The Founding Fathers.

1. Republican member of the Electoral College from Texas says he won’t cast ballot for Donald Trump

Even as voting is underway in the 2016 presidential election, our system is being called into question. Not the campaign finance system – well, yes, that too, but we’re specifically talking about the Electoral College. The campaign to abolish the Electoral College is a terrible, destructive idea.

“An 11th state looks ready to join a national movement to sideline the Electoral College and decide presidential elections by popular vote,” the Daily Signal reported. “A bipartisan bill moving through the Arizona Legislature aims to reallocate the state’s 11 electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the majority of votes on a national scale rather than the candidate who wins the state. The legislation is part of a nationwide push called the National Popular Vote plan, an effort to create an agreement among states that vow to automatically elect the president of the United States using the national popular vote instead of the final vote count in each respective state.”

Arizona would join California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia in calling for a National Popular Vote.

Here’s why that’s a bad idea.

The Constitution provides for the election of the president through electors, or members of the Electoral College. When we vote for a candidate, we’re actually voting for a slate of electors.

It’s not a democratic system – and that’s the point. The United States is a republic. The Framers of the Constitution were actually a little distrustful of direct democracy. They feared the “tyranny of the majority,” which in a truly democratic system means that any majority over 50 percent of the public holds absolute sway over the whole nation. The Electoral College ensures that minorities are respected.

The Framers also feared that presidential elections would become simple popularity contests; electors, they reasoned, would be the last line of defense against unqualified candidates gaining power.

In practice, the Electoral College also quarantines voter fraud. It isolates problems and allows us to deal with them on a smaller scale (recounting one state, for example, rather than the entire nation’s ballot boxes).

But the strongest argument against National Popular Vote’s call is that abolishing the Electoral College would merely shift the political battles from battleground states to big cities.

In a popular election, candidates would have to go where the voters are – and that means rural areas would be skipped.

And because politicians tend to promise their audiences things, rural interests would undoubtedly suffer at the expense of urban concerns. According to The New York Times, “the average county in a swing state receives more than an 8 percent increase in federal grants, totaling perhaps $35 million, during a year when an incumbent president seeks re-election.”

That kind of largesse would be lavished on the high-density population centers, rather than on other areas, which might need it more.

The Electoral College is a vital protection for rural Americans. It is crucial to America’s unique form of government.