Explain the Electoral College’s brief history and how it subverts the will of the electorate,
For a fleeting moment in early October, it looked like the US presidential electoral system might become an issue in this year’s election. The Democratic vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, told two audiences that the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced by a direct national popular vote.
Walz was shut down quickly by Kamala Harris’ campaign with a brief statement that abolishing the Electoral College is not its official position. Walz duly walked back his comments and the story had a shelf-life of fewer than 24 hours.
However, should this year’s election result in yet another “runner-up” president—when the electoral vote and, thus, the election are won by the loser of the popular vote—the Electoral College problem might very well come back to haunt the Harris campaign.
This might happen if the race is as close as the majority of surveys suggest. Furthermore, Harris is less likely than Republican former President Donald Trump to benefit from this antiquated, illegitimate voting system.
The operation of the Electoral College
Under the Electoral College system, the president is chosen indirectly in two stages.
To select “electors,” who formally cast the “electoral vote” in what is known as the “Electoral College” on December 17, the first step is the November 5 popular vote in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The president is chosen by the electoral vote, not the popular vote.
Each state receives electoral votes based on its representation in the US Congress rather than its population, which further complicates matters.
Regardless of population size, every state has at least three electoral votes because each state has two senators and at least one member of the House of Representatives.
To win, a candidate must receive 270 or more of the 538 votes in the Electoral College, which is an absolute majority. In the event that no candidate receives an Electoral College majority, the Constitution also includes a convoluted and blatantly undemocratic fallback plan. Each state delegation would thus have one vote in the House of Representatives’ presidential election.
The Electoral College’s beginnings
The Electoral College was purposefully created to be an undemocratic institution, so it should come as no surprise. When the majority of the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia in 1787, they had a highly conservative view of government, which was expressed in the process of choosing the president.
The framers firmly believed that the presidency should be a position independent of politics. They also believed that people who are knowledgeable about governance and statecraft should make the decision.
Because of this, the founders opposed a popular vote for president, fearing that it would result in “tumult and disorder,” as one of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, put it. The framers strongly favored what they referred to as a “republic” over direct democracy.
Allowing state legislatures to decide how each state’s electors should be selected was their solution. The electors, not the public, were initially chosen by the legislatures of the majority of states to choose the president.
Then, the Electoral College system and its underlying principles were enshrined in the Constitution and intentionally created to keep the general public out of the process.
There have also been claims that slavery and racism played a key role in its creation. The framers of the Constitution gave the major slave-holding states much more influence over the president’s choice as well as in Congress by building on the previously reached compromise over representation in Congress and the counting of slaves as “three-fifths of all other persons.”
Two significant political events in the early 19th century necessitated certain modifications to the plan, so the framers’ efforts were not totally effective in the long run.
People started calling for a bigger involvement in American democracy as the country’s frontier grew and political parties emerged. This pushed state legislatures to enable popular voting for the Electoral College and give up their authority to choose electors.
The Electoral College functioned largely as it does now by the middle of the 19th century.
Interestingly, the Constitution’s language allowed the states to respond to the need for popular voting without the need for a constitutional amendment:
However, that didn’t alter the fact that the “electors,” not the people themselves, would still select the president.
How the popular vote is distorted by the Electoral College
By inflating the winner’s margin of victory, the electoral vote invariably skews the popular vote. It can also deviate from the popular vote in extremely tight races, as it has done four times: in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.
This is caused by two methods.
First, because small states are guaranteed at least three electoral votes, their populations are overrepresented in the Electoral College in comparison to bigger states.
For instance, according to US census figures from 2020, Alaska has three electoral votes, or one for every 244,463 residents. New York, on the other hand, has one electoral vote for every 721,473 residents, with 28 electoral votes. Therefore, the value of an electoral vote in Alaska is nearly three times that of an electoral vote in New York.
The second, and far more important, arrangement is the “winner-takes-all” one. No matter how close the race is, the victor of the popular vote receives all of the electoral votes in all states except Maine and Nebraska.
It’s winner-take-all even in Maine and Nebraska, but in both states, the statewide winner of the popular vote receives two electoral votes, while the winner of the popular vote in each of their congressional districts receives one electoral vote.
The winner-take-all system would also be unfamiliar to most Americans.
In other words, when voters cast their ballots, they are actually casting several votes—once for each state elector who supports their preferred presidential candidate. They accomplish this by checking off a single box next to the name of their favorite candidate.
For instance, all 19 electors on Harris’ slate will defeat all 19 of Trump’s electors by the same amount if Harris wins Pennsylvania’s popular vote by 51-49%. Despite the tight popular vote, Harris won 19 to 0 in the electoral vote.
The Electoral College vote will always inflate the victory margin in comparison to the popular vote when that is replicated in each of the 50 states.
For instance, in the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton won the electoral college by a landslide, 370-168, over George H.W. Bush. But in the popular vote, Clinton narrowly defeated Bush by 5.5 points (43% to 37.45%). Ross Perot, an independent, received about 19% of the popular vote but received no electoral votes because he did not win any states.
Additionally, when the electoral vote is won by the loser of the popular vote, as was the case with Trump’s triumph over Hillary Clinton in 2016, it demonstrates that the location of a candidate’s votes is more significant than the total number of popular votes they receive.
A candidate must have an equitable distribution of votes among the states in order to win the Electoral College. This should not be a component of the electoral system in a majoritarian democracy, which is founded on the idea of majority rule. However, this is not how the US presidential election process was intended to function.
Finally, the character of the election campaign is also significantly influenced by the Electoral College. The majority of US states are “safe” victories for one party or the other.
As a result, the candidates’ efforts are focused on the few competitive states, also known as “battleground” states. People often overlook the rest of the nation.
The Electoral College’s future
Due in part to the Constitution’s flexibility in handling the earlier dispute in the 1800s over state elector selection and the extreme difficulty of altering the document, the Electoral College has persisted into the twenty-first century.
This is true even if the vast majority of Americans want a national, direct public vote for president over the Electoral College.
Nobody can predict what will happen in this election. The outcome is not only uncertain, but it might even be random given the polls’ indications of such close popular vote margins in the battleground states. And that’s a really bad remark about the condition of American democracy.