage of economic unrest and the pandemic to edge themselves into positions of influence, with the eventual goal of overthrowing the existing social order.

We are now seeing the same playing out in America.

The United States has gone far along with the socialist ideology. Mainstream media champion the ideas of equality and follow the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) attacks on America. Our younger generations have come to view socialism favorably and are among the most fevered in taking part in protests and riots aimed at destroying our cultural heritage.

Meanwhile, society at large has come to support the idea that the government should provide health care, education, and perhaps eventually the cost of living. Knowingly and unknowingly, we are gradually trading our freedoms for a system that controls people.

Socialism and communism claim full ownership over all property and human beings. Socialism demands people give up their belief in God and instead take the state as God.

The United States, the place founded on a fundamental belief in freedom, has become a country where freedom gets betrayed. This has now come to a head with the 2020 election and credible allegations of voter fraud.

The nation that stands to gain the most from this is China, where the CCP has ruled brutally for more than 70 years, resulting in the unnatural deaths of at least 65 million people.

For communist China, the United States has always stood in the way of the communists’ objective of global control. The communist regime’s goal has always been to overthrow the United States and become the dominant power in the world.

For decades, it has worked toward this objective, and it is now close to attaining it.

Its methods of subversion are sophisticated and run deep. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in July that the agency has nearly 2,500 open counterintelligence investigations related to China and that the agency opens a new one about every 10 hours.

China’s rise, however, was halted and even reversed under the Trump administration, which recognized the mortal threat of the CCP to the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the CCP as the “central threat of our times.” A nationwide effort has been underway to rid the United States of the CCP’s influence, as well as counter the Party’s aggression overseas. Needless to say, the Chinese communist regime stands to gain a lot from an end to the Trump presidency.

A Battle Between Good and Evil

Communism teaches people to replace belief in God with atheism and materialism.

As a consequence, in today’s world, the criteria for discerning good and evil have been inverted. Righteousness is cast as wickedness and vice as compassion.

By the start of the 20th century, atheistic and anti-traditional thought had begun to gradually seep into school curricula, facilitated by leftist pedagogical experts who had infiltrated academia and held sway over educational policy.

The public is inculcated with a modern consciousness and mobilized to overpower the minority of people who stubbornly hold to tradition. Intellectuals levy heavy criticism of folk cultures around the world, fostering narrow-minded prejudice among their undiscerning audiences. The concepts of critical and creative thinking are abused to pit those of the younger generation against authority, preventing them from absorbing the knowledge and wisdom of traditional culture.

In communist countries, after the bearers of traditional culture were slaughtered, the bulk of the population was indoctrinated to participate in revolution. After the CCP seized power, it took 25 years to nurture a generation of “wolf cubs,” a Chinese term for those who grew up under communism and were indoctrinated to hate and kill class enemies. They were encouraged to fight, smash, rob, and burn indiscriminately.

Epoch Times Photo
Communist Party cadres hang a placard on the neck of a Chinese man during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The words on the placard states the man’s name and accuse him of being a member of the “black class.” (Public Domain)

The CCP actively cultivates murderous sentiment. During the Cultural Revolution, teenage girls readily beat their teachers to death as part of Mao’s ideological crusade.

In the West, communist parties proudly harken back to the experiences of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. Every revolution and insurrection has been introduced by mobs that had no scruples, no shame, and no compassion.

Communism is a scourge on humanity. Its goal is the destruction of mankind, and its arrangements are meticulous and specific.

Human civilization, meanwhile, was transmitted to man by the divine. If humans destroy their culture and tradition, and if the morality of society collapses, then they will fail to understand the divine.

We can break through the communist specter’s attempt at destruction by actively rejecting its influence and instead following the divine, restoring our traditions, and elevating morality.

This is an era of both despair and hope.

This article was written in part based on the special editorial series “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World.” To read the series, click here.

Why the 12th Amendment?

One possible outcome of this historic election could be an Electoral College impasse that would then move the choosing of the president to the US legislature.

