A Very Brief Outline of My Early Pioneer Life

Flora May Randle McMahan wrote this in 1930

I was born in the year of 1874, in the state of Tennessee. My father, J. L. Randle, and mother Dicy C. Randle moved to Washington Territory in the fall of 1886, with their family of three children: Matt, May, and Charlie. One sister Minnie, and one brother Walter, and died before this. In 1887 my sister Stella was born, near Mossyrock. In October of 1887 we moved to the Big Bottom country, just across the [Cowlitz] river from what is now Randle. Father had come on ahead and taken his homestead and built a log cabin for us.

We had to go most of the way over a rough, winding Indian trail. The ponies had to jump and climb over logs and fallen trees and go full length around them.  When we got to what was called Fulton then, on the Cowlitz river, the ponies were unpacked, the packs taken across the river in dugout Indian canoes. Then we had to swim the ponies, repack and go on. That was the second day. That night we stayed with a bachelor, a Mr. Carlisle in a one room log shack.  Next day, the third day, we arrived at our future home. Had to unpack and swim the horses again. I can never forget the first impression I had as a child, of that home, which consisted of a log cabin 10x10 feet with a mud and stick chimney and a fireplace. There was an addition of split cedar started, but not finished so we could use it for a while after we put part of our belongings in it. In the one room we had one home-made bed, with slats for springs, then made the other beds on the floor at night. 

The trail was so bad, and winter came so early, with snow between three and four feet deep, bending and breaking over the brush and into the trail, that it was impossible to get our cook stove, sewing machine and so many things that winter; that was so hard to get along without. There were three months at one time that we did not get any mail. An Indian on snowshoes then brought our letters in. 

When we moved in, there were about half-a-dozen bachelors, a Mr. and Mrs. Chilocoat with two small children 1/2 mile from us, Mr. and Mrs. R. T. Siler, who were married and moved there in the spring of the same year, one mile from us. 

I was the only girl within twenty miles. Of course there were no schools, no churches, no stores or post offices; just a poor trail through the rushes, brush, and woods between these homesteads.

Mother got very sick, I believe it was the following January.  Will Davis went horseback to Chehalis after a doctor who would not come, as it took a week to make the trip.  She was spared to her family, but what agony to me, while she lay there, not knowing whether she would live or not. I had to learn to cook on the old fireplace and to bake in the Dutch oven—cared for my baby sister, did the washing, mending, sewing, etc.

The next winter I had the most terrible toothache in my back teeth. I could neither eat nor sleep as I should. I suffered so. In the month of March, father went to Mossyrock after some cows, which Mr. Doss let him have to keep for half of the increase. I went along to get my teeth out, as we heard there was a man nine miles below there who had a pair of forceps. I rode the nine miles alone. He broke one off and all to pieces, and left the roots in. I came back home with it in that condition and suffered every minute on the way. 

Dode Doss helped father take the cows back. It took three days. I led three pack horses, one of which had only been packed a few times. They were a way ahead with the cattle. The wild, foolish pony got scared as we were going through a slough in a swampy place. The water being half-way on their sides; he got his feet over the rope and bucked and reared, run up to my side and would strike my knees with his feet and nose, until I felt sure he would get me under their feet. To make matters worse, my horse balked, and I could not make it go at all. It was pouring rain with snow mixed in, and with the horses splashing the water over me, I was drenched to the skin. I was getting so cold and numb that I could hardly stay on. I tried to call for help, but they could not hear. 

I was so long out of sight that father came back to see what was the matter. He had to wade in to get me. I was almost frozen and could not stand up when he got me off the horse. He rubbed me and put his raincoat on me. We went on to find a place to stay all night. We had to stay with two or three bachelors, in a small one-room shack. I had no clothes to change, so slept in my wet underwear. I didn’t even catch cold, but suffered until the next February with toothache. Then we went to Tacoma, and I kept house there for father, while he worked in the mill and I went to school. While there, of course I had my teeth out. 

You will wonder why I have told you this. Just because it was one of many, many instances of the hardships we had to pass through. I worked for my board and went to school in Winlock one term. Mother took us to Mossyrock and sent us to school three months. 

My ambition from childhood was to get a good education and to make something of myself, and because I could not, and because of awful loneliness, I used to cry myself to sleep almost every night. Through the day when I had time I would go into the woods and lie down to think and cry. I had no girlhood days. Finally the old timers organized a Sunday School. We would meet in the different cabins in bad weather, and out under the trees in nice weather. Later a local preacher and wife came and took a homestead. So then a Methodist church was organized, which I joined, and the few faithful ones kept it going until it has grown to serve the whole community. 

We raised good gardens, and always had good food. The only girls that I ever got to see in those days were Mr. and Mrs. Siler’s sisters, when they came in to visit them. Why! But didn’t we have good times together!

Gradually, of course, more settlers came in. They all had to slash, burn, and grub out a little at a time to make a home. Father kept adding to our house until it was 10x40 feet. All split out of cedar except the first room, 10x10. 

There was a happy day, especially for mothers, when the first doctor came with his wife and two children. There was still just a trail. He took a homestead and lived there for several years. The game, especially bear and deer, were plentiful. We had plenty of fresh meat without going far away from the house for it. 

When I was about sixteen years old, a talkative, jolly, “happy-go-lucky” young man, Jim McMahan came and took up a homestead just across the river from us. He came to our place quite often. I was so hungry for friends and someone to talk to that we became real friends, and when I was 17-years-and-two-months old we were married, then of course I moved to his home. I didn't want to marry so young, but I was just desperate. I thought if I got married, then I would know I could not go to school any more; I would have to take care of my home and help make a home.  Jim carried the mail to and from Mossyrock and packed grub and anything else anyone wanted. First, once a week; and then twice a week. I was alone so much and tried hard to do my part in making our new home. We surely have earned the land we now have many times over. After a few years there was a little school started, which has gradually grown to the wonderful school we now have. Then a little log church was built, from that, the beautiful little church we now have, and a parsonage has been built. 

When we were married thirteen months, our son, Clarence was born. Seven years later our other son, Neil, was born. During that time and long after, we only had Indian canoes to cross the [Cowlitz] river in. I could paddle the canoes as good as any man. Many, many times I’ve paddled the canoe while the men held the horses by the side of the canoe to swim them across the river. Sometimes they would rear, plunge, strike, and struggle until they would almost fill the canoe with water, or almost tip it over. I know I am safe in saying that I have ferried people, men mostly of course, hundreds of times, and never received a penny for it. Occasionally one would thank me. 

When I had the one boy, I would sit down and hold him between my knees to keep him from falling in the water. After I had the two, Clarence would sit flat in the bottom of the canoe and I would hold Neil between my knees and paddle across. It didn’t matter how high the river, or how much drift was running.  My folks living just across the Cowlitz River, I would cross to go there almost every day, too. Many, many times all alone, I've paddled across and back of nights going to church and prayer meetings, when it was so dark I could not see my hand before me. God must have been with me to take care of me.

