The Case for Keeping
the Electoral College
The current debate over the fairness
of the Electoral College for picking United States presidents is based on
misconceptions and ignorance about how it operates. This is what it does.
1. The Electoral
College Is Designed To Let the States Choose the President
The
Electoral College was created by the framers of the Constitution to keep the
selection of the president in the hands of the states and out of the hands of
the federal government itself. It is one of the crucial checks and balances in
the Constitution. The men who wrote the Constitution gave the president veto
power over acts of Congress. The way the founders chose to make the Office of
the President a co-equal branch and independent of the Congress was to give the
power to choose him or her to the states. Just as the President can not pick
the Congress, neither Congress nor the courts can pick the President if the
branches of government are to remain equal.
The
president is chosen, not by voters directly, but by electors. Electors are
state officials, governed by state law, who are elected by the voters in the
November General Election. The winning electors then travel to their state
capitols in December to cast their ballots for President. The Electors are
elected state public officials designated to vote for President on behalf of
their states. Their ballots are then sent to Washington, D.C. where they are
counted by the presiding officer of the United States Senate, who is the
Vice-President. Then, a winner is declared. If no candidate receives a majority
of the electoral votes, then the decision is made in the House of
Representatives where each state's delegation has just one vote.
Nothing
could be clearer. The authors of the Constitution intended to let the states
pick the president.
The
Electors
The electors are candidates for
statewide office. That's what makes the unit rule. They run as a slate pledged
to a candidate, and they either all win or all lose. When a voter casts a
ballot for a candidate, they are casting a ballot for a slate of candidates who
say they will vote for the candidate whose name is on the ballot.
The only constitutional requirement
for an elector is that "no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an
Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an
Elector." [Article II, section 1, clause 2.] The people designated to pick
the president are those who are not connected with the federal government in
any way. Could anything be clearer?
The framers of the Constitution
wanted the people who choose the president to be ordinary folks, as free as
possible from federal government influence, and who would be free to vote their
consciences. While the uncertainty of what is called faithless electors is seen
as a threat to democracy by some, it is a safety valve that can be used to
counteract blatant fraud in election practices at the state and local level. An
elector's independent judgment is another hallmark of the Constitution,
balancing powers between different entities.
The Constitution puts the ultimate power of
picking the president in the hands of its citizens to guard against local
government corruption and malfeasance. This is why the president is chosen by
intermediaries and not by the straight number crunching of a popular vote. In
the 1876 Hayes-Tilden election, allegations of Black voter suppression in the
deep South led to challenges to 20 electors. The House of Representatives
created a commission that ultimately awarded all 20 electors and the presidency
to Rutherford B. Hayes who had lost the popular vote, but he might have won it
had everyone been allowed to cast ballots. Without electors, there is no possible remedy to possible local vote
suppression and destroyed or stolen ballot boxes.
2. The Electoral College Favors
the Large States
As
every state has two Senators, and a state's electoral vote is equivalent to the
number of members in its congressional delegation, it is undeniably true that
voters in small states are disproportionately empowered to pick electors. The
problem is that the election is not about choosing electors, but about picking
a president. A proper analysis is a two-step process. First, who has more power
to pick a slate of electors; undeniably, the voter in a small state. However,
the second question is, how likely is that state's block of electors to change
the outcome of the presidential contest? In the second case, the answer is
equally undeniably the big states.
Where
is the proof that the Electoral College favors the small states? The 11 states
with the most electors alone can elect the president, whereas the 39 smallest states plus the District of Columbia
cannot. The claim that the small states are favored comes from the idea that
voters in the small states have more power to select their electors than voters
in the big states. The only reason people see small swing states as having
disproportionate power is that the big states usually split.
So,
the question is whether the less voting power of the individuals in the big
states is compensated for by the fact that they are deciding on a bigger block
of votes.
For
example, Wyoming has 300,000 voters who pick three electors, while California
has 19 million voters who pick 55 electors. On its face, the Wyoming voters are
3.5 times more powerful than the California voter (Wyoming has one elector for
every 100,000 voters while California has one for every 350,000.) But Wyoming
picks only 1.1% of the electors required for victory, while California picks
over 20% of the electors.
According
to the Banzhaf-Penrose Power Index, a mathematical analysis of elections where
votes have different weights, a voter in California had 2.5 times the chance of
changing the outcome of the presidential election than a voter in Wyoming.
It
is obvious that presidential candidates devote a disproportionate amount of
campaign time and resources to the big states because it is impossible to win
without at least one of them and it is easier to win with them.