As this potential reality continues to grow, a review of the 12th Amendment is necessary to avoid insecurity of the citizenry. Here is the process:

Step One – On the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, registered state citizens vote for political party to represent the state.

Step Two – Before December 14, State government certifies the votes and selects Electors of the Electoral College to represent the state based on the will of the people as demonstrated by the popular vote.

Step Three – On December 14, Electors cast two votes each, one for president and one for vice president.

Step Four – Electoral College creates list of all candidates voted for by Electors and number of votes for each and sends it to the President of the Senate.

Step Five – Before both houses of congress, the President of the Senate opens and reads the votes cast for president and vice president. The candidates with the majority of votes (270 or greater) will be the next president and vice president.

Amendment XII

The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;–The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;–the person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Much of the debate over the value of the Electoral College has been fueled by the insistence that America is a “democracy” and that the popular vote is all that matters.

Remember, from the 1787 Constitutional Convention to now, the intent of the framers was that both the populace and the state governments be represented fairly. That is why originally the House of Representatives was selected by popular vote, but the Senate was appointed by the state legislatures (changes to popular vote by the 17th amendment). Simple “one vote per person” is democracy and only works in small governments as defined by James Madison: “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” These societies, Madison contended “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.” 

To decrease the frequency of these spectacles and ensure that the people and state governments were fairly represented, the system of the Electoral College was wisely adopted. I must again point out that from a perspective of “Federalism” (system established by the Constitution) states must be represented as well as population.

To wrap up, if no candidate has a clear majority of electoral votes (270), the process will devolve to the US House and Senate, and each state will have one vote in each body to answer to the question of the next president and vice president.

For better understanding I recommend these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIPt0oZuYFU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTbvYGH_Hiw

MATH AGAINST TYRANNY

By Will Hively

The following article is taken from the 1996 November issue of Discover Magazine. We would like to thank Discover for the great research and writing that went into this article. To read more great articles from Discover, visit them on the web at www.discover.com.

I CAN’T ENCOURAGE YOU ENOUGH TO TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS ARTICLE AND REALLY UNDERSTAND THE NECESSITY AND LIBERTY GUARDING EFFECT OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.

When you cast your vote this month, you’re not directly electing the president—you’re electing members of the electoral college. They elect the president. An archaic, unnecessary system? Mathematics shows, says one concerned American, that by giving your vote to another, you’re ensuring the future of our democracy.

“One morning at two o’clock,” Alan Natapoff recalls, “I realized that I was the only person willing to see this problem through to the end.” The morning in question was back in the late 1970s. Then as now, Natapoff, a physicist, was spending his days doing research at MIT’s Man-Vehicle Laboratory, investigating how the human brain responds to acceleration, weightless floating, and other vexations of contemporary transport. But the problem he was working on so late involved larger and grander issues. He was contemplating the survival of our nation as we know it.

Not long before Natapoff’s epiphany, Congress had teetered on the verge of wrecking the electoral college, an institution that has no equal anywhere in the world. This group of ordinary citizens, elected by all who vote, elects, in turn, the nation’s president and vice president. Though the college still stood, Natapoff worried that sometime soon, well-meaning reformers might try again to destroy it. The only way to prevent such a tragedy, he thought, would be to get people to understand the real but hidden value of our peculiar, roundabout voting procedure. He’d have to dig down to basic principles. He’d have to give them a mathematical explanation of why we need the electoral college.

Natapoff’s self-chosen labor has taken him more than two decades. But now that the journal Public Choice is about to publish his groundbreaking article, he can finally relax a bit; he might even take a vacation. In addition to this nontechnical article, which skimps on the math, he’s worked out a formal theorem that demonstrates, he claims, why our complex electoral system is “provably” better than a simple, direct election. Furthermore, he adds, without this quirky glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long ago into warring factions.