We worked hard and finally got enough land opened that we raised quite a crop of timothy and oat hay among the stumps, which had to be cut with a scythe.  Then, oats and wheats, which had to be cut with a cradle. 

Eventually, a wagon road was opened up. The settlers volunteered and slashed it out. The stumps and roots were in it, and it was so muddy that the horses were down every little while. It would take from six to ten days to go to Chehalis, 65 miles for a load of whatever groceries, clothing, etc., we would have to have for at least six months ahead. My father carried the first chairs in the valley, strapped upside down on his back with the best breakable things packed in them.

He owned and brought in the first mowing machine. Mr. R. T. Siler packed the first wagon in on horses; father, the second. After a while we had cattle and hogs to sell, and had to drive them to Tacoma, taking a week to get them there. My dear mother had all the hardships of a woman’s pioneer life, and I believe I did, too. 

When we first began to take wagons over the road, there were no ferry boats. So they would unload them, ferry the load over, and then tie two canoes together, put two wheels in each canoe, and take the wagon over, load up, then swim the horses, hitch up, and try it again. Gradually the roads were improved, very gradually until the autos came. Now we can go to Chehalis and back in three hours instead of from six to ten days. 

I often wonder what the girls of today [1930] would do if they had to live as we lived. Good boxes for chairs, cupboards, and dressers. The rough walls were papered with newspapers. Maybe one fairly nice dress, and two calico or gingham dresses. But really, with all the hardship there was something fascinating, something satisfying, about the pioneer life. We never worried about what we didn't have or couldn’t have, or what we could or would wear. One felt so free and easy out in God’s great outdoors, with all the beauties of nature. It was inspiring and uplifting. 

I feel now that I could not possibly go through it again. But I am proud to know I have had a part in helping to develop this little part of the world from a wilderness to a beautiful little valley, blessed with all the blessings of civilization. Good houses, good roads, good people, schools, churches, etc.. How slowly and gradually it has all come about. I could write a whole book telling of the hardships and thrilling incidents we all went through and had, but I hardly think it is necessary. Just read between the lines; think what would, could, and did happen in all those years. There were many joys, also heartaches and disappointments. We, the old timers, will soon al be gone, and I hope to a better land. We trust our children and grandchildren will appreciate the heritage we leave them. 

This is from an essay Flora May Randle McMahan wrote in 1930. She lived from May 19, 1874 to September 1, 1955. Her father was James Lawson Randle (1843-1920) and her mother was Dicy Caroline Erwin Randle (1846-1930). J. L. Randle served in a unit of the Union army in the war against the Rebellion of the Southern Slaveholders, and was part of a unit that chased Morgan’s Raiders through Indiana. 

May Randle McMahan’s younger son, Neil (1899-1972) was my Grandma Dorothy’s dad, and my father’s grandfather. I met him briefly when I was not even yet two years old, but I have a vague memory of him, and there is a photograph of me sitting upon his lap, which confirmed that I had met him years later when my parents had forgotten our visit to Randle and I insisted that we had been there when he was alive and I had met him. My grandma Dorthy (Dorothy May, 1922-1998) told me about him, and it seems my dad had a good and close relationship with him (I think my dad’s relationship with his father, my grandfather, was not especially close, but I heard that he spent a lot of time with his Uncle Bob and Grandad Neil).  I knew Great Granddad Neil’s wife, my great-grandmother Pearl (1901-1995) very well. She was born in 1901, and so was only in her late 70s and early 80s when I spent a week or two in Randle in the summers of 1978, 1980, and 1981. I learned to drive a car and tractor on the farm that Flora May and her mom (Dicy) and dad (J.L.) settled when they arrived as founders of the town of Randle, and I baled hay on that land about fifty years after May wrote the story.  I am glad we had a reaper and baler machine hitched to a tractor, and did not have to do the work with scythe and cradle and pitchfork. 

(Neil and Eric, 1969)

The “Big Bottom” area of the Cowlitz River valley is a wide and long flat area that must have been a lake thousands of years ago, and it filled up with silt until it became the lovely valley it now is, full of fairly rich and somewhat sandy soil. The Upper Cowlitz tribe that lived in the valley mostly died off in epidemics and malarial fevers in the 1820 and 30s, with survivors fleeing to the Washington coastal region, and the land was left nearly vacant for a few decades until European-Americans settled. In the 1880s when settlers arrived, there were two native families left in the area, and evidently (from May's story above) one of them worked in mail delivery. The settlers tended to be persons (like my Randle ancestors) from Appalachia (especially eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and the Virginia highlands). You may detect some of the eastern Tennessee folkways in my great-great-grandmother's writing as she uses phrases like “I’ve paddled across and back of nights” or the use of “grub” as a verb to mean “work hard under difficult circumstances” when people had to “grub out a little at at time.” 

Uncle Bob’s car, 1980 

(the first car I drove)

  As May’s story shows, Dicy and J.L. weren’t the first European-Americans to settle the valley. In addition to Carlisle and the Chilocoats and Silers, there were bachelors living in shacks. These early immigrants to the Cowlitz River Big Bottom might have been living from a mix of hunting and trapping and working in tree-felling and lumber, as there was a sawmill established in the Randle area as early at 1866.  Actually, that's one of my earliest memories; the smell of sawdust and the loud sound of the saw, and my father trying to help me see bats up in the sawmill building. That first visit of mine to Randle must have been late in 1969, when I was about 22-23 months old.  Anyway, she doesn’t mention the German August W. Joerk, who made a land claim in 1883, probably two years before J.L. Randle made the cabin for his family, and three years before they arrived. 

I remember hearing one story about the notorious James brothers (the criminal insurrectionists gang) in connection with family emigrating out Appalachia on their way to the Midwest, and then from there on to the Washington Territory. The story goes that the family was in a wagon with their belongings, and a wheel had broken or become mired in the mud, and some men rode up on their horses and helped the family fix the wagon and get it back on the road. The men were Jesse and Frank James, and possibly some others, and the oral history in the family was that they were kindly and polite. This must have been in the mid-to-late 1870s, before the family headed out to Washington and before the James Gang met their demise.  Of course in those days the trains would have been carrying wealthy persons around, and the fact that my ancestors were migrating by wagon may say something about their class status, and I believe that the James Gang was motivated not just out of resentment against the Union, but also out of some class animosity against wealthy persons.  Oddly enough, coming down from my mom’s side of the family there was also oral history about the James gang, as my grandmother’s step-father’s grandfather was an engineer on one of the trains robbed by the gang, and his story was that that Frank and the other men were polite and calm and friendly as they robbed the passengers and crew, but that Jesse was nervous and rude, and seemed like he needed his older brother Frank to calm him down. 

Anyway, the families that settled the Big Bottom of the Cowlitz River Valley (Randle and Packwood) were mostly farming folk from highlands of the eastern mountains, and they enjoyed hunting, fishing, and being independent and free from interference of urbanized white-collar America. I remember such attitudes being expressed by my great-grandmother and her younger son, my dad’s youngest uncle (my Uncle Bob, who when I was twelve taught me on the farm how to drive and how to run a tractor). There was an endearing parochialism to my great-grandmother’s views of people outside her little corner of the world.  I remember her wondering with amazement why anyone would want to go out of the region and end up in a big city like Chehalis or Tacoma, and god-forbid, Seattle. And going out of Washington State seemed to her about as wild and reckless as riding a rocket to the moon. I think she expressed her misgivings about people going away from Randle or Washington State in a good-natured way, but that sort of parochialism is something I’ve noticed about the Pacific Northwest. Consider that by car it’s more than a single day's journey to drive to any large city outside of the Pacific Northwest; leaving Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver you can’t get to Salt Lake City, San Francisco / Sacramento, or Calgary in a single day’s comfortable drive. So, there is a bit of isolation up there. 

Another issue that may have made my great-grandmother skeptical of the idea that anyone should leave Randle was her own personal story. Her mom and dad came to the Big Bottom from Iowa, I believe, in the first decade of the 20th century, when she was a young girl. Her parents divorced, which was almost unheard of in those days, and as she told me, most of her siblings went back to Iowa with their mom, and she stayed in Randle with her dad (and I think also perhaps her younger brother, Warren Earl). Great-Grandma Pearl told me with some sadness in her voice about her dad’s misery at the end of the summer when her older siblings would come to visit, and then leave in August to go back to Iowa to stay with their mother, Sarah Alice Pixler (1864-1919).  She said her dad (Milton Thomas Moriarty, 1858-1925) would become despondent and mope around (sounds in retrospect like he was prone to major depressive episodes), and say that it hurt so much when the other children left and went back to Iowa that he might wish they never came at all. So, such impressions might have given my great-grandmother a bias against people leaving Randle, I guess.

Reading this narrative by my great-grandmother’s mother-in-law I notice something else; I get the impression that my great-great-grandmother was an excellent story-teller and a decent writer. Her aspirations to make something of herself, and her sense that her isolated childhood and early marriage may have thwarted her educational ambitions, may have been increased by her being an especially talented or intelligent person. I had a similar feeling about her daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, as she impressed my mind (seeing her as a 10-year-old or 12-year-old boy) as a woman with significant intellectual power, but who lived with no particular venue beyond her family for expressing her talents or intellect, and no particular help in developing her abilities. My grandmother was like this as well; an avid reader and a fairly well-informed person with opinions on many topics, and some of those opinions were quite progressive and well-informed; she was a short-order cook, and quite good at her work, but if she had been born in 2002 instead of 1922, no doubt she would be in college now, perhaps studying at the University of Washington in Seattle. And while I think being a short-order cook is just as admirable as any other occupation, and a good deal more admirable than many vocations, at least with more opportunities for her, or her mom, or her grandmother, I think they could have had lives even more enriched. Each could have shared their abilities in a wider field. 

 I’m often aware of this situation with my students, as my university receives many transfer students coming out of Chicago or small Illinois schools who have gone to third-rate public schools and second-rate community colleges (the students who go to the best Illinois K-12 schools—and there are many good ones—tend to prefer the U of I at Urbana or perhaps Northwestern in Evanston or some other private out-of-state school if not Bradley in Peoria).  The thing is, in any cohort of 20-30 students making it through the social work program, there are always a few who are intellectually my peers, and several more who could, I’m convinced, have gone to a more prestigious school if they had received the proper preparation in K-12 or if their families had the money it takes to get a better education (UIS may be the most affordable university in Illinois). My university is not bad, but it’s “one of the best small public universities in the Midwest” and accepts about half of all those who apply to attend. We're selective, but not that selective.  Sometimes in these students there is that same spark of awareness that they could have done better if life had given them the opportunity. If not for the barriers placed in their way, they would have attended classes without balancing their studies with part-time (or even full-time) jobs, family responsibilities, and the distractions of worrying about whether I will cut their grades because they missed a class when their boss told them to come in to work or face getting fired. 

Around the same time my dad's ancestors were settling the town of Randle, my mom had ancestors who were relocating to Port Townsend, Washington, and their lives were quite different. As I read Flora May's account of the settler life in the Cascades of the 1880s and 1890s I marvel at the contrast between the lives of these ancestors of mine, one family in Port Townsend living a middle-class life (my great-great grandfather in that family was a hotel manager), with a background in the German intellectual tradition (they were Ifflands, allegedly related, although not by direct descent, to their great uncle August William Iffland, the German playwright). Every one of the six girls in that family in Port Townsend went to college or nursing school (in fact, the eldest daughter, Louise, who was born just three years after Flora May Randle, was the first woman in Jefferson County, Washington, to earn a college degree at the University of Washington). But of course the value in life doesn't come from education or whether one lives in material ease or difficulty. As Flora May expresses it, "we never worried about what we didn't have or couldn't have" and "there was something fascinating, something satisfying" about that life along the Cowlitz.   

  

The numbers out of New York City are way better that I thought possible

A friend in New York, Paul Brill sent me some very encouraging charts.  These show deaths and hospital admissions related to COVID-19 in New York City, and the drop-off in daily counts since the peak is much steeper than I imagined possible. The people of New York are doing a great job of keeping up their social distancing (I guess), and the people who aren't doing so well at that seem to have not significantly slowed the positive trend. If we could get the whole country to have this steep of a decline (through social distancing, wearing masks when you are in public, and so forth), we could really shut down this virus for a while.

The deaths peaked on April 7th, and then had a slow decline until the 11th, but have really been dropping fast since then. This is great news.

New admissions to the hospital were running high with no trend from March 30th to April 8th, but since then, new COVID-19 admissions have been declining at a fairly steady rate. The drop from April 17th to Monday was especially encouraging. I had no idea we could see a fall-off in new admissions occur at such an encouraging rate.

 The change in rate of positive identifications of persons with COVID-19 isn't as accurate an assessment of reality as the hospitalization and deaths, but even so, it is showing a similar trend, and the trend has been very good since April 14th.  Look at what the people of New York accomplished by staying home and maintaining social distance.  We can all do this.

Harvey J. Stein has some even better charts that give us a similar picture of the overall trend:

Blood test studies suggesting much higher rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection are flawed, but we need more blood antibody tests, so keep at it.

Three recent studies suggest many more people have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 than mainstream medical science has estimated. 

