Despite what some defenders of the Electoral College seem to think or wish, New York and California are still part of the union; their citizens' votes count just as much as those residing in noncoastal states, and accounting for the national popular vote in our presidential elections wouldn't lead to some sort of bicoastal tyranny.

My column last week suggesting a reform to the Electoral College prompted a number of reader responses I thought worth addressing. Yesterday I looked at some of the misconceptions surrounding the Founding Fathers' intentions regarding the institution; another common thread in reader responses is the idea that the Electoral College is a necessary guard against majority rule and that, specific to the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton's popular vote victory is somehow illegitimate because it included California and/or New York voters.

A typical complaint, from a reader named Andrew: "As you know perfectly well, 4.3 million of Clinton's 2.8 million national plurality came from [California]." Another reader writes: "We have a federal system that protect [sic] most of the country from being ruled by New York City, and Southern California." And so on.

These sentiments cut to the nub of what animates a lot of defenses of the current iteration of the Electoral College: not a high-minded, philosophical mistrust of big states or majoritarianism as such a toxic reverse-snobbery that disdains some chunks of the country as being less legitimately American than others.

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The ostensible idea is that, as big states, New York and California threaten to single-handedly dictate the outcome of the national popular vote. Or conversely that the Electoral College protects small states by augmenting their importance. (I should note again that I don't favor simply eliminating the Electoral College in favor of a straight direct election, but the arguments are much the same either way.)

There are several problems with this view, the first being philosophical: Either you believe in democracy – majority rule, put most simply – or you don't. Majority rule needn't mean mob rule; systems can be constructed to protect minority views and rights (see: the Constitution). But much of the argument against accounting for the national popular vote is fundamentally anti-democratic. It is defended as being consistent with the wisdom of the founders – they were leery of straight democracy, the argument goes; and it's true, many of the framers took a dim view of the average voter. But we shouldn't be bound by such anachronistic elitism any more than we would share the founders' view that the ballot should be restricted to white, male, Protestant property-owners. Our politics have progressed in the last couple of centuries, and few people would publicly make the serious argument that voters are too stupid to choose their leaders.

Another really basic problem with this line of argument against the popular vote relates to math: 13.7 million Californians and another 7.5 million New Yorkers voted in the general election; nationally, 136.6 million people cast votes. So even if everyone in California and New York voted in lockstep, they couldn't come close to dictating to the rest of the country. To put it in mathematical terms, 115.4 million > 21.2 million.

But, comes the counter argument, surely candidates would cater to the big cities and big states. One reader writes: "I suspect that if our president was elected based on the popular vote, those of us in Kansas would not see many candidate visits and feel less represented than we do currently." But the fact is that under the current system states like Kansas are already ignored by the candidates. The Sunflower State got nary a post-convention candidate visit, making it hard for its voters to feel less represented. But Kansans are in good company: New York didn't get any, according to the group National Popular Vote, and California got only one. (The count excludes private fundraising events from its definition of campaign visit, else those figures would be inflated.)

Indeed real life belies the idea that the Electoral College in its current form uniquely empowers small states. It's true that Wyoming's 255,000 voters each got more electoral bang for their votes (85,000 voters for each electoral vote) than did California's 14.2 million voters (257,000 voters per electoral vote) but collectively they got one general election candidate campaign visit. Big state Florida got more visits, though small states Iowa and New Hampshire got their share as well. The current system doesn't empower little states over big; it empowers swing over non-swing states.

It's also important to note that The Washington Post's Dave Weigel surveyed countries that use a national popular vote to select their president and found that their elections "look a lot like our own, with candidates stumping everywhere to drive up favorable turnout and flip voters their way." And closer to home, he noted, "Just 12 years ago, in this country, George W. Bush was wiped out in every urban area outside of Texas, and won the presidency and popular vote."

And speaking of the Lone Star State, despite what they say, defenders of the current iteration of the Electoral College don't seem to mind a single, large state deciding the election per se – just single, large election-swinging states that support Democrats. So the aforementioned Andrew wrote: "How democratic is it for one State ... to elect the President for all 50? The Electoral College was written into the Constitution precisely to prevent such a thing."

But the Electoral College does not prevent that; and in fact using the reader's logic, in 2016 one state – Texas – elected the president for all 50. If you were to move Texas' 38 electoral votes from Trump's column into Hillary Clinton's she would have 270 and he would have 268. So the issue isn't actually fear of big states per se; after all, Texas is second only to California in population and New York is only the fourth largest state, lagging behind Florida. Defenders of the current system, so concerned about big states New York and California deciding matters for the rest of the nation, are strangely quiescent in the face of big states Texas and Florida actually doing it.

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And when you come down to it, that's really what much of the defense of the Electoral College is about. It goes to the toxic notion most famously voiced by former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in her national turn when she made the distinction between "real America" and, I suppose, fake America. "Real America," she said, exists in "small towns" and "little pockets" – city dwellers and coastal Americans, by implication, are less authentically American; their votes can be discounted and their influence should be checked regardless of – in fact because of – their numbers. At best it's a peculiar idea of national identity in a country where 63 percent of the population resides in cities; at worst it speaks to a more insidious strain in our politics. "It's also important to note that referring to real America is code for the fact that we are talking about a portion of this country that is primarily white," Nancy LeTourneau writes at The Washington Monthly. "Suggesting that is what it means to be 'real' is also code for white supremacy."

You could hear it four years ago when Republicans dismissed Obama's victory as having stemmed from "center cities" and "urban areas"; it was evident in the loathsome Ted Cruz's campaign against "New York values" during the GOP primary (attacks countered, remember, by this guy); you can see it in emails like one from the Electoral College proponent who decried "moronic population centers"; you can see it in right-wingers like Matt Drudge touting Donald Trump's popular vote 'win' outside of New York and California and you can even hear it in the words of ordinarily sober people like Charlie Cook, who recently talked about how Democrats have lost touch with "real America."

And look, it's absolutely true that progressives who live in big cities (I grew up in New York and now reside in the Washington, D.C. metro area) need to remember that this is a big diverse country where people have often sharply differing views on issues like guns, gay marriage, taxes and so on.