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This month many of us are playing our allotted role in the drama that’s haunted Natapoff for so long. Ostensibly, by voting on November 5, we are choosing the next president of the United States. Nine weeks after the apparent winner celebrates victory, however, Congress will count not our votes but those of 538 “electors,” distributed proportionally among the states. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has seats in Congress–California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated states have 3 each; the District of Columbia also has 3. These 538 votes actually elect the president. And the electors who cast them don’t always choose the popular-vote winner. In 1888, the classic example, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote versus Benjamin Harrison’s 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. But the electors chose Harrison, overwhelmingly (233 to 168). They were not acting perversely. According to the rules laid out in the Constitution, Harrison was the winner.

Some reversals have been more complicated. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and then more electoral votes–99 versus 84– but still lost the election because he didn’t win a majority of electoral votes (78 went to other candidates). When that happens, the House of Representatives picks the winner. In 1876, Samuel J. Tilden lost to Rutherford B. Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes’s 47.9 percent; an extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. We’ve also had some famous close calls. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, a smaller margin than Cleveland had over Harrison. But wait: Nixon won more states (Nixon 26, Kennedy and others 24). But no: Kennedy, who won bigger states, went on to win the electoral balloting, 303 to 219. This time we, the people, did not strike out. The popular-vote winner became president.

Clearly, in U.S. presidential elections, it ain’t over till it’s over. A popular-vote loser in the big national contest can still win by scoring more points in the smaller electoral college. But isn’t this undemocratic? Isn’t it somehow wrong that a few hundred obscure electors, foisted on a new republic by men of property in powdered wigs, should be allowed to reverse the people’s choice?

By 1969, Congress was beginning to think so. After Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey with a popular margin, again, of less than 1 percent, the possibility of a modern-day winner’s being denied the presidency had become so obnoxious to the House of Representatives that it approved a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The American Bar Association supported the move, calling our current electoral system “archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and

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dangerous.” In the Senate, too, the amendment had broad support. What could be simpler or fairer than electing the president by direct popular vote? Over the next few years the issue lost momentum, but Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory over Gerald Ford in 1976 brought it back to life. The League of Women Voters, a host of political scientists, and a large majority of American citizens, according to various polls, all agreed that the electoral college should be abolished. In 1977, though, among those testifying against the amendment was a self-described political nobody from Massachusetts: Alan Natapoff.

Leafing now through the Congressional Record, Natapoff laughs. “The impact of my testimony,” he says, “was negligible.” He hadn’t yet proved his theorem, and the mathematical argument he did present was edited to a “blunted” paraphrase, leaving out some of his most important arguments. The electoral college survived, of course, but not because of anything Natapoff said. After a decade of sporadic debate and 4,395 pages of testimony, the bill died in the Senate. It had majority support, but not the two-thirds majority required to pass it.

The issue will likely catch fire again, though, the moment another popular winner fails to muster the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch victory. “Raw voting, having the president elected by a popular vote, is deep in the American psyche,” Natapoff says. It’s been around since Andrew Jackson finally won the presidency–four years later than he should have, according to 153,544 raw, frustrated voters. “My theorem,” Natapoff admits, “contradicts the common wisdom of our time. Everybody gets this wrong. Everybody. Because we were taught incorrectly.”

Natapoff included. How could a boy who grew up in the Bronx, played ball in the streets, and attended public schools in New York City not have absorbed the common wisdom? Natapoff went on to study particle physics at Berkeley. Later, at mit, he changed his field of research but not his belief in raw, popular democracy. Then one day in the 1960s, he saw an article in Life that changed his mind. It quoted political experts who said the electoral college robs voters of their power. But the mathematics these experts were using seemed too simple to support their conclusion. Natapoff looked into the math, and pretty soon he reached the opposite conclusion. Almost always, he convinced himself, our electoral systemincreasesvoters’ power. The experts had not considered enough cases; they looked only at unbelievably close elections with two candidates running neck and neck everywhere in the country. Real elections are almost never that closely contested. Some states tilt sharply toward one candidate or another, and the voting power of individuals in each state changes in ways the reformers’ arguments ignored.