A Stanford group sampled blood from 3,330 persons in Santa Clara County and found 50 of them had antibodies for SARS-CoV-2. There are three problems with their research.  The biggest fatal flaw is that they recruited their sample by targeted Facebook advertisements, and there is a probability that persons suspecting or knowing the study had something to do with COVID-19 enrolled in the study in the hopes of getting their blood tested to find out whether they had been exposed to the virus.  On the other hand, the Stanford researchers under-sampled persons who don't use Facebook or didn’t have time or ability to drive to the site to get tested, so that probably would lead to an under-count of poor and minorities, but it’s hard to say by how much, and the higher rates of infection in poor and minority communities may have occurred later in the outbreak, with the initial infections being more common in people who were more socially connected to persons who had been in China or Europe recently (wealthier persons like the sample in the Stanford study).  Who can say?  To their credit, the Stanford team pointed out these sampling problems: The authors admit these weaknesses, in the paper’s caution that: “…other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior COVID-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are also possible.” 

A second problem is that their conclusions include a mathematical error in estimating the lower bounds of the confidence interval for the actual rate in the population (even assuming their sample was a representative sample and not biased by eager volunteers who had reason to suspect they had been infected). Combining the Stanford group studies of false positives on known negatives with the data from the test manufacturer, they had a total of 2 false positives in 489 known negatives, so they  should have rescaled the uncertainty due to the number of false positives by 1/square-root-of-489 [0.045], but they mistakenly calculated the lower bound error estimate by 1/square-root-of-3,330 [0.017]. When you adjust correctly, their lower bound confidence estimate for the prevalence in Santa Clara County should be about a third lower than it is. 

A third problem is with the test they used and whether it has too many false positives. The test they used has a reported 1-in-245 false positives (for every 245 persons who don't have the antibodies you’ll get a false “hit” that they do). But another study examining a different test from the same manufacturer found a much lower sensitivity, and even ceased testing one test from that manufacturer when they had two false positives in 15 known negatives.  Different test, but same manufacturer, so one wonders how good the quality control is and whether all the batches of tests from that company are uniformly at the 1-in-245 rate of false positives.

Another study led by Hendrik Streeck involved checking for antibodies in a German town with about 12,500 inhabitants. That study found antibodies in 70 of 500 persons tested (14%). There are a few problems with this study.  First, the test that Streeck’s team used was tested by a Danish research group headed by Ria Lassauniere, and they found that the test has a lower sensitivity than Streeck’s group claimed, and according to the data from Lassauniere's group, the actual count by Streeck could have been 58 positive instead of 70. Streeck and Lassauniere’s groups have conflicting results on the sensitivity (false positive) question, and even so, there are still a lot of people in Heinsberg with the virus.

Another problem is that Streeck’s team sampled households, and since the virus is more likely to spread in households, the rate of infection is likely to be higher in households than in individuals (groups of people living together are at greater risk than individuals because if any one of the group gets it they are likely to spread it to others).

Finally, the region sampled by Streeck’s team had a big event (like the New Orleans Mardi Gras) that brought a high number of the community together when the virus was spreading, so that region probably has a much higher rate of infection than Germany as a whole.

Another study was conducted by Massachusetts General Hospital pathologists in Chelsea.  They specifically chose to do their work in Chelsea because the hospital was seeing so many cases from that area. They approached people on the street and asked to get a blood sample, but did not give people their results, so they eliminated the bias the Stanford team probably had from attracting people who wanted to be tested. But, they were approaching people out on the street, and this is at a time when people who want to avoid the virus and have the ability to do so are not out on the street much, so the fact that their sample came from people out on the street may bias their results. And, they picked their sampling process because they expected to find very high rates of infection in Chelsea, so you can’t really use that sample to estimate what is going on in Massachusetts or the United States in general.  The Chelsea sample was small (200 persons) and the 63 positive cases could be too high because the test they used has a relatively low specificity (the manufacturer says it has 90%, which would suggest a lot of false positives, but Massachusetts General says their testing showed specificity of 99.5%, so very few false positives). The main point is, people walking along the street when we are supposed to be sheltering in home aren't a random sample, and Chelsea probably is a place with a high infection rate, so the sample isn't very good for estimating the infection rate of the United States.

My earliest estimates about COVID-19 in mid-March took a fatality infection rate of 0.8% as plausible and I did my modeling using that estimate.  Rates of death based on antibodies found in blood are still not well understood because these three studies are too early and preliminary, and are too flawed in their sampling and their testing specificity to give us an accurate understanding of how many people have been infected (and what the death rate is).  Many estimates now are suggesting infections lead to death in 1% to 2% of cases. These studies suggest (even despite their flaws) that the death rate may be closer to 1% than 2%, and given the high number of persons who are not showing symptoms, that makes sense to me.

There are two facts that really contradict these studies in terms of how lethal infection from the SARS-CoV-2 is.  First of all, we have some cases where almost entire populations have been infected (like cruise ships, or hospital staff at hospitals in Wuhan), and from those cases we can see death rates in that 1% to 2% range, not down around 0.2% or even 0.5%. Secondly, COVID 19 has been around in Europe and North America for about ten weeks, and has already killed far more people than the seasonal flu ever does in such a short time. Over the course of a year, the seasonal flu virus probably infects between 10% and 35% of Americans, and kills tens of thousands of us.  Even these very flawed studies are suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 has infected fewer persons than the seasonal flu, but we are seeing death rates far, far higher than the flu. For example, the seasonal flu never kills 1,500 to 2,000 persons per day in the USA, and COVID-19 has been doing that for the past couple weeks despite the fact that most Americans have been socially isolating for over a month. These actual facts tell us enough to understand that estimates of death rates of 0.1% (similar to the flu) are not plausible. We can also look at societies with mass testing (like Korea, Taiwan, etc.) and see that death rates are well above the common flu level of 0.1%.  And, COVID-19 seems to do a lot more damage in a lot more ways than the flu.  People with mild cases of COVID-19 may be suffering permanent lung damage, liver damage, kidney damage, neurological problems, and other things we don't typically see with the flu.

There are other issues with the Stanford study. Eran Bendavid, Andrew Bogan, and Jay Bhattacharya are among the co-authors in that study, and I think they have somewhat damaged or even ruined their reputations among scientists (or anyone who understands issues of sensitivity and selectivity in testing, or issues of getting representative samples, or ethical issues of revealing conflicts of interest). In other words, scientists who look at these papers and what has been going on around them are going to be dismissive of the people involved, who sometimes seem to be motivated more by an ideological agenda than a desire for an accurate understanding of what is going on.

Back in March (on the 24th of March) I recall reading an idiotic editorial in Wall Street Journal (which is to be expected; editorials in the WSJ typically show little evidence of sound thinking or awareness of facts). In that editorial Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya (associated with Stanford, and members of the Stanford Group that has done the research in Santa Clara county) were suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t so deadly, because on March 19th a study of 450 NBA athletes showed that 10 of them had already been exposed to the virus. They went on to make the ridiculous suggestion that NBA players were sort of like the general American population. That was ridiculous because NBA players breathe heavily, sweat, and stand close to each other, bump into each other, and so forth as part of their job. Their infection rates therefore ought to be much higher than the general population. Their editorial ignored this fact, which was essentially scientific malpractice (perhaps the editors at the WSJ trimmed their editorial and cut out the caveats). 

