Let's do away with Electoral College

The daily Gallup tracking poll is an indicator of the popular vote for a presidential candidate. But our president is not elected by popular vote, which makes this statistic meaningless. The more meaningful polls would be state polls because as we know, the candidate who gets the most popular votes wins all the electoral votes for that state. We are using a method for electing our president, the Electoral College, that was rejected every time it was proposed during the Federal Convention of 1787, which produced our constitution.

Eleven delegates, when writing the final form of our constitution, replaced Edmund Randolph's proposal for the president to be elected for one seven-year term with the Electoral College. Our seventh president asked his Congress to write legislation so that the choice of the people would not be defeated by the Electoral College.

Obviously they did not and the choice of the people has been defeated four times in our short history. We need a grass-roots effort to abolish the Electoral College and elect our president by popular vote. I wrote to both Peter Roskam, my congressman, and one of my senators, Dick Durbin, about this issue. I hope that we can inundate our congressmen with letters asking them to give the people the right to choose their president and not electors. The abolishment of the Electoral College is long overdue.

Chuck Coletta

Lombard