Brian Beckley’s Nov. 18 editorial says the Electoral College (EC) worked because the issues of concern to rural voters were not trampled by the votes of urbanites, which was the intention of the Founders. I disagree.

You quoted Clinton on concerns of voters and said that voters in places with those concerns were the ones that beat her. But she was speaking about Trump voters everywhere, without a mention of place. The Republican Party is shrinking, so they use the EC to overcome their popular vote deficit. They encourage dividing voters on demographics such as city/rural with its racial implications.

The editorial succumbed to that racial undertone by saying Democrats engage in “identity politics” by “preaching to minorities” to “elect people who look like you” and “white rural voters did just that” in voting for Trump. Clinton doesn’t look like a racial minority nor Trump like a country boy. Trump ran a campaign of white fear and resentment of non-whites, something he began years earlier, using the “birther” nonsense to foment an underlying white backlash against President Obama.

There was no urban/rural divide in 1788. Only 1 in 25 people lived in cities, and only 5 cities had more than 10,000 people. The divide was between colonies with different numbers of rural people and different numbers of slaves. To get agreement to form the Union, smaller colonies were given more power in Congress and slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. The Founders also wanted local elected elites to be the Electors who would choose the President, an idea quickly hijacked by political parties.

Today, Wyoming gets one EC vote per 142,741 people, but California needs 508,344. In Wyoming 1-in-5 voted for Clinton and in California 1-in-3 voted for Trump, but they knew their vote would not actually count because of the EC. The unfairness of the EC can be eliminated without amending the Constitution if enough states enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, as our state already has.

Tom Blake,

Renton