The Darn Electoral College
How is it that a presidential candidate can be winning by over 4 million votes, and yet the race is still “too close to call”? Blame it on the electoral college, the unique and increasingly inconvenient way we select our presidents. Why did the framers of the US Constitution feel the electoral college was necessary? What are its benefits? How is it that candidates for president can lose the popular vote and still win? And is it right that we have to spend several days waiting for volunteers in Pima County, AZ and Allegheny County, PA to count every last mail-in ballot?
First a little history. In 1787, the framers of the US Constitution recognized they needed an executive to make certain necessary decisions, but they weren’t sure about how to select them. A direct popular vote frightened many of the framers, because they feared that a populist might manipulate voters and skew the election. Their plan was that Congress should appoint the president. Other framers disliked this idea, since they felt it would invite corruption and backroom deals. This impasse lasted for months, but they finally reached a compromise. According to this compromise, each state would select a number of electors based on population. These electors would then vote for the president. The idea was to avoid direct popular election while also taking the process out of the hands of congress. None of the framers seemed to be thrilled with this compromise, but after months of arguing, they were ready to move on to other issues.
The first crisis of the electoral college had to do with what is often referred to as the “three-fifths compromise.” Southern states wanted the electoral college to consider enslaved Black people to be part of their population, even though they denied these people the legal rights of citizens. Northern states argued that it was unacceptable to classify people as “property” but then ask to re-classify them as “residents” for purposes of the electoral college. To many framers, this was merely a cynical power grab on the part of Southern states, since the greater the population of a state the larger its number of electors. In the end (big surprise), they came up with a compromise: each enslaved Black person in aSouthern state would count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of designating electors. So then, if South Carolina had a total population of 250,000 people in 1789, and 43% of its population consisted of enslaved people, then there were 142,500 free residents in South Carolina and 107,500 enslaved people. Since each enslaved person counted as three-fifths of a person, the enslaved population counted as 64,500 people for the purpose of assigning electors to the electoral college. This brought South Carolina to a total electoral population of 207,000 people and gave it seven electoral votes. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment repealed the three-fifths compromise, but the electoral college remained.
What are the benefits of the electoral college? First of all, if you live in a mostly rural state such as Iowa or Pennsylvania, the electoral college forces candidates to spend time campaigning in your state. If we elected presidents by national popular vote, would they spend so much time in rural Ohio and Georgia, or would they campaign in large metro areas like New York City and Los Angeles? They’d probably go where the most votes are to be found, and rural states would be neglected. The other major issue is that a popular national vote might end with a winner who got less than 50% of the vote. If we imagine an election with a strong third-party candidate, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched that the winner might receive less than 50% of thevote. Would we feel okay electing a president who received the support of less than half the country? With all its problems, the electoral college at least spares us this one.
The electoral college is not without its benefits, but now that five candidates have won the presidency while losing the popular vote (and two in just the past 20 years), it may be time to revisit the value of the electoral college. We may end up with presidents who earn less than 50% of the vote, but this seems better than electing presidents who lose the popular vote by 500,000 votes (George W. Bush in 2000) and 3 million votes (Donald Trump in 2016). It also would save us from having to care so much about the wishes of people who live in “swing states” with relatively low populations. Who knows? Maybe Pennsylvania is also sick of being bombarded by political ads every four years.
