The Electoral College: All Costs, No Benefits

This piece ran as a newspaper op/ed in latish September, 2024.

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These days, one can reasonably wonder how many Republicans believe in the ideal of democracy –in which (since we are all “created equal”) every citizen is entitled to an equal say in choosing who will wield the power of the state.

This is addressed to those who do still believe in that basic American ideal. If we care about Justice, we should be like Justice with her blindfold, not looking at whether we benefit from injustice.

What I want to argue here is that the Electoral College system – that gives all of each state’s electoral votes to that candidate who get the majority in that state — serves no justifiable purpose, and that it should be replaced by a system in which our national leader is whoever gets the most votes nationally wins.

Consider the pernicious impact of the present system, which differentiates Battleground States — where the outcome of the state-level vote is uncertain — from all the other states that are so unbalanced toward one party that it is a foregone conclusion which candidate will get those states’ Electoral Votes.

That means that most Americans will be ignored by the two campaigns. It means that most Americans can reasonably conclude that – since their state’s winner is certain — it doesn’t matter whether they vote or not.

It’s a far healthier democracy that involves all the people in the democratic process. But the winner-take-all Electoral College system tells most citizens that they are irrelevant, that — whether they vote or not — they are not participating in the nation’s choice. It gives us a less involved, less motivated citizenry.

If whoever got the most votes overall was the winner, we’d all be involved equally. And the candidates would pay attention to the whole country.

(By the way, the straight-out popular vote –– whoever gets the most votes wins — is how every single state chