The Electoral College - Part 1

The history of America's other peculiar institution

The Electoral College has long been an oddity of American democracy. Every four years when we go to the polls and cast a vote for one of the presidential candidates on the ballot, in reality we’re not voting for the candidate them self, but rather we’re voting on an elector who will pledge to vote for the indicated candidate in the Electoral College election in December. This brings up three questions that are worth exploring. Why did the Founding Fathers come up with this system when writing the Constitution? Why has this rather strange system survived for over 230 years? Finally, given the fact that the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere in the near future, what do the candidates need to do to win this year’s election. Since the election of Donald Trump, who won the Electoral College but lost the popular election by 3 million votes, the issue of the Electoral College has become very partisan in nature. Many Republicans, trying to legitimize Trump’s election, have argued that the Founding Fathers carefully crafted the Electoral College system and that it’s working just as planned, however, this isn’t based on historical facts.

It’s easy to forget that in 1787 the Constitutional Convention very nearly ended up being a deadlocked disaster. One of the issues delegates had to overcome was how to elect the President. The initial debate was between two opposing plans, one side proposing that Congress elect the President and the other side arguing for the President to be elected by popular election. Those who favored Congress electing the President were afraid that the people were too ill-informed and subject to being wooed by a politician making unrealistic promises. However, the other side maintained that Congress selecting the President would weaken the separation of powers by making the President dependent on Congress, especially during re-election and would lead to cronyism. They felt that an election by the people would make it impossible to buy off the electors to win the Presidency. This was the view of the Father of the Constitution, James Madison, who argued that the people at large were the fittest to judge the merits of the President.

The popular vote had considerable support, but Madison had to concede that it was politically dead due to opposition from the southern states for a separate reason. The northern and southern states had a similar population, however about a third of the southern population were slaves who obviously couldn’t vote. In a popular election the states with small slave populations would have a natural advantage over states with a large slave population. By this point in the convention the infamous three-fifth compromise which counted slaves and three-fifth of a person for representation purposes in the House of Representatives had already been agreed to. The realization that they were at a deadlock led to the compromise of the Electoral College. Neither side liked it, but it was the least objectionable idea they could agree on. By basing the Electoral College on congressional representation the south received a disproportional representation, but by having the electors chosen by the states rather than by Congress it maintained the separation of powers and dispersed the electorate enough that buying the election would be impractical.

Having arrived at this compromise the delegates to the Constitutional Convention could move on to other things, however, none of the framer’s assumptions about how the Electoral College would work ended up coming true. They left the process of choosing electors up to each state, but it was assumed they would be chosen by state legislatures and each elector would be free to vote their conscience. Initially, the electors in most states were chosen by the state legislatures, but gradually over the first half of the 1800s most states moved to a popular election to select the electors. However, from the beginning the electors in most states were bound to vote the way the state had determined ahead of time, making the actual Electoral College vote a foregone conclusion. They also didn’t account for the formation of political parties and assumed there would be a large number of candidates preventing any one candidate from getting the required majority of the electors. As a result, it was believed elections would frequently go to the House of Representatives to determine the President, however that has only happened twice, the last time being in 1824. When Republicans argue that the system we have today is what the framers of the Constitution wanted, they are incorrect. The initial objections to the popular vote were based on concerns that the voters were ill-informed and too easily influenced, and the complaint of southern states that it underrepresented them due to their large slave populations, these issues no longer exist. The Founding Fathers would not recognize our current system of electing the President with the universal suffrage and the winner take all Electoral College. Given that the Electoral College was an expedient compromise rather than a foundational principle, the Framers would likely wonder why we hadn’t done away with it once slavery was abolished and a popular vote was established making the reasoning behind the Electoral College moot.

This begs the question, why haven’t we done away with the Electoral College when the reasons the Founding Fathers created it are no longer applicable. Back when I was a teenager in the 1980s and first learned about the Constitution there was widespread agreement that the Electoral College was outdated and didn’t serve a purpose anymore. In the late 1960s there was a movement to do away with it in favor of a national popular vote. At the time a poll showed 66% approval for the idea with no significant difference between Democrats and Republicans, in fact the amendment was slightly more popular with Republicans. The Amendment passed the House of Representatives by a huge margin but came up a couple of votes short in the Senate because some of the small states objected. A decade

later the support for the Amendment was even higher at 73%. I think part of the problem back then was it had been a century since someone one had lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College making the problem seem abstract. Essentially, even though there was widespread agreement about the Electoral College, there wasn’t a sense of urgency about it. However, in 2000 when George Bush won the White House despite losing the popular vote and a partisan divide was created. In 2004 a poll showed that there was still a 59% to 37% support for amending the Constitution, but support was only 40% of Republicans while Democratic support remained high at 75%. Now in 2020, four years after President Trump won the Presidency without a plurality of the popular vote, support for abolishing the Electoral College is down to 53%. It’s still a majority, but the divide between the parties has grown even wider with 79% of Democrats supporting the popular vote but only 25% of Republicans. Among Democrats, support for selecting the Presidency through a popular vote has remained consistently in the mid to upper 70s percentile, it’s among Republicans that support has fallen to a third of what it once was after seeing that shifting demographics gave them an advantage in Presidential elections.

When the Electoral College wasn’t seen as giving one party a significant edge over the other the overwhelming majority of Americans supported an Amendment to do away with it. However, because it seemed unlikely that the winner of the popular wouldn’t also win the Electoral College there wasn’t the urgency to drive people to demand something be done about it. Then on the rare occasions when the political dynamics changed to give one party a seeming advantage it then became a partisan issue making the consensus needed to pass an Amendment impossible. The Electoral College was an unpopular compromise that was a necessary to get the Constitution passed in 1787. The original reasons for its inclusion in the Constitution no longer exists, but the perception that it gives the Republican party an advantage in Presidential elections makes an amendment to abolish it impracticable in the near future. So, like it or not, the Electoral College will be with us as we countdown to the 2020 election in November. In my next article I’ll examine trends from resent elections to determine which states will be in play to swing the Electoral College, which one’s might be in play and which ones are likely safe in the race to get 270 electoral votes and win the Presidency of the United States.