Is There a Better Option than the Electoral College?

By Travis Van Oosbree

In 1787, at the constitutional convention, a debate raged about the process for electing the president. Federalists argued that the election of the president should be decided by a congressional vote. After all, Congress is supposed to represent the electorate. Those opposed to the idea feared that deciding the presidency gave Congress too much power, instead arguing in favor of a popular vote. The Federalists countered by saying that a popular vote from an uninformed electorate would lead to mob rule, and the election of unfit candidates. The compromise that was devised was the implementation of the Electoral College, a system in which each state is granted a certain number of votes – also called electors – relative to their population. When a state holds its presidential election, the citizens cast their votes and the results inform the electors on how they will ultimately distribute the state’s allotted electoral votes. States have the right to decide whether the electoral votes are distributed in a winner-take-all fashion or split amongst all vote-getting candidates proportionate to their popularity. The candidate to reach a simple majority of Electoral College votes wins the presidency. In the unlikely case that there is a tie, or if the votes are split three ways resulting in no candidate receiving a majority, the decision is passed to the House of Representatives to vote for president and the Senate will decide the vice president.

Although that may seem a bit convoluted, in principal it gave everyone at the constitutional convention a little bit of what they asked for, and the important task of deciding the president was shared by everyone. In practice the Electoral College is a bit more problematic. In five instances over the course of America’s two hundred and forty some year history, the winner of the election lost the popular vote, but still gained the majority of Electoral College votes. Now, you might be thinking that in fifty-three of the fifty-eight presidential elections held in US history the system worked. That’s more than 91% of the time the most popular candidate wins the election. I’d say that’s a pretty successful system to determine the person that best represents all of America. The trouble comes in the fact that two of those five times have come in the last two decades and according to a study conducted by the University of Texas in 2019, this “inversion” of the Electoral College vote over the popular vote will favor the Republican Party 65% of the time.[1] How can this be? Well, because of the way the electoral votes are allotted to states based on population and number of Congresspeople, some states’ votes are actually more influential than others.[2] California for example, has a population of roughly 39.45 million people and fifty-five Electoral College votes, Wyoming on the other hand has a population of 578,759 people and three Electoral College votes. That means every Californian’s individual vote is 0.000139% of an Electoral College vote, but Wyomingite’s individual votes are 0.000518% of an Electoral College vote. A fraction of a percent may seem insignificant, but because less densely populated states tend to vote Republican, it accounts for the 65% advantage I mentioned before with the inversion of the popular vote.

This imbalance seems like a bit of a threat to American democracy doesn’t it? It would appear there is a serious flaw in the system of electing the president. The popular vote is much more representative of the will of the people, because it ensures that every citizen’s vote carries exactly the same weight. Critics of the popular vote contend that the switch would unfairly swing the power away from Middle America and focus it in densely populated urban centers. To that supporters of the popular vote contend that as it is, the current system gives too much power to the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina. The demographic makeups of those states are not necessarily representative of the entire American population, but they end up being the ones who determine the outcome of the vote.[3]

Another popular argument in favor of the Electoral College is that it guarantees the certainty of the results. There is never a need for a recount and even if the vote is split three ways, with no single candidate earning a majority of votes, as was the case when Richard Nixon won the election with 43% of the popular vote in1968, he still earned 56% of the Electoral College votes and therefore the presidency. Detractors of the Electoral College argue that the system ignores the will of the people, and by valuing certain votes more than others it creates and Orwellian democracy where “All [people] are equal, but some [people] are more equal than others.” As far as guaranteeing the certainty of the results, it would seem to me that despite the debacle of the Iowa caucus we witnessed in February, the collective ingenuity of America’s greatest minds could devise a system to tally votes that would guarantee the results are accurate. We have cars that drive themselves, we should be able to create something that is more or less a glorified Scantron machine.

Lastly, supporters of the current system make the point that changing the voting process would require a constitutional amendment. Changing the constitution alters the founding fathers’ original intent and threatens to turn America into something other than what it was intended to be. Also, passing an amendment is hard! It would have to be approved in both the House and Senate with at least 2/3 vote, and in these times of unfettered partisanship, that seems unlikely. That being said, let’s not lose sight of all of the good things that can come from amending the constitution. Twenty-seven times the constitution has been amended and it has given us liberties like freedom of religion, speech, the press and the right to assemble. Constitutional amendments abolished slavery and expanded voting rights, and most significant for this discussion, the 17^th Amendment changed the election of Senators from a state legislative decision to a popular vote.[4] So there is precedent for changing election systems already written into the Constitution.

Now we get into the really sticky question of whether we should actually do away with the Electoral College or not. After all, it’s undemocratic, right? I believe it is, but America is not a Democracy, it is a Republic, and in a Republic we are governed not by the population, but by our elected officials, and those elected officials have thus far determined that the current system is still working. Of course there are some outspoken Congresspeople who are pushing for change, but we are a long way away from consensus. In a time when political compromise is so hard to come by, I like to think that the Electoral College is an example that compromise can build something stronger and more effective than what either side is proposing alone. When describing what had been achieved at the constitutional convention of 1787, Alexander Hamilton said of the Electoral College, “If the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.”

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[1] Ford, Matt. “The Case Against the Popular Vote.” The New Republic, September 20, 2019. https://newrepublic.com/article/155134/case-popular-vote

[2] ConnectUs. “14 Pros and Cons of Abolishing the Electoral College.” August 19, 2019. https://connectusfund.org/14-pros-and-cons-of-abolishing-the-electoral-college

[3] ProCon.org. “The Electoral College: Top 3 Pros and Cons.” September 1, 2019. https://www.procon.org/headline.php?headlineID=005330

[4] U.S. Constitution