EIGHT years ago, our country witnessed an unprecedented and bizarre election that left disillusioned Americans scrambling to figure out which aspect of our election process needed to be changed first. Today, the answer is as clear as it has ever been: The Electoral College, our unwieldy procedure that places a barrier between the people and their elected officials, should be eliminated.
When citizens cast a vote in a presidential election, they are not voting directly for a candidate. They are voting for “electors,” who are chosen by their respective political parties to represent their interests. Every state has as many electors as it does Congressional representatives and senators. After the election, each state’s electors, the party of whom is usually determined by the state’s overall popular vote, convene and vote for the next president of the country.
The Electoral College is one of the many manifestations in our Constitution of the Framers’ hesitation over giving too much power to the general public. But the broad expansion of voting rights to include both genders and all races, the 17th amendment that put the election of senators into the public’s hands, and the simple truth that relying on popular vote is more democratic all make the Electoral College outdated and improper.
There might be a reason no other country in the world, even those that admire our political freedom and our governmental efficiency, have chosen to imitate this stage of our political process. It makes little sense to assume that U.S. citizens have the capability to directly elect their congressmen, senators, and governors, but not the president. The magnitude of the office should not encourage us to moderate the public’s control over the result; on the contrary, it makes the expression of democracy that much more critical.
The Electoral College is flawed in theory alone, but even its execution raises serious questions. 48 states, plus the District of Columbia, have a winner-take-all system, whereby all of a state’s electors are allocated to the winner of its popular vote; but Maine and Nebraska allow for the electors to be split between candidates if one wins the popular vote and another wins in the different congressional districts. Such discrepancies between the states further taint the process’s legitimacy. Our system of federalism provides individual states with independent jurisdiction over certain areas of law; but the election of a president to govern the whole country needs to be based upon uniform rules.
Some people may be surprised to learn that electors are not legally bound whatsoever to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote within their state (or district). That they almost always do so out of deference to their party and that an election has never been decided by electors who defect does not make the existence of that possibility any more reasonable. In essence, the absence of any law dictating the vote of an elector transforms the process into one in which voters choose people to choose a president for them. Voters would be excused for not knowing anything about the electors for whom they actually vote. Those whom the voters do know are the presidential candidates, and they should be voting for them, not for intermediaries.
And there is another flaw in the process that makes simply requiring electors to act in accordance with their state’s vote misguided. By apportioning electors on the basis of a state’s representation in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Electoral College unfairly benefits less populous states. Representation in the Senate is equal for all states and therefore does not take into account population. Thus, by appropriating electors partially on the basis of a state’s senators, the present Electoral College system gives an advantage to citizens of smaller states. Just as they have more influence in the Senate compared to citizens of more populous states, the citizens of less populous states have a greater impact on the presidential election, and that impact would remain even if electors’ deference to their state’s citizens was demanded.
The Electoral College is thus unreasonable not only because it sometimes produces a result at odds with the nationwide popular vote; but also because the methods that result in that decision are illogical. Even if they were more sound, however, the unavoidable barrier erected between the population and the president-elect make the procedure an inappropriate manner of conducting an election.
Grant Johnson’s column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.johnson@cavalierdaily.com.
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