Jay Bhattacharya said in an interview that “I think we have a very, very strong responsibility to be utterly honest as we can be about what we know and we don't know” That is good, but what about the language in their draft paper and the writing about it? Is it honest about the degree of confidence we can have in their work?  To their credit, the Stanford Team admits in a pre-review paper, that “If new estimates indicate test specificity to be less than 97.9%, our SARS-CoV-2 prevalence estimate would change from 2.8% to less than 1%, and the lower uncertainty bound of our estimate would include zero.” That’s good science. Yet, the article in Nature (!) By Smriti Mallapaty begins with this:

“Widespread antibody testing in a Californian county has revealed a much higher prevalence of coronavirus infection than official figures suggested. The findings also indicate that the virus is less deadly than current estimates of global case and death counts suggest.”

However, the Stanford group’s tests did not reveal a much higher prevalence, they revealed a possibility—one very much diminished in its likelihood if their blood test was not especially accurate or their sampling method was biased—that prevalence is higher than estimated. The study also suggests that the virus may be less deadly than global case and death counts suggest, but that is already a widespread assumption, since testing and case counts are highly biased in terms of only including persons with the most severe cases. That is, we are seeing about 7% of known cases with people entering hospitals and clinical care ending in death, but no one really thinks the virus kills 7% of the people it infects. Everyone understands that most people who get COVID-19 never show up for clinical care, and some portion of persons infected with the virus (estimates still vary between 20% and 80%) remain asymptomatic for a long time (or possibly for the full course of their infection). These three flawed studies suggest that the actual percentage of infected persons who are pre-symptomatic or have no symptoms may be closer to the 80% estimate than the 20% estimate, but even so, basing our estimates of actual infection rates in the population depend much on our counts of sick persons, dying or dead persons, and positive tests from the nasal swabs and so forth, and we're not testing everyone, and we're not even counting all the people who die from COVID-19, so we still don't have a firm grasp on what is going on. 

How sensitive and selective was the test used by the Stanford group?  The authors say they tried it first on 30 controls, and then on 88 controls, and it never had a false positive with those controls. That's good.  That’s 100% sensitivity in 118 cases. The manufacturer of the test reported sensitivity of 99.5% and 99.2%, also good. However, the Stanford study’s test kit was very similar to ones evaluated in another pre-review paper (not yet peer reviewed) by Ria Lassauniere and colleagues that showed that the accuracy of negative values were 91%, 89%, 89%, and 74% on tests of 89 controls (persons who had never had COVID-19).  The test on 2019-nCoV IgG/IgM Rapid Test Cassette (Hangzhou Alltest Biotech, Hangzhou, China; Cat # INCP-402) had 2 false positives out of 15 persons known to have not been infected. The Alltest Biotech assay was such a poor performer that Lassauniere’s group stopped testing it. The test used by Battacharya and Bendavid and Bogan was from Alltest Biotech, but was a different test, and didn’t give a single false positive on 118 control samples, so Alltest Biotech must have come out with a better version of their test than the one examined by Lassauniere's team, but I still wonder how many of the 50 positives Bendavid, Battacharya and their team found in their sample of 3,320 were false positives. We really need to see these antibody sero-prevalence tests standardized with tests on hundreds or thousands of controls to get a better understanding of their true sensitivity. The manufacturer of the kit used by the Stanford group reported 2 false positives in 371 true negatives, a rate of 99.5% accuracy for specificity. Let's just say, the idea that the test used by the Stanford team had a specificity under 97.9 percent is plausible, but the testing on a total of 489 known negatives that turned up only 2 false positives can give some confidence that their test is probably not giving us a high number of false positives. My conclusion; the sampling issue is magnitudes more significant in undermining their findings than problems with false positives from their tests, but that is also a concern.

What about sampling?  If you are going to extrapolate from a sample of 3,320 persons to make a conclusion about the population from which they were drawn, you must try to get a random sample or at least a representative sample. Bhattacharya already has shown a weakness for misunderstanding representative sampling in his WSJ editorial in which he suggested NBA players are a reasonable sample to use for making speculations about the populations of cities hosting NBA teams.

Well, the sampling in the Stanford Study relied on Facebook targeted advertisements, and as I already quoted, the authors themselves admit that people may have wanted to be tested, and that may have contaminated or biased their sample.  Sure, of course it did.  In early April it was difficult to get tested. If I had been having some symptoms and couldn't get a nasal swab test and someone offered to test my blood to see if I had antibodies, I would have been eager to be in that sample, and I would have told all my friends with similar symptoms about the experiment and urged them to get into the sample as well. If anything like that happened in Santa Clara County, the Stanford Group’s study is not likely to give us accurate information. 

Another problem I have is with one of the Stanford team’s co-authors named Andrew Bogan. He wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal in which he discussed the Stanford group’s study, and never mentioned that he is a co-author on that study and part of the Stanford group (!), and that is not ethical. It makes the whole Stanford team look bad. 

If you want to see someone else take down this study, check out the video by Chris Martenson. 

The USA may have peaked in deaths per day from COVID-19 (sometime around April 16-19)

The USA was supposed to reach a peak in mid-to-late April in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2. I have not been paying attention much to the "new cases" or "total cases" since those numbers in the USA reflect how many people are being tested and what criteria are being applied to decide who will be tested, and the results may not reflect the actual spread of the virus very well.  I have instead been paying attention to deaths attributed to COVID-19.  That said, even the data on that are highly suspect; many persons die without being tested, and it is rare to waste a precious test on a cadaver. When epidemiologists compare deaths this year to deaths a year ago, any increases probably show the influenced of COVID-19. The non-pharmaceutical interventions (almost everyone staying home) reduces communicable diseases such as the seasonal flu and deaths related to people being out and about (drunken homicides related to fights at bars, traffic deaths, etc.), so keep in mind that deaths-per-day related to COVID-19 are still rough approximations of the problem. I've observed four sources for estimates of deaths per day: the World-o-Meter Covid-19 update seems pretty good. Johns Hopkins University is another good source. Our World in Data and CNN also have some good maps (but their color schemes don't offer enough contrast) and data sources.

Here is a chart from Johns Hopkins showing deaths per day in the USA:

I downloaded data from NBC, put them in a spreadsheet, and ran the death rate with five-day averages (every day's death count was replaced with the average of the previous two days, that day, and the following two days) to smooth out the chart, and came up with this:

The data sources are different, so the charts look a little different, but both charts show a decline just now (April 19th and 20th seem to have had fewer deaths than the preceding several days).  This may be a sign that we have actually peaked in our deaths-per-day, or it could be something like the dip in deaths-per-day that the NBC data have for April 10th-12th.  