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The more Natapoff looked into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the more parallels he found with another American institution that stirs up wild passions in the populace. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports– which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill “Moose” Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. “Nobody walked away saying it was unfair,” he says.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. “And that’s exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888,” Natapoff continues. “Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the five biggies.” And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available– bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field–and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

“Experts, scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral reform,” Natapoff decided, “but nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.”

These insights came quickly, but it was many years before Natapoff devised his formal mathematical proof. His starting point was the concept of voting power. In a fair election, he saw, each voter’s power boils down to this: What is the probability that one person’s vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands. To figure out these probabilities, Natapoff devised his own model of a national electorate–a more realistic model, he thought, than the ones the quoted experts were always using. Almost always, he found, individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts–such as states–than when pooled in

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one large, direct election. It is more likely, in other words, that your one vote will determine the outcome in your state and your state will then turn the outcome of the electoral college, than that your vote will turn the outcome of a direct national election. A voter therefore, Natapoff found, has more power under the current electoral system.

Why worry how easily one vote can turn an election, so long as each voter has equal power? One person, one vote–that’s all the math anyone needs to know in a simple, direct election. Natapoff agrees that voters should have equal power. “The idea,” he says, “is to give every voter the largest equal share of national voting power possible.” Here’s a classic example of equal voting power: under a tyranny, everyone’s power is equal to zero. Clearly, equality alone is not enough. In a democracy, individuals become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power increases.

James Madison, chief architect of our nation’s electoral college, wanted to protect each citizen against the most insidious tyranny that arises in democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in a dominant bloc. As Madison explained in The Federalist Papers (Number X), “a well-constructed Union” must, above all else, “break and control the violence of faction,” especially “the superior force of an . . . overbearing majority.” In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives.

A well-designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. Under raw voting, a candidate has every incentive to woo only the largest bloc– say, Serbs in Yugoslavia. If a Serb party wins national power, minorities have no prospect of throwing them out; 49 percent will never beat 51 percent. Knowing this, the majority can do as it pleases (lacking other effective checks and balances). But in a districted election, no one becomes president without winning a large number of districts, or “states”- -say, two of the following three: Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Candidates thus have an incentive to campaign for non- Serb votes in at least some of those states and to tone down extreme positions–in short, to make elections less risky events for the losers. The result, as George Wallace used to say, may often be a race without “a dime’s worth of difference” between two main candidates, which he viewed as a weakness but others view as a strength of our system.

The founding fathers were not experts on voting power. Many wanted an electoral college simply because they distrusted the mob. A large electorate, they believed, falls prey to passions, rumors, and “tumult.” Electors were supposed to consider each candidate’s merits more judiciously, not blindly follow the popular will. Nowadays, of course, whoever wins the popular vote in any state wins all the electoral votes in that

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state automatically (except in Maine, which divides its electoral votes). We no longer need human bodies to cast electoral ballots, Natapoff says. That part of the system is indeed archaic. But it has worked beautifully, he insists, as a formula for converting one large national contest into 51 smaller elections in which individual voters have more clout. The Madisonian system, by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the nation, has forced majorities to win the consent of minorities, checked the violence of factions, and held the country together. “We have stumbled onto something that not everyone appreciates,” Natapoff says. “People should understand it before they decide to change it.”

Which is why, late one night a couple of decades back, with a minimum of fanfare, Natapoff appointed himself unofficial mathematician for one of the least popular institutions in America.

Two variables, Natapoff realized, profoundly affect each citizen’s voting power. One is the size of the electorate, a factor that political scientists already recognized. The other is the closeness of the contest, which most experts hadn’t taken into account.

It’s easy to see the effect of size. Your vote matters less in a larger pool of votes: it’s the same drop in a bigger bucket and less likely to change the outcome of an election. However, in a ridiculously small nation of, say, three voters, your vote would carry immense power. An election would turn on your ballot 50 percent of the time. For a simple example, let’s assume that only two candidates are running, A versus B, and each vote is like a random coin toss, with a 50 percent chance of going either way. In your nation of three, there’s a 50 percent chance that the other two voters will split, one for A and the other for B, and thus a 50 percent chance that your single vote will determine the election. There’s also, of course, a 25 percent chance both will vote for A and a 25 percent chance both will vote for B, making your vote unimportant. But that potential tie-splitting power puts all voters in a powerful position; candidates will give each of you a lot of respect.

