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Excellent: The Electoral College  If Not Perfect, At Least
Excellent: The Electoral College  Last Wednesday, September
17th, was Constitution Day – the anniversary of the day the
Constitution was signed.  In celebration Donald Ritchie, author
of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington
Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United
States: A Student Companion, spoke at the Robert C. Byrd Center
for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University in West
Virginia.  Below, Ritchie, who has been Associate Historian of
the United States Senate for more than three decades, shares his
speech – which reflects on the electoral college.  If the
authors of the Federalist Papers drew straws to decide which
parts of the Constitution they would defend, Alexander Hamilton
must have drawn the short straw, since he had to rationalize the
Electoral College, a problematic procedure then as now. Hamilton
introduced it cleverly by noting that “if th