Deaths seem to come (on average) about 18 days after people get infected, but the range is huge (something like 15-45 days from infection). Because the length of time between infection and death isn't normally distributed (it is very skewed; almost no one dies within 10 days of infection, and most die in the 12-24 days after infection, but still a lot of people die in the 25-50th day after infection), we should expect the decline in deaths per day to be much more gradual than the steep increase we saw in March and April up to the 16th of April. 

The orders to stay at home and the way people have been obeying those orders, as well as the habit of wearing masks in public have seemingly helped us as a country stop the growth in deaths per day.  It is important to wear masks in public because a quarter to three-quarters of persons infected by the virus are not showing symptoms because the virus is slow to express itself in symptoms and many persons (currently plausible estimates made by experts and researchers vary from 20% to 80%) never do show symptoms never do show symptoms, but asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic persons can spread the virus. Wearing a mask reduces the water droplets that float in the air around you as you breathe or speak, and thus reduce the virus count you are putting out (if you are infected) into the air around you.  Inhaling a billion viruses is likely to cause a worse problem than inhaling a thousand viruses, so please wear the masks to show your solidarity with everyone and show your recognition of the fact that it is easy to be a carrier of SARS-CoV-19 without knowing it.

The Electoral College is bad and Tara Ross fails to convince me otherwise with her video "explaining" it.

Tara Ross wrote a book (second edition published in 2012) about the value of the Electoral College.  She summarizes her points in favor of the electoral college in a short PragerU video, which I’ve seen some people post now that we have had the second election in sixteen years in which the winner in the electoral college is not the winner of the popular vote.

I happen to agree with Ross with some of the ideas in her other book, about George Washington’s attitude toward religion and democracy. For example, I think religious participation and belief can support democracy, and governments ought to encourage religion in general without supporting any particular sect or favoring any particular religion.  However, when it comes to her defense of the electoral college, I’m not in agreement with her argument.  Let me present my analysis and discuss the points she makes in her short Praeger lecture.

Tara Ross begins by asking a good question.  “Why do we have the electoral college, and why do we still need it?”   A better way to phrase this question might have been, “what reasons still justify its continuing presence, and what arguments justify removing it, and on balance, ought we to keep it or abandon it?”  But, this isn’t a fair inquiry into the electoral college.  She is an intellectual who lives in the conservative bubble.  She presents her ideas and gets heard by all the think-tanks and media outlets and journalism outlets that are funded by the capitalist elite class in its attempt to shape public opinion and government debate. In that realm of the American Enterprise Institute, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Fox News, and so forth, people don't really ask fair-minded and dispassionate questions… everything is prepared to support a particular agenda.  Every word is chosen to influence people and support the cult.  I could say the same about some left-wing media outlets (you don’t read or watch The Nation or In These Times or Daily Kos or The Young Turks with the intention of being exposed to a broad range of ideas and fair-minded questioning either).  At any rate, her answer to her question of “why we still need the electoral college” is based on the idea that it protects us from the flaws of direct democracy, it encourages nation-wide campaigning and other good results in election politics, and it prevents anyone from stealing elections.  I think she’s wrong in just about every point she makes.

Tara Ross then claims that “the founders” believed we should not have a pure majority-rule democracy.  She also claims that “the founders” allegedly “knew” that pure democracies did not work, and they knew this because they had studied the history of pure democracies.

Well, who are the “founders” she is talking about?  Of course James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay were all opposed to direct democracy, but those were not the only “founders” and James Madison actually supported the idea of direct popular election of the President.  Also, in what cases was representative government favored, and in what cases was direct popular voting favored?  It’s obvious enough that even back when the nation had only four million voters, they couldn't possibly deliberate and vote on all the various laws.  The town hall direct democracy of New England wasn’t going to work at the level of state governments, let alone the federal government.  Of course as a practical necessity, the “founders” all agreed there would need to be some form of representation and representative authority.  It wasn’t workable to have direct democracy for the nation as a whole, or for the states, rather than representative assemblies, and no one proposed direct democracy as a plausible alternative to having a Senate or a House and Senate.  So, when conservatives such as Ross claim that the “founders” wanted representative government rather than direct democracy, they are not saying anything that really helps their point.  Of course the founders wanted representative government, that’s not the question.  The question is why do we need representative government (a college of electors) to elect our President rather than having the President selected by a popular vote. It’s a specific issue, not a general question about direct democracy at the Federal level. 

 In fact, at the Constitutional Convention the direct election of the president was suggested as a possible method for choosing the leader of the executive branch. The other possibilities were having  the House choose the President, which still can happen if no candidate gets more than 270 votes in the Electoral College, having state legislatures select the president, and the electoral college system we ended up with.  Clearly, the founders who proposed the direct election of the president at the Constitutional Convention were not so opposed to direct democracy in that one specific case of electing the president.  In fact, on August 24, 1787, the vote to have direct popular election of the president went down with 2 states for and 9 states against.  So, some of the founders were certainly comfortable with the idea of direct popular elections of the president.  Who were these founders? In one source I find that “Direct election by the people had strong support from some of the leaders at the convention, including James Madison of Virginia, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, and James Wilson, also of Pennsylvania.  John Dickinson, Rufus King, Daniel Carroll, and Abraham Baldwin also supported popular election.” (George C. Edwards, Why the Electoral College is Bad for America, page 81)

Ross does not actually state her case, but she is implying that the electoral college is one method of protecting our republic from the harmful possibilities of direct pure democracy.  No doubt direct democracy can be harmful, and it’s certainly unworkable as a system of regular government for any group of people that exceeds a fairly small number—perhaps a hundred thousand.  But, a government can clearly protect itself from those harms through a variety of means, such as having two representative legislative bodies with one having members elected infrequently, checks and balances between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and restricting the role of direct elections, referenda, and recall votes to a manageable level, perhaps by setting up requirements for petitions and the collection of many signatures before allowing direct popular voting on issues of concern.  The question Tara Ross ought to address is whether, when all these things are present to protect citizens from the abuses and logistical difficulties of direct democracy, it is still necessary to elect the chief executive through an electoral college.  That’s the real question, and her answer is just to generally say that direct democracy is dangerous (no doubt it can be) and we need protection from its problems (no doubt we do), and the electoral college does this (that is the question at issue, and simply stating it as a fact does not win her case for her).

Tara Ross claims that the founders “knew” that direct democracy tended to fail.

 She makes the claim that “pure democracies do not work.  They implode.”  What was the evidence for that?  Well, Madison claimed, “The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”  (Federalist Paper #10).  In other words, with popular government (“direct democracy”) you get the violence of faction, the tyranny of the majority, and a tendency toward instability, injustice, and confusion, and this tendency is just what the enemies of democratic governments use to justify their tyranny (illustrated well by how China state media point to the election of Donald Trump as proof that the American system is failing, and the form of dictatorship led by the Chinese Communist Party is superior).  Is this really so?  What did the founders know, and what are the facts?