As a nation gets larger, each citizen’s voting power shrinks. When Natapoff computes voting power–the probability that one vote will turn the election–he is really computing the probability that the rest of the nation will deadlock. If you are part of a five-voter nation, the other four voters would have to split–two for A and two for B–for your vote to turn the election. The probability of that happening is 3 in 8, or 37.5 percent. (The other possibilities are three votes for A and one for B, a 25 percent probability; three for B and one for A, also 25 percent; four for A, 6.25 percent; and four for B, 6.25 percent.) As the nation’s size goes up, individual voting power continues to drop, roughly as the square root of size. Among 135 citizens, for instance,

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there are so many ways the others can divide and make your vote meaningless–say, 66 for A and 68 for B–that the probability of deadlock drops to 6.9 percent. In the 1960 presidential race, one of the closest ever, more than 68 million voters went to the polls. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371 votes for Kennedy and the same for Nixon (also-rans not included). Instead, Kennedy squeaked past Nixon 34,227,096 to 34,107,646. You might as well try to balance a pencil on its point as try to swing a modern U.S. election with one vote. In a typical large election, individuals or small groups of voters have little chance of being critical to a raw-vote victory, and they therefore have little bargaining power with a prospective president.

So, does this historic example demonstrate how the electoral college compensates for our individual insignificance? Wasn’t each vote for Kennedy or Nixon actually more important than the raw vote count suggests, being funneled through the electoral college? If a couple thousand votes had changed in a key state or two. . . ? Actually, no- –if the experts’ assumptions are true. If each vote really is like a toss of those perfectly balanced coins so beloved by theorists, then districting never boosts voting power. It’s actually a useless complication; it slightly reduces individual power. You can see this in a small electorate. If you district a nation of nine into three states with three voters each, with each vote a perfect toss-up, the probability of a deadlock in your state is 50 percent. Your vote would then decide the outcome in your state. Beyond that, the other two states must also deadlock, one going for A and one for B, to make your state’s outcome decisive for the nation. The probability of that is also 50 percent. So the compound probability of the whole election hinging on your vote is 25 percent. In a simple, direct election, on the other hand, the national pool of eight other voters would have to split four against four to make your vote decisive. The probability of that happening is 27.3 percent (35/128), giving you more power in a direct election. Districting doesn’t help this nation of nine, and it doesn’t help any electorate of any size when the contest is perfectly even.

Thus the experts who wanted to reform our system were right, but only if you grant them one large assumption. An electoral college does rob voters of power if everyone, in effect, walks into a voting booth and flips a coin to decide between two equally appealing candidates, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. “But this is an inaccurate model,” Natapoff counters. “They were going to change the Constitution based on a narrow finding.”

Natapoff decided to push the analysis further, even though the math got harder as he shed convenient, simplifying assumptions. He wanted to know what happens when voters stop acting like ideal, perfect coins and begin to favor one candidate over the

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other. He could see right away that everyone’s voting power shrinks, because the probability goes down that the electorate will deadlock. The national tally is more likely to be lopsided, just as a tail-heavy coin is more likely to come up, say, 60 heads and 40 tails than 50-50.

A general preference for one candidate over the other is like a house advantage in gambling. “If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote,” Natapoff says, “in 100,000 votes he’s almost sure to win. And that’s bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn’t make any difference in the outcome. The leading candidate becomes the house.”

