The Electoral College Puzzle

"views on the fairness of the Electoral College are often partisan. Not surprisingly, many Clinton supporters have called for its reform or abolition. But most recent polls indicate that supporters of both parties feel that this 18th-century system of choosing a president should be modified or abolished. Nonetheless, others continue to make the case for preserving the Electoral College in its current form, usually using one of three arguments. In my course about American elections, we discuss these arguments – and how each has serious flaws."

"Above all, the electoral college had nothing to do with slavery. ...If anything, it was the electoral college that made it possible to end slavery, since Abraham Lincoln earned only 39 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1860, but won a crushing victory in the electoral college. This, in large measure, was why Southern slaveholders stampeded to secession in 1860-61. They could do the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the electoral college would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents."

"...Why didn’t [the framers] create a directly representative system ... Is the answer once again slavery?" "Yes. At Philadelphia, the leading lawyer in America, James Wilson, proposed direct elections. Wilson was one of only six people to sign the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He wrote the words "We the people" in the document. He's one of the first five associate justices on the Supreme Court. And he was for a direct election. When he advocated this, James Madison's immediate response was: In principle, you're right, but the South won't go for it because they'll lose every time because they won't be able to count their slaves."

"The Electoral College is an antidemocratic relic. Everyone who remembers 2000 knows that it can lead to the election of the candidate who loses the popular vote as president. But the Electoral College's other serious flaws are perhaps even more debilitating for a democracy. It focuses presidential elections on just a handful of battleground states, and pushes the rest of the nation's voters to the sidelines.... Both parties should have reason to fear the college's perverse effects. In 2000, the Democrats lost out. But in 2004, a shift of 60,000 votes in Ohio would have elected John Kerry, even though he lost the national popular vote decisively."

"It is long past time that we stopped using the Electoral College to choose our presidents and started using the national popular vote instead. Every vote should count equally. Every state should be a swing state. There is a realistic path to making an end-run around the Electoral College for the 2020 elections. This is because we don't need a constitutional amendment to stop using the Electoral College. We only need the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact."

"The Electoral College is a democratically indefensible anachronism that dilutes minority votes while disproportionately amplifying whites votes. Defenses of the system are almost comically casuistic in light of the fact that we transcended its two original purposes: To water down democracy by choosing independent “electors” who vote for president (which we no longer do), and to help Southern states maintain national influence despite the fact that a large chunk of their population consisted of slaves who were denied the right to vote. But the Electoral College remains lodged in our Constitution, and this year, for the fourth time in history, it elevated to the presidency a candidate who lost the popular vote."

Fun with electoral college history. And a lot of other sad things about elections in the U.S.

The trick is to win all the smallest states.

"It's beyond time to focus attention on this," Todd Donovan, a Western Washington University political scientist and elections expert, emailed Wednesday. "The Electoral College is malapportionment. That's unconstitutional for legislative representation. We've already got disproportionate state-based representation in the U.S. Senate, and there is no modern logic (other than dated federalism arguments) to defend the Electoral College. It was the product of short-sighted compromise at the constitutional convention, when there was no concept of popular votes. It failed spectacularly in the first few elections it was used, and it's limped along since."

"The idea of 'all votes are equal' actually dilutes individual votes. George Wallace’s 1968 third party campaign won just 46 electoral votes, but the Republican Party was influenced (intimidated?) enough to execute a 'Southern Strategy,' which changed the direction and success of the GOP in that region for five decades running. In a ballot box containing 73 million votes, Wallace’s 13 percent share would have had little leverage if the election was a popularity contest."