The American “founders” knew direct democracy from their knowledge of classical history: the Roman Republic, the Greek City States (which were sometimes democratic, as was Athens in the times of Pericles, Cleisthenes, and after the overthrow of the 30 tyrants, guided by the ideas of Solon and others). They also knew (if they were from New England) about town governments using direct democracy in town hall meetings.  Did they know about the councils of the Althing in Iceland, or the deliberative councils of the Seneca, or the governing councils of the Six Nations (the Haudenosaunee “Iroquois" Confederacy)?  They certainly did know about democracy in the Indian system of governance. Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, was very familiar with the Seneca politics and governance, and I think Benjamin Franklin knew something about the governance systems within the Six Nations. Had any of these examples collapsed and failed? 

There were other historical examples beyond Rome and Greece, and not just the popular assembly in Iceland or the tribal assemblies of Northeastern American Indian nations. What about  the system of direct democracy in the smaller Swiss cantonal governments and communal assemblies, or the guild systems and elected assemblies in the free cities and small states such as those in the Hanseatic League or Venice or Florence or Strasbourg? Those historical examples offered a mixed record: stability in Switzerland, instability in Italian city states.  How about the democratic forms of governance in Novgorod that flourished until Moscow took over? That system seemed to flourish for a long time, and external, rather than internal problems ended its success.  It’s clear from Federalist Paper #20 that Madison was aware of the systems of governance in the Dutch Republic, and he didn’t approve (the United Provinces were a confederation of seven or eight tiny states that functioned as a republic between 1581 and 1795; they were the first government to recognize the independence of the United States).  Within the Dutch republic some of the states practiced direct democracy (Friesland comes to mind), and I don’t recall that they ever had any implosion.  San Marino has been a republic since the 4^th century, and it uses direct democracy through referenda, and it used a general popular assembly (the “Arengo”) for centuries without implosion.  The claim that direct democracies “implode” is an empirical claim, and I don’t know what the evidence for or against it may be, but I would be very surprised to find that Tara Ross has conducted some sort of survey of direct democracies to support her argument, and I can find no historical reference work to answer the question, either.  My sense is that there are several examples of long-term direct democracy that endured for centuries without implosion, and these have been especially successful in smaller city states or in areas of low population.

She then points out that forms of governance in which bare majorities can easily tyrannize the rest of the country are unfair to minorities (she uses the simile of two wolves voting against a sheep about what to have for dinner).  This is an interesting point, and it’s very relevant to how legislative assemblies are formed.  However, is it relevant to the issue of selecting a president? The problem of the president being a “wolf” is corrected by having the legislature control the creation of legislation, the approval of appointments and treaties, the allocation of money, and so forth.  The Supreme Court can also weigh in and declare a President’s actions unconstitutional.  So, why do we need the Electoral College?  Ross again gives a general argument that would support the principles that shape the structure of our government, but may have no relevance to the specific question at hand. 

Ross then explains that we have three branches of government to protect us from the tyranny of the majority.  Exactly.  Since we have these branches of government, and many other things in our Constitution to protect us from the tyranny of the majority, how is it that we still need the Electoral College to protect us from a popular vote for the president?  In what case would the Electoral College give us a president different from one who won the popular vote?  Well, in 2000 and 2016 the Electoral College stepped in when the popular vote was quite close.  If the popular vote is quite close in the election of the president, isn’t it also the case in actual practice that the legislature will be fairly evenly divided?  If the Congress is fairly evenly divided, why do we need the further work of the Electoral College?  In a situation where the popular vote is very close, is it plausible that this is because a candidate has won a fantastic majority in a few regions or large states and been utterly defeated everywhere else?  If that even were the case, how would choosing one candidate over the other in the electoral college protect a minority from a tyranny of the majority?  Isn’t it much more likely that in close elections, each candidate will have a fair degree of support everywhere, with perhaps a few lopsided losses and victories here and there, but not the sort of total isolated regional victory the Electoral College was designed to thwart? 

She also claims that the threat of tyranny of the majority is the reason why each state has two senators, regardless of the state’s population (so that people in Wyoming and Montana and Alaska and Vermont get one senator for every 400,000 to 600,000 persons while people in California, Texas, and New York get one senator for every  10 to 18 million persons).  Another way to express this is to look at the actual situation we face in America now. The rural states and rural areas of sparsely populated landscapes–the places where the people are almost all European-American—hold a minority of the population. Urban centers and metropolitan areas (that also happen to have great racial diversity, partly because a few generations ago some European-Americans had pogroms and laws to force Americans without European-American heritage out of their rural areas) have most of the population.  So, while most people live in the big cities and their suburbs and exurbs, a minority lives in the rural countryside.  The system with senators representing all the states equally means those rural states with low populations get more representation than the states with lots of big cities.  Senators from New York, Florida, Texas, California, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania add up to 18.  Senators from Wyoming, Vermont, New Hampshire, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota, Idaho, Delaware and South Dakota add up to 18. This protects the people in those rural, sparsely populated, tiny states.  It protects them from what?  Financial allocations are made by the House of Representatives, not the Senate, and the House has representation proportional to population, but are those sparsely populated tiny states getting fewer federal dollars on a per capita basis compared to the biggest states?  Isn’t the actual case that we face in the existing situation a tyranny of the minority, inflicting the policies favored by our rural population on the urban centers?  Is that better than a situation in which the urban centers had proportionate power to shape policies?  In what way?  It’s a discussion that Ross isn’t going to have.

She also claims the difficult process of amending the Constitution is also made difficult to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.  Yes.  I agree with her on this point.  It should be difficult to amend the Constitution. 

She claims that the electoral college encourages coalition-building.  Back in the 1780s this was, of course, necessary, because people only knew local candidates, and in order to get policies through the Federal system you needed institutions to push people to build coalitions.  But, since the invention of modern telecommunications and transport and mass media, we surely have natural incentives to form coalitions, and the usefulness of the Electoral College to achieve this end is questionable, and the need is simply no longer there.

She claims that the electoral college encourages national campaigning.  The evidence is that it most manifestly does not.  What Democratic candidate for president is going to waste time campaigning in the inter-mountain west, the high plains, or the deep south?  There are a few states (Nevada, Colorado, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina) where maybe the Democratic candidate can hope to win, but where else in those regions does either candidate need to campaign?  And what Republican candidate is going to waste time and money on the Pacific Coast or the Northeast?  Aside from New Hampshire, and Maine (where the state doesn’t allocate all its Electoral College delegates as one big bunch), no Republican needs to campaign in New England, and campaign stops in New York are more likely to be fundraisers than campaign rallies.  In the face of this, how can Ross make the counter-intuitive claim that the electoral college encourages national campaigning, when it manifestly discourages this?  She has two points: first, the swing states are scattered all over the country, and second, the swing states change over time, so good candidates will try to bring new states into the status of swing-states, and over time, various states will have opportunities to become important in national presidential campaigns.   Well, her argument is therefore that “over the course of many years, the electoral college encourages national campaigning in several states scattered across the continent.”  The counter argument, which she does not address, is that “abandoning the electoral college would instantly encourage national campaigning everywhere.”  No wonder she doesn't carefully consider that alternative claim.