Of course, you might object, voters aren’t really roulette wheels. When you walk into the voting booth, you’ve probably already made up your mind which candidate you’ll vote for. If it’s A, the probability that you’ll pull the lever for B instead isn’t 45 percent, it’s more like 0 percent. Similarly, if your brother-in-law is a strong supporter of B, the probability that he’ll actually vote for B is close to 100 percent, not 45 percent. Although many people get hung up on this part of Natapoff’s argument, it’s not really that hard to understand. Imagine for a moment that you’re not a person at all, but a voting booth. When someone steps in to cast a vote, you have no idea whether that vote will be for A or for B. The voter may have made up her mind long ago, but until she actually pulls the lever, you won’t know whom she’s chosen. All you know is that of the people whose votes you count today, about 55 percent will vote for A and about 45 percent for B. Similarly, a spin of the roulette wheel isn’t really random. The laws of physics, the shape of the ball, the currents in the air, and other factors will all determine where the ball lands. But a gambler can’t calculate those factors any more than a voting booth can know which candidate an individual voter will choose.

In a nation of 135 citizens, says Natapoff, one person’s probability of turning an election is 6.9 percent in a dead-even contest. But if voter preference for candidate A jumps to, say, 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of your one vote turning the election, falls below .4 percent, a huge drop. If candidate A goes out in front by 61 percent, the probability that one vote will matter whooshes down to .024 percent. And it keeps on dropping, faster and faster, as candidate A keeps pulling ahead.

The next step is the kicker. The effect of lopsided preferences, Natapoff discovered, is far more important than the size effect. In a dead- even contest, remember, voting power shrinks as the electorate becomes larger. But a 1 or 2 percent change in electorate size, by itself, doesn’t matter much to the individual voter. When one candidate gains an edge over another, however, a 1 or 2 percent change can make a huge difference to everyone’s voting power, giving candidates less of a motive to keep

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the losers happy. And the larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, like a house advantage.

Some people know this from ordinary experience. If you’re gambling in a casino, for instance, you had better keep your session as short as possible; the longer you play, the less likely you are to beat the house odds and break even (let alone win). By the same principle, if you’re flipping a lopsided coin yet looking for an equal number of heads and tails (a deadlock), you had better keep the number of coin flips low; the longer you try with lopsided coins, the more the law of averages works against a 50-50 outcome. And if you’re voting in an uneven election, you had better keep the electorate’s size as small as possible. “If the law of averages has got an edge,” Natapoff says, “it’s going to tell in the long run. And so the idea is not to allow any very large elections if you are a voter. Unless the contest is perfectly even, you want to keep the size of elections small.” The founding fathers unwittingly did this when they divided the national election into smaller, state-size contests.

So even though districting doesn’t help in an ideal, dead-even contest, with voters acting the same all over the country, it does help, Natapoff saw, in a realistic, uneven contest. Sports fans, again, vaguely understand the underlying principle. In a championship series, the contest becomes more equal, and the underdog has a better chance, when a team has to win more games, not just score more points. Similarly, when contesting 50 states, the leading candidate has more ways to lose than when running in a large, raw national election–there are more ways for votes to cluster in harmless blowouts, just as there are more ways for runs or goals to cluster in the seven games of the World Series or the Stanley Cup play-offs. In a big, raw national contest, those clusters wouldn’t matter.

The degree to which districting helps, Natapoff found, depends on just how close a contest is. Take as an illustration our model nation of 135, divided into, say, three states of 45 citizens each. When the race is dead even, of course, no districting scheme helps: voting power starts off at 6.9 percent in a direct election versus 6.0 percent in a districted election. But when candidate A jumps ahead with a lead of 54.5 percent, individual voting power is roughly the same whether the nation uses districts or not. And as the contest becomes more lopsided, voting power shrinks faster in the direct- voting nation than it does in the districted nation. If candidate A grabs a 61.1 percent share of voter preference, voters in the districted nation have twice as much power as those in the direct-voting nation. If A’s share reaches 64.8 percent, voters in the districted nation have four times as much power, and so on. The advantage of

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districting over direct voting keeps growing quickly as the contest becomes more lopsided.