3.
Geographical Distribution
Another important function of the
Electoral College is that it guarantees that the winning candidate for
president has support from all over the country, not just in one area. No
matter how big a majority a candidate accumulates in a state like New York or
California, the margin can never completely silence the voters in Wyoming.
This prohibition on vote margin
rollover, so to speak, is the reason Trump won in 2016. Clinton won the popular
vote by almost 3 million votes, but she carried California by 4,269,978 votes.
In other words, Clinton's entire national popular vote margin and more came out
of California. Hillary's margin of victory in California was bigger than the
total number of votes cast in Alaska, Delaware, Washington D.C., Hawaii,
Montana, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming
combined. That's nine states and the District of Columbia whose total votes
were less than Clinton's winning margin in California.
Without the Electoral College,
candidates would campaign almost exclusively in the big metropolitan vote-rich
areas. Spending scarce time traveling to distant places with few voters would
be seen as waste during the crucial final weeks of campaigning. When small
swing states are in play, the Electoral College prevents candidates from
avoiding contentious issues that may be important to a small segment of the
population.
The Electoral College represents the
land as well as the people in the political process. Although undemocratic, the
physical plant is important because prosperous, viable farms and rural areas
are as essential to the wellbeing of people in the cities as it is to the
residents themselves.
To be elected president, a candidate
needs to carry at least one state in each of the five geographic regions of the
country: the Atlantic Coast, the Pacific Coast, the Gulf Coast, a state
bordering on the Great Lakes, and a landlocked state. This requirement is why Florida, which
fulfills two of the five requirements, is so important, especially for the
Democrats.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost badly to
Ronald Reagan and carried only eight states: Hawaii (Pacific Coast); Minnesota
(Great Lakes); Rhode Island, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C. and his home
state of Georgia (Atlantic Coast), and West Virginia (landlocked). Carter
failed to carry any states on the Gulf Coast.
Jimmy Carter got 41% of the vote and
won only eight states. Twenty-four years later, John Kerry got 48.3% of the
vote and carried 19 states plus the District of Columbia, but he did worse than
Carter. He carried four Pacific Ocean states (Alaska saved Bush), seven states
that touched the Great Lakes (if you include Vermont's Lake Champlain that goes
up into Canada) and nine states that abut the Atlantic Ocean. Kerry did not
carry a single state on the Gulf Coast, nor one that was landlocked. Voters can
be very, very subtle.
The Elections Where the Popular Vote Loser
Became President
Critics
of the Electoral College cite the five presidential elections in which the popular
vote loser entered the White House as proof that the Electoral College needs to
be abolished. The Electoral College was responsible for only two of the flipped
contests.
The
elections of 1824 and 1876 were decided by the House of Representatives. In
2000, it was the Supreme Court that picked the winner. Only in 1888 and 2016
did the operation of the Electoral College itself put the popular vote loser in
the White House.
An
interesting side note is that the relative of a former president: son, grandson
or wife, was a candidate in four of the five elections where the popular vote
loser won the election.
Are Elections Fair?
Another criticism of the Electoral
College is that it appears to give outsized influence to small swing states.
Without these crucial contests with small constituencies, all our leaders would
be chosen by the mass media. Presidential candidates have to get out, press the
flesh, and meet the voters in New Hampshire and Iowa in person.
Most people never see a presidential
candidate in their entire lives, much less sit down and talk to a president.
Citizens of the big states depend on the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire to do
an early vetting of the personalities and character of the candidates. The
crucial small swing states in other parts of the country during the General
Election campaign serve the same essential function.
Is the Electoral College a fair way
to pick a president? Not entirely. But the House of Representatives, supposedly
based on equal population, is not fair either. There is no way to apportion 435
House seats among the 50 states so that there is no significant variation in
population. Montana's House seat represents 994,000 people, almost double
Delaware's which represents 568,000.
These anomalies abound in all electoral systems.
And in the Senate, of course, where
every state has two Senators regardless of population, the 39 states that
together can not elect a president hold 78% of the power.
So, while no part of the American
electoral system is perfectly democratic, the whole system, because of the
checks and balances, is fairer than any of its parts. To change one part,
willy-nilly, without carefully assessing its impact on the whole, would be
foolhardy. Abolishing the Electoral College with its big state bias and moving
to direct popular vote or apportioning electors would not make the system more
democratic, it would just shift power away from the states, and increase the
power of the Senate, the least democratic part of the federal government.
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