She points out that regional voting blocks will not provide sufficient electoral college votes for a presidential victory, and this forces presidential candidates to seek votes from beyond a single region of the country.  This is not an argument that specially favors the Electoral College.  No single region of the country has enough of the population that a presidential candidate could focus all their attention in one region to win a direct popular vote.  With direct popular elections a candidate would have to seek votes all across the country, and not just in one or two regions.

She claims that in a campaign based on direct election of the president, candidates would probably campaign in areas of high population density, and restrict much of their campaigning to large states, neglecting small states like West Virginia, Iowa, and Montana.  There is already in the existing system with the Electoral College no reason for Democratic candidates to campaign in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, or other small states like that, and no Republican is going to waste time trying to win in Delaware, Rhode Island, or Vermont.  The Electoral College is achieving the exact evil she says would be effected by direct popular elections.  It is true that candidates would probably campaign most vigorously in areas of high population density, but those areas (urban areas) exist in all the states outside of Vermont and New Hampshire.   If we had direct popular elections, a Democratic Candidate would have a reason to at least make a brief visit or two in Boise, Idaho and Butte, Montana, and Fargo, North Dakota, and Birmingham, Alabama, and San Antonio, Texas.  All places for which there is no strategic reason for any Democratic candidate to now visit or purchase advertisements.  Likewise, with direct elections, Republicans candidates would visit Los Angeles and San Diego and the San Francisco Bay, and they would visit New York and upstate New York’s small cities, and Providence, Rhode Island, and Chicago, Illinois, and Seattle, Washington.  These are all areas where no Republican currently has any reason to visit or advertise or campaign, but with direct popular elections, all of these cities would be important campaign stops.  Also, in the current system, where candidates must visit swing states because of the Electoral College, are they going out to give their speeches in towns with fewer than 10,000 residents in Florida and North Carolina and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?  No, of course not.  They advertise in television markets, which are based in cities, and they come to visit cities and large towns. With direct popular elections, even if candidates didn’t personally visit states where they would not win local majorities, they would need to organize active campaigns everywhere, because votes from everywhere would count.

She anticipates the argument that swing states get all the attention from candidates, and says that over time the swing states change.  Yes, but how is it helpful to her argument to point out that over the course of decades a handful of new states become swing states and a handful of swing states become safe states?  The fact is, in any single election year, only a dozen or perhaps a score of states are swing states where candidates need to do any campaigning.  That is one (of many) problems with the existing Electoral College System.  Saying that over the course of four or five election cycles about half of the states will at some point be decisive, even if in any one election cycle only a dozen or so are really decisive, is not a convincing argument in the face of the counter-claim that with direct popular elections all the states would be important in all the elections.

She says that the specific defeat of Gore was attributable “really because” a “safe state” (West Virginia) was considered a safe Democratic Party win, and the 4 electoral votes from West Virginia went to Bush because Gore had neglected it.  There are so many reasons that Bush was installed in the White House despite the fact that Gore won the popular vote (even in Florida, as it turns out), that making a claim that this outcome was “really because” of  some specific thing is just ridiculous.   Maybe it was “really because” Gore didn’t stir up enough enthusiasm in his campaigning?  Maybe it was “really because” Gore didn’t offer ideas about policies that really excited the Democratic base?  Maybe it was “really because” the Supreme Court forbade Florida from recounting the ballots (which, after all the ballots were eventually counted from the whole state, showed that Gore had in fact won the vote in Florida).  Maybe it was “really because” Gore didn’t campaign enough in his home state of Tennessee, and lost there.  Maybe it was “really because” Republicans had stripped many minority voters (likely Democrats) of their voting rights in Florida.  It’s laughable that Ross would argue that Gore’s neglect of a supposedly “safe win for Democrats” state in West Virginia while his opponent Bush cleverly campaigned in West Virginia because he recognized it had become a swing-state is somehow a argument in favor of the Electoral College.   There were many states Gore (and Bush) neglected in their campaigns because of the Electoral College system.  How can picking one of those states to point out that in one particular case a candidate was mistaken in neglecting the state be counted as an argument in favor of a system that had both candidates neglecting dozens of states?  There are about 650,000 potential voters in West Virginia, and in a country where the popular vote has been won by fewer than 2 million votes in 2000 and 2016, a presidential candidate would need to campaign in West Virginia, even when there are 7 million potential voters in New York and 9 million potential voters in California.

Ross says the electoral college protects us from stolen elections.  In a direct election, she claims, it might be easy for a solidly blue or red precinct to allow voter fraud, and such things could influence the national election.  However, she claims, with an electoral college someone who wanted to steal an election would need to steal votes in a swing state, and swing states present more difficulties to the would-be election thief, since they are evenly-split areas, and they change from year-to-year.  This argument has more merit than her other arguments, but it’s still not very convincing.  Wisconsin and Michigan and New Hampshire were won by margins of less than 25,000 votes in 2016, and Florida and New Hampshire had close margins in 2000.  In fact, in Florida in 2000, it may very well be the case that the election was stolen by the local Republican Party’s successful disenfranchisement of many legitimate voters through their administration of the election system (Republicans controlled the election system in Florida).   It’s true that in a close national election where the victor has only a margin of a few tens of thousands of votes, the federal election system would need to be vigilant everywhere to the potential of vote stealing.  However, with our current Electoral College system, a corrupt state government in a swing state could easily manipulate the election to provide their favored candidate with a few thousand extra votes, as probably happened in Chicago, Illinois in 1960, and probably happened in Florida, in 2000. In close elections where the winner takes all in the Electoral College, this poses a real threat to our elections, and in fact, twice in living memory unfair behaviors by local officials have influenced the national election outcomes.  A national direct popular election of the president would reduce the risk of these sorts of abuses.

Okay, that’s why I’m not convinced by anything Tara Ross has said in her PragerU video.  I’ll also add that my understanding of the Constitutional Convention and the Twelfth Amendment is that the electoral college was really instituted to give Virginia and other slavocrat states where humans were held as property a better chance to have their candidates win the presidency (and this worked well for Virginia).  Also, we can use the National Popular Vote to correct the problems of the Electoral College.

In contrast to Tara Ross and her claim that the Electoral College was instituted to protect us from the tyranny of the majority or the problems of direct democracy, William C. Kimberling, at one time the Deputy Director of  the Federal Election Commission National Clearninghouse on Election Administration has this to say:

A third idea [for a method of selecting a president] was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote. Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence, but rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.

So that it.  The electoral college was instituted because people wouldn't be familiar with national candidates, and it was also instituted to please states with very few people like Delaware and Rhode Island and Georgia (at the time it was sparsely populated) so they wouldn't always be dominated by presidents from Virginia or New York or Pennsylvania.

Finally, I refer my readers to a short video explaining the National Popular Vote movement.