The Electoral College has been a part of American politics since George Washington. For many, it is a bedrock institution. However, the time has come for the college to be dissolved. The underlying issues that the EC attempted to address no longer exist and so its usefulness to American politics no longer exists.
In order to understand this better, let’s take a trip back to the late 1700’s and understand why Congress created the Electoral College. Congress wanted to ensure that the President was properly vetted by well-educated individuals who knew something of the person running and would ensure that the voters didn’t elect someone who would be an embarrassment to the new nation. There was also the need to ensure that the winner had national support. Back then, it was difficult for voters in, say, Georgia to get reliable information on candidates who lived in, say, Massachusetts and vice versa. News just didn’t travel that fast and small incidents that would be viral sensations today never made it out of the little town or village where they occurred. It also made it very easy for disinformation campaigns to spread quickly without an adequate fact-checking system in place. That’s the historically cleaned up version anyway. It’s also accurate to say that Congress wanted to ensure that a bunch of rich white men had the final say in the election so that a bunch of poor country bumpkins couldn’t screw it up.
Congress also wanted to ensure that the electors did not simply choose the hometown hero and so they mandated that the electors had to vote for two men and one had to be from outside the elector’s home state. It was expected the people in Massachusetts would vote for the hometown candidate. If the electors only voted for the candidate selected by the people of their state, it would get real messy, real quick. By forcing electors to also choose a second candidate, it ensured that the final winner had some broad national appeal. This second vote required electors to have good judgment and well-rounded critical thinking skills so that they could best determine who should get their second vote.
After a few bad elections (1796 and 1800), they changed the Electoral College. Instead of electors voting for two candidates, parties would run a ticket consisting of a candidate for President and a candidate for Vice-President. Electors would then vote for one ticket. It was still designed to ensure that rich, white men had the final say. Over the ensuing years things have changes a little. Electors aren’t always rich, white men these days. State laws have bound electors to the results of the statewide vote, thus forcing electors to vote for the dupe if that’s who the people pick. Electors are no longer allowed to use their good judgment when they vote.
So, if electors are forced to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, why not just remove the electors from the process. Frankly, it’s much more fair and representative of the nation. If you are a Democrat living in the Dakotas, your vote doesn’t really count. Since WWII, Lyndon Johnson is the only Democrat to win in either North or South Dakota. A similar argument could be made for Republican voters living in New England. The only Republicans to win Massachusetts since WWII are Eisenhower and Reagan. If we scrapped the Electoral College then the Republican living in Boston is just as important as the Democrat living in Bismarck and they are both just as important as the voters living in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or any of the other “swing states.”
In addition to making every vote carry the same weight, it makes the outcome much fairer and easier to understand. Imagine how different 2000 would have been if we didn’t have the Electoral College. Al Gore won the popular vote by roughly 500,000 votes or 0.50%. Overall, it was a really close race. Only two states, Florida and Wisconsin, had margins less than 1.00% and enough voters to possibly impact the final outcome. However, it’s reasonable to expect that everyone would have agreed that the contentious number of ballots in those two states would not have been enough to change the final result. I will allow the possibility that a massive recount effort would have been demanded by George Bush on the hopes that a recount in every state would be enough to shift the final national count. But, it likely would not have resulted in the long, drawn-out process we witnessed with the Supreme Court being forced to play the role of final arbiter in the election.
The 2000 election isn’t the only time the popular vote didn’t match the electoral vote. We all know about 2016, when Donald Trump won the election despite losing the popular vote by over 3 million votes. The elections of 1876 and 1888 also featured differing results between the popular vote and the electoral vote. In 1876, Samuel Tilden actually won a majority, not just a plurality, of the popular vote and still managed to lose the electoral vote. The interesting side note to all four of those elections is that the Democratic candidate won the popular vote and the Republican candidate became President. Rutherford Hayes lost the popular vote in 1876 by a full 3%. To put that in perspective, Trump’s 3 million plus defeat was just over 2% of voters. The Electoral College skews results and paints a picture that does not reflect the nation. And it’s not just the four previously mentioned elections that are the issue. When you look at the popular vote totals, Reagan’s supposed landslide victory in 1984 doesn’t really play out. Sure, he won the popular vote by an 18.2% margin, but that’s certainly not the largest in history. Harding, Coolidge, both Roosevelt’s, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon all had bigger wins in the popular vote. And yet Reagan won 97.58% of the Electoral College, second only to FDR’s 98.49% in 1936. How can we really call that a landslide victory?
The Electoral College must be removed so that the free will of the entire American electorate can be exercised. It is the only race that the entire country has a say in. Senators and Representatives are selected by states and districts. Congressional leadership is chosen by the members of Congress. People in Texas or California or any other state don’t have a say in who gets to be Speaker of the House – that is strictly an internal vote by the 435 members of the House. Only the presidential race is run across the entire country. No president should get to behave like there’s some sort of national mandate to govern because they convinced the right 58.8% of the nation to vote for him (or, someday, her). Our American Democracy places great importance upon the will of the people, as such the race for president should be solely determined by the will of the people without any intermediaries.
No comments:
Post a Comment