The Iowa Standard was able to take part with Sen. Charles Grassley’s Capitol Hill Report on Thursday. We asked Sen. Grassley for his thoughts on criticisms being levied at the Electoral College.
“You’ve heard the term Iowa and the Midwest could be ‘fly over country,'” Grassley said. “If we did away with the Electoral College, this part of the country would never see a candidate for President. They’d fly over us to California, to Arizona, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois — they would get all the attention.
“And worse than that is that if you have fraud in an election, let’s say you have fraud like we did in Illinois in the 1960 Presidential election, when you have an Electoral College, the fraud is limited to a recount or prosecution in Illinois, but it doesn’t dilute the Iowans’ votes for President of the United States. But if you had everything done by popular vote, besides Iowans not getting any attention, if there was fraud in New York it would dilute the vote of an Iowan at the same time.
“We have to keep it the way it is. We’re a federal republic, not a democracy. And the constitutional division between states and the federal government has to be respected. One of the ways of protecting that division of power is by having the Electoral College.”