This week on the Lectures and History podcast, a lecture about the Electoral College.

The House of Representatives recently introduced legislation that would reform the 135-year-old law,

affirming the vice president has no role in validating a presidential election besides overseeing the counting process.

University of Utah political science professor James

Curry teaches the class about the creation of the Electoral College. That the founders were concerned

that the country was too large and that people would be too uninformed of their potential leaders

from any other states other than their own. So essentially that if you did direct election by state,

what you would get would be, if we're talking about the first election, 13 states that would

choose 13 different presidents and you essentially be deadlocked with 13 candidates

essentially coming in sort of a quasi-tie tie. This class was taught in the fall of 2020.

All right. In that case, I'm going to share my screen, and we're going to start talking about

the Electoral College, everybody's favorite thing. Okay. So today we're going to spend,

we're going to start our week of talking specifically about the electoral college,

what it is, how it works, why it's important, why George C. Edwards doesn't like it. In fact,

why most political scholars kind of hate the electoral college. It's not very popular among

sort of the political science set. You're going to kind of with George C. Edwards book, which hopefully you've read most of so far,

if not all of it, you kind of get a full-throated argument against the electoral college.

But it's a useful and instructive book also because he lays out all of the common arguments for it as well,

which I think is helpful for allowing each person to sort

of make up their mind about what they think about this institution, generally speaking.

So this is really, I do a whole week on this one because it's how we like the president,

but very few Americans fully understand the full extent of the process.

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