COLLEGIATE CONUNDRUM
2020 is the 59th American presidential election year. Since the first, in 1789, every candidate has undertaken to win a majority in the Electoral College. This small body—membership is now 535 persons—materializes briefly every four years and, despite never actually meeting as a whole, almost always decides who becomes the most powerful person on the planet. Despite many a glitch, this odd institution marches on, because the Electoral College arguably fulfills the main purpose that the Framers had in mind when they created it: warding off stolen elections.
The brigands seen as most threatening at the Constitutional Convention were foreigners, and the most recent example of such thievery had involved Poland. Early modern Poland, a vast domain, or diet. When the throne became vacant in 1763, the leading candidate was the noble Stanislaw August Poniatowski. Handsome and fluent in half a dozen languages, Poniatowski, 32, would have made, according to one diplomat, an excellent master of ceremonies, though “moral courage he altogether lacks.” His main qualification was that in their twenties he and Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, had been lovers. Russia had long cultivated allies in Poland’s diet, and Catherine now used them to boost Poniatowski, calculating that he would be a compliant placeholder until she and Poland’s other neighbors—Prussia and Austria—could agree on divvying Poland up. Her ex became Stanislaw II Augustus in 1764. Catherine and fellow predators took their first helpings of his country in 1772.