Natapoff now had a two-part result. A districted voting scheme can either decrease individual voting power or boost it, depending on how lopsided the coin being tossed for each voter becomes. He found the crossover point interesting. For a nation of 135, that point is right around a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, they would be better off voting by districts. How does that crossover point shift, Natapoff wondered, as electorate size changes?

For very small electorates–nine people, say–he found that the gap between candidates must be very large, at least 66.6 to 33.3 percent, before districting will help. That’s why raw voting works well at town meetings, where electorates are so small. As the number of voters gets larger, the crossover point moves closer to 50-50. For a nation of 135, voters are better off with districting in any race more lopsided than 55- 45. For a nation with millions of voters, the gap between candidates must be razor-thin for districting not to help. In the real world of large nations and uneven contests, voters get more bang for their ballot when they set up a districted, Madisonian electoral system–usually a lot more.

Now, try to imagine a bleary-eyed Natapoff working through the math for case after case. He finds out what happens as the size of the electorate changes, as the contest gets more or less lopsided, or as the method of districting changes (in his most favored nation of 135, you could have 3 states of 45 citizens each, 45 states of 3 citizens each– even 5 states of 20 and 7 states of 5). All these things affect voting power. Natapoff’s theorem now covers all cases. “The theorem,” he sums up, “essentially says that you’re better off districted in any large election, unless every voter in the country is alike and very closely balanced between candidates A and B. In that very extraordinary case, which rarely if ever occurs in our elections, it would be better to have a simple national election.”

Natapoff had finally answered, to his satisfaction, the question that had nagged him for decades. But what size, shape, and composition should our districts have? Like everyone else who delves into electoral politics, Natapoff could see that the actual, historic United States is not a perfectly districted nation. For one thing, states vary enormously in size. Natapoff can solve his equations to find an ideal district size for the purpose of national elections, assuming that each vote, like a coin toss, is statistically independent–but the answer depends on an election’s closeness. The districts could

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all be the same size, but only if the preference for one candidate over another is the same everywhere in the country. In general, the more lopsided the contest, the smaller each district, or state, needs to be to give individual voters the best chance of local deadlock. So in close elections, voters in larger states would have more power; in lopsided elections, voters in smaller states would. Since some campaigns run neck and neck to the wire while others become blowouts, we will probably never have an ideally districted nation for any particular election, even with equal-size states.

Ideally, too, no bloc should dominate any district. This consideration, by itself, probably makes the 50 states a grid that’s closer to ideal for electoral voting than, say, the 435 congressional districts. For example, in heavily black districts, no single white or black person’s vote would be likely to change the outcome, if blacks in that district tend to vote as a bloc. Each of those voters, black and white, would have more national power in a districting scheme more closely balanced between black and white. For this reason, Natapoff says, gerrymandering can be counterproductive even when undertaken with the intention of boosting some national minority’s power. The gerrymandered district might guarantee one seat in Congress to this minority, but those voters might actually wield more national bargaining power with no seat in Congress if representatives from, say, three separate districts viewed their votes as potentially swinging an election. Anyway, Natapoff says, the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of blocs on the outcome. “This is a nonpartisan proposition,” he says. “The idea is to be sure all votes in a district have power.” Ideally no single party, race, ethnic group, or other bloc, nationally large or nationally small, will dominate any of the districts– which for now happen to be the 50 states plus Washington, D.C.

Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to jack up individual voting power, we’ll have an electoral “anomaly”–a loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of votes in this or that district can turn the election. “We were blinded by its minor vices,” he says. “All that happens is someone with fewer votes gets elected,” temporarily. What doesn’t happen may be far more important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn’t celebrate by jailing or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn’t find Harrison so intolerable that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later, beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.

