What is the Electoral College?
In the US we do not directly elect the president but rather the populace elects a slate of electors. In every state but Maine and Nebraska, the candidate who wins the most votes in the state gets all of the state’s electoral votes. The number of electors in each state is the sum of its U.S. senators and its U.S. representatives. Although the number or representatives is proportional to state’s population, the number of senators is always two irrespective of the size of the state Factcheck.org. As such the number of electors a state gets is disproportionately high for small states. That is, low population states get more electoral votes than they would if the electors were allocated purely based on population.
What the HECK were the founding fathers thinking?
There were a number of reasons the founding fathers chose the indirect election method the electoral college provides over using the direct popular vote. The rationale included:
- Voters will not have sufficient information on national candidates or an understanding of their qualification to directly judge candidates. To ensure only fully qualified individuals become president, the populace elects local electors who are knowledge about national political who, in turn can make a more informed presidential selection. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.” Factcheck.org
- Tilting the number of electors in favor of low population states and making the election in fact 50 separate elections and ensures that small states will be important in the election. The Electoral College prevents what James Madison called “Tyranny of the Majority”. It prevents candidates from wining an election by focusing only on high-population urban centers (the big cities), ignoring smaller states and the more rural areas of the country. Heritage.org Under a pure popular vote, the power of small states will be diminished (commensurate to their population).
- The electoral college gave additional power to the south who counted slaves in determining the number of electors. At the Constitutional Convention, the James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But slave owner and Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count. Time.com
Do these arguments make sense in 2019?
The third argument is clearly arcane and the first argument is greatly weakened in the modern age in which everyone has access to extensive information. In addition, the Electoral College did not prevent the election of Trump, a clearly poorly qualified candidate on all standard metrics. In fact, the Electoral College enabled Trump to get elected despite losing the popular vote.
The only argument that is potentially relevant in 2019 is the second point regarding ensuring low population states are not ignored in the election process. Unfortunately, the founding fathers tilted the scales to favor small states rather than just balance the power between states of various sizes. In addition, the population divide between the small and large states has been growing overtime. In 1790 the largest state has 11 times the population of the smallest state. Now the population of California is 68 times the population of Wyoming. https://politicaleye.org/2018/07/27/not-so-representative-democracy/.
Tyranny of the Minority
The Electoral College continues to empower small states in the face of a widening population gap. The result is that there is a tyranny of the minority in the US. That is, our elected officials are far more conservative than the population as a whole because the South and the Midwest are over represented in Senate and by the Electoral College, tilting the presidency to the GOP. Perhaps going to a pure direct vote would tilt the scales the other way but clearly a better and more fair approach can be implemented that, at a minimum, puts more weight on the popular vote when determining who becomes president.
Thank you for the excellent post