This is Reason Enough for Electoral College

From what I understand, they're still counting the votes, going on four weeks after the election, in California (as they have been in Michigan, Wisconsin and may in Pennsylvania). In Brazil, a nation with much more challenging geography, they manage to do it in five hours.

The seemingly endless dawdling of California's (presumably union-represented) public employees has obscured two interesting things about this year's presidential election. The first is that Electoral College loser "Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote by a considerably wider percentage than her counterparts in the elections of 2000 and 1888, though she apparently won by a slimmer margin than Tilden in 1876." The second is that the most populous state was a political outlier, voting at one extreme in the national political spectrum.

You can see this easily if you array the states in order of Democratic percentage. At the top, before any state, was the District of Columbia, where 91 percent of voters chose Clinton. Next, some 5,000 miles away, was Hawaii, which went 63 percent for Clinton. Then came giant California, the nation's most populous state at 62 percent Democratic.

Well, one might say; California has been called the Left Coast for quite a while. Just about everyone in the Silicon Valley and in Hollywood with few exceptions supported Clinton. White middle-class families have been pretty much priced out of the state by high taxes and housing costs, and the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who have replaced them vote far more Democratic. If California continues to occupy one extreme of the national political spectrum, the Democratic Party needs to make a case with more appeal beyond California if it wants to win 270 electoral votes.

All of which prompts renewed arguments about the Electoral College. The case for abolishing it is simple: Every American's vote should count the same. But it won't happen. Two-thirds of each house of Congress and 38 of the 50 state legislatures will never go along.

The case against abolition is one suggested by the Framers' fears that voters in one large but highly atypical state could impose their will on a contrary-minded nation. That largest state in 1787 was Virginia, home of four of the first five presidents. New York, California, and Illinois  by remaining closely in line with national opinion up through 1996, made the issue moot.

California's 21st-century veer to the left makes it a live issue again. In a popular vote system, the voters of this geographically distant and culturally distinct state, whose contempt for heartland Christians resembles imperial London's disdain for the "lesser breeds" it governed, could impose something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation. Sounds exactly like what the Framers strove to prevent.