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One other benefit attributed by Natapoff to our electoral college seems almost aesthetic. As usual, it’s easier to appreciate in sports. In 1960, under simpler rules, the Yankees might have been champions. They might have won, for instance, if there were no World Series but only the scheduled 154-game season, with one large baseball nation of 16 teams instead of two separate leagues. The team winning the most games all year long would simply pick up its prize in October. Instead, here is what happened. By the ninth inning in game seven of the series, the Yankees and Pirates had fought to a standstill–the ultimate deadlock. Each team had won three games. The Yankees had led throughout much of game seven, but Pittsburgh astonished everyone by scoring five runs in the eighth inning, after a Yankee fielding error, to go ahead 9-7. They couldn’t, of course, hold their lead. The Yankees answered with two more runs in the top of the ninth to tie the score at 9-9.

Then, in the bottom of the ninth, Bill Mazeroski, an average hitter without much power, stepped to the plate for Pittsburgh. He seemed a mere placeholder–until his long fly ball just cleared the left-field wall. Rounding second base, halfway home, Mazeroski was leaping for joy, and Pittsburgh fans were pouring from their seats, racing to meet him at the plate. The Yankees had finally toppled. There they were, ahead in the polls, piling up votes like nobody’s business, until one last swing of one player’s bat turned the whole season around. “Everybody regarded it as one of the most glorious World Series ever,” Natapoff says. “To do it any other way would totally destroy the degree of competition and excitement that’s essential to all sports.”

4th of July

July 4th Celebration Address 2020

On the 4th of July, Monticello College will hold a sunrise service beginning at 5:50am. Following this devotional, the college president will read the short speech below and offer a showing of the David Barton video: Sands of Time.

On this day of celebration, it is customary to recite some moments of historical significance regarding the War of Independence and the break from Great Britain. But today I have chosen to spend a few minutes remembering why the war occurred and what that great struggle was meant to achieve. As I have reflected on this idea, my mind returned over and over to the simplicity and gravity of the 1954 U.S. Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Many would say that our great nation began on July 4, 1776. We had a great struggle for independence, and organized a new nation–that history is abundantly available and part of our curriculum at Monticello College. But the IDEA of a nation like our started much earlier, in fact, a case could be made that it started as early as 1607, with the settlement of Jamestown or 1636 with the establishment of Harvard University.  Or maybe it wasn’t until the appearance of great frontiersmen of the late 1700’s such as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. Whatever date you use as a starting point, the Pledge of Allegiance is very instructive as a focal point for what the framers intended for this nation to become.

United States of America

America was, according to the framers, to be a nation of nations, or to use the term of the time, a “federation of sovereign states.” Each state was supreme in its administration within its borders but ceded limited powers to a central government.

Republic

The framers combed through thousands of years of history and through all sorts of forms and philosophies of government reading the writings of great writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Cervantes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu, finally settling on a Republic as the best form of government.

One Nation Under God

Without attempting to dictate the future, the framers left a legacy of religious observance in official acts, writings, and art to encourage their progeny to have an expectation of Divine influence if the nation was to remain. From the chambers of the Supreme Court to the Capitol’s Rotunda, religious engravings and art can be seen by all to evince the influence of religion and dependence on a Divine Creator in the forming of our great nation.

Indivisible

As families can have their squabbles and disagreements, so too can a nation of sovereign states find reasons to disagree. In spite of this propensity, the framers envision our nation to be unified and indivisible. A great and terrible war was fought to test this resolve and to date, it has held.

Liberty and Justice for All

The Signing of the Constitution of the United States, with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson at the Constitutional Convention of 1787; oil painting on canvas by Howard Chandler Christy, 1940. The painting is 20 by 30 feet and hangs in the United States Capitol building. (Photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

The foundation and supreme logic behind the formation of our nation is the establishment and protection of liberty and the administration of justice. In many ways America is a global leader in the protection of human and civil rights. In other areas, it is a continuing struggle, but as obvious as our faults may be, all are free to protest and express their grievances as guaranteed under the 1st amendment and demonstrated over the past few months.

As we celebrate this 4th of July holiday, we can rejoice in the liberties that all Americans enjoy, we should give thanks for the miracle that America is, and we must continue to defend the rights of all Americans through education, public discourse, and the administration of justice.

The framers would have it no other way.

Video: https://www.facebook.com/WallBuilders1776/videos/308907610509835/