Everything you know is wrong (V)

Today we take on the Electoral College, one of the most misunderstood pieces of our government. It is much in the news recently, as an initiative is afoot to undo it without amending the Constitution. The idea is to get enough states to commit their electors to whomever wins the national popular vote, regardless of how the votes in a particular state go. So, for example in the last election, if the people of Colorado voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump (they didn’t), the electors from Colorado would still have cast their votes for President for Hillary Clinton, based on the fact she received more votes in the national vote totals. If enough states pass similar rules, the electoral college becomes irrelevant, and the winner of the national popular vote becomes President.* Simple, yes?

Now if you were shocked (everyone was) and appalled (some were, some weren’t) by the results of the November 2016 election, it is entirely understandable why you might blame the Electoral College. But should we change it on that basis, and why do we even have this (very unique) institution? You be the judge!

A quick review of the Electoral College: you don’t vote for President. You vote for a name associated with a slate of state electors who then convene and award the electoral votes from your state to a candidate. Sounds redundant, and it is. Each state determines how its electoral votes are awarded. The most common method is “winner-take-all,” although Maine and Nebraska use more elaborate methods which apportion their votes by congressional districts. The number of state electors is equal to the number of the state’s federal representation (House & Senate) meaning every state gets at least three (two senators and one representative), and more populous states then get more.

One reason the founders created the college was to balance against the tyranny of very large states. At the time, the founders feared Virginia and New York, the two largest states, might get together and trade votes between each other, ensuring the President always came from one or the other. While this threat seems quaint now, it is paralleled in the notion today that absent the Electoral College, a candidate might only campaign in New York city, Los Angeles, and Chicago (for example) in hopes of running up such a large vote advantage in metropolitan areas they could ignore large portions of the country.

Critics say this already happens: they charge that Democratic party voters are disenfranchised in red states as their votes don’t count, and it makes no sense to campaign in such states. First I would note that of course all the votes count, just some people voted for a winner and others voted for the loser. Second, Virginia was once one of those wasted-vote states until enough Democratic party voters moved there, turning it purple and now (perhaps) blue. So electoral reality changes, as it should. Finally, the difference between not needing to campaign (i.e., being able to ignore a state) and not wanting to campaign (because it is a lost cause) is an important one. No system which intentionally ignores large sections of the country can long endure.

Which leads to the chief criticism of the Electoral College: it is anti-democratic. This is 100% correct. As I noted before, the founders were very suspicious of the simple voting majority, and one of the reasons for creating the concept of electors was to have a group of reasoned, thoughtful citizens second-guess the popular vote: you can’t get much more anti-democratic than that! Doesn’t this ignore the wishes of “large sections of the country,” the claim I just described as unsustainable? No. Even in the last election, the country was evenly divided, and the electoral college less so. The national popular vote majority collected by Senator Clinton (three million votes) was dwarfed by the majorities she achieved in California and New York (six million votes). Stated another way, absent those states, candidate Trump “won” a majority of the popular vote in the other forty-eight!

So is the Electoral College just an unnecessary anachronism which gets in the way of our democratic process? We won’t know how necessary it is until we change it, which is always a hard way to learn (see constitutional amendments 17, 18, and 21). It is no more an anachronism than our constitution is: both are old, both still work. Does the electoral college get in the way of our democratic process: Yes, just as the founders intended.

There have been critics of the college from the very beginning. They surge in number and volume after any election when the winning candidate did not win the popular vote, which has happened five times out of fifty-eight elections. Consider the following question: is the drive to eliminate the college a principled effort to fix a longstanding problem, or an emotional reaction to a shocking election result?

Recall that prior to the 2016 election, it was then-candidate Trump who opined he might lose due to the “rigged system.” And it was then-candidate Clinton (and then-President Obama, among others) who rightly criticized him for attacking the system simply because he didn’t like the probable outcome. That debate was not specifically about the electoral college, but the principle holds: we don’t make drastic, summary changes to a system which has worked so well for so long, simply because we don’t win.

*Eagle-eyed observers may note that the movement to circumvent the electoral college has not been ruled on in the courts. If someone from a state adopting the approach sues for relief, the Supreme Court would have to rule whether the entire concept is an unconstitutional route to amending the existing constitutional system. ¡Ay Caramba!