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(I have to clear my poli-sci throat on this one. Purists for higher ed might want to skip this one.)
Monday night (posted Tuesday morning) I wrote the following:
I’m a political scientist by training. I’ve taught American government and spent more time on the Federalist Papers than is probably healthy. I know about the Electoral College. But even with all of that, it still seems … odd … that we so casually distinguish between getting the most votes and winning the election. After more than 100 years of moving in tandem, they’ve split in two of the last five elections, and there’s a nontrivial chance it will be three of six.
Sigh.
At this point, Biden is up by over three million votes, but the Electoral College is a nail-biter. Even if he wins, I think the “nontrivial chance” piece has been vindicated. The fact that we know who got the most votes, but are still trying to figure out who wins, is the entire point.
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That’s not new, of course. Our political system was built to favor certain people over others. James Madison spelled it out in Federalist Paper No. 10:
A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project …
The system was built to defeat popular opinion, or what Madison called “rages.” It did that by multiplying veto points and giving extra weight to the affluent. In early days, property qualifications for voting were common; if you couldn’t afford land, you couldn’t vote. Women were excluded, as were enslaved people (although they counted as three-fifths of a person for apportionment purposes). The Electoral College was specifically put in as a safeguard against candidates pursuing such “improper or wicked project[s].” Even the Senate wasn’t elected by popular vote until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913. Filtering the popular vote through carefully chosen men of means was intended to protect those men of means.
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Back in the ’90s, before the recent spate of diversions of the Electoral College from the popular vote (and when I was in grad school), a professor in my program argued that the Electoral College was a good idea because it prevented widespread fraud.
Seriously. He actually said that. In public.
His argument was that if the president were elected by the popular vote, then there would be incentives to commit fraud in all 50 states. But in the Electoral College, most states fall clearly into one camp or the other, so we can focus our scrutiny on the few swing states. What’s the point in narrowing the margin in Oklahoma or Massachusetts from 30 points to 25 when it’s winner-take-all anyway?
I remember thinking the argument insane. If the Electoral College were so brilliant, I wondered, why hasn’t any other country in the world adopted it? They’ve had over 200 years to see it in action. Surely, someone else would have tried it by now.
Now that we’ve endured the dumpster fire elections of 2000, 2016 and 2020, it’s hard even to take the antifraud argument seriously. Disinformation campaigns, machine hacking, voter suppression and all manner of shenanigans are effective precisely because (in 48 states) the Electoral College is winner-take-all. Win Pennsylvania by a fraction of a percent, and you get 100 percent of its 20 electoral votes. If a state is likely to be close, the payoff for picking up a couple of percentage points is potentially the whole ball game. Meanwhile, “extra” votes in solidly red or solidly blue states are effectively wasted. That’s how someone could have millions more votes than the other candidate and still lose. Yes, more Americans voted for Smith than for Jones, but they weren’t the right Americans, so they don’t count.
Given our history, I get twitchy when someone decides to distinguish the “right” Americans from everyone else. That never ends well.
There’s no shortage of other arguments against the Electoral College. For instance, “faithless electors” could simply ignore the popular vote in their own states. (Although we tend to think of that as a bug, the Founders saw it as a feature. Sometimes the masses need to be saved from themselves, after all.) Since the electoral votes of a given state are based on the number of senators plus the number of representatives, small states are overrepresented. But it gets even worse than that. If no candidate gets a majority, then the election moves to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote. That means that Wyoming gets the same clout as California, even though California has over 60 times more people than Wyoming.
It’s our version of the British “rotten borough” system, except that England abolished that system in 1832. We still have it.
Harrumph.
There. I feel better now. Wise and worldly readers, thanks for indulging this one. I’ll get back to my higher ed beat post haste.
