This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 9th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Electoral College has a few purposes, and one of those purposes is the idea that virtuous

people would be given the duties as electors and they would vote

according to conscience to provide a check on mob rule.

Andrew Grossman is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a constitutional litigator at Baker-Hostetler.

We spoke about the Electoral College today.

The Electoral College is a part of the Constitution.

Some people may be surprised to learn that it is not people who elect a president.

It is state legislators that delegate to voters the ability to vote for president and then the state certifies that

result and then sends people to do what? Well under the Constitution every state is responsible for appointing a certain number of federal

electors, and it's those electors who in December actually vote for the President of the United

States by a majority vote. If no candidate captures a majority vote, then the entire election is

thrown to the United States House of Representatives.

What was the purpose of the Electoral College?

Because you can imagine that the founders could have said, well, every

state just send your results to Washington, D.C. and we'll look at the results and then

we'll certify the will of the state legislature,

typically delegated to voters and that the person that wins gets to be the president.

The whole point of this was to prevent mob rule,

and it does that in a couple different ways.

One of course is this majority requirement.

It's not enough that a candidate has a concentrated base of support in one or two states. it has to be somebody who has the esteem of the entire nation.

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