Writer slanted election details

Erik Meyer’s Tuesday letter “They are Democrats in name only” made many questionable assertions, but I have to take issue with his contention that the Electoral College is democratic and that Republicans peacefully accept the outcomes of presidential elections when they lose.

The Electoral College is absolutely not democratic. It was created in 1787 as a reaction by the framers to what they perceived as the “excessive democracy” shown by state legislatures that had passed debt-relief legislation. It also served to protect the interests of Southern slaveholders, by counting slaves as of a person in order to apportion more voting power to the Southern states.

Meyer’s claim that Donald Trump won a landslide by winning 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227 conveniently ignores the results of the popular vote, which Clinton won by 2,868,519 votes. Meyer also failed to mention that almost 54 percent of the country’s votes were cast for someone other than Trump. No other comparable democratic nation in the world employs a device as anachronistic as the Electoral College. It is ludicrous for Meyer to claim that “this is how democracy works or is supposed to work.”

But Meyer managed to astonish me with this claim: “When a Democrat wins, the Republicans do not like it, but quietly accept the outcome.” Did the tea party or Republicans in Congress quietly accept the election of President Barack Obama? The right wing in this country spent eight years questioning Obama’s birth certificate, suggested that he was a closeted Muslim, ginned up irrational fear about the Affordable Care Act (remember “death panels”?), falsely accused him of trying to abolish the right to bear arms, shut down the government and threatened to vote against the debt ceiling, while successfully obstructing Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court in 2016.

Craig Swarts Columbus