Timothy Explains The Electoral College

Good evening students. It is I Professor Timothy the Talking Cat of Bortsworth Polytechnic’s Faculty of Politics and Squirrel Hunting (open Wednesdays and Thursdays 12 pm to 3 pm except public holidays and when it is raining).

Many people ask me “I didn’t think the UK had polytechnics any more?” but what they should be asking me is “what is the best system for choosing your government?” That is an excellent question, thank you so much for asking it.

The best system of government is a REPUBLIC. Now what is a republic? A republic is not a democracy and that is how it is defined. A democracy is the worst kind of system of government as numerous example attest. Once you understand this then it is clear that a republic is the system of government you want. This was all worked out by the Ancient Greeks many years ago but despite their wisdom, Ancient Greece fell when it joined the European Union and everybody had to speak German or French or some weird mutant language that is like a hybrid of the worst bits of both languages (can you imagine that!)

Once you have established your republic you must pick your leader. It is imperative that you have a wise and noble leader. Who should you pick? Me of course! Ha, ha, I jest — there’s no way I’d want to run your crappy country. No, no, you’ll need to pick a second rate leader from your own country.

Picking them is hard. You can’t just ask everybody “who should be leader” because that would be democracy and as we already established we want a republic not a democracy. The amazing answer is to set up an electoral college.

The dictionary defines “college” as:

a university where you can study for an undergraduate degree

A Dictionary

However, an electoral college is a university where you study to pick the leader of your republic. Like any university it has a library and over-priced places to eat which the students avoid because they can’t afford to eat on campus but that’s OK because all their lectures are online now and they can eat toast at home. In America, the electoral college is in a big tree all covered in ivy and so probably doesn’t have a lot of room for over-priced places to eat, maybe only a gift shop selling t-shirts with the university name on them.

How does this work? Every state picks people to go to the special university. It doesn’t matter how they pick them and they don’t need to be super-smart because they only have to go to one lecture and they don’t even have to take notes. Once they get to the university they have to climb up the ivy so that they can sit on what are called “the three branches of government”. A big Irish guy called Bill O’Rights then asks them who should run the government. It’s a tough final exam for your first day at university! Luckily that’s the only question on the test.

Everybody has a guess at who is going to be the new leader. Interestingly it is never anybody at the college because of what they call “separation of powers”. If you guess right then you graduate. That’s bad news because you then owe the government lots of money in student debt, so everybody tries to guess wrong. Bill O’Rights tallies up the guesses and the person with the most guesses is named ‘The POTUS with MOST-UST”. Everybody then swears at him (it’s always a him because that’s a rule for republics).

This time hallowed process ensures that your republic never falls into the dangers of democracy. Also you get a t-shirt and a mug from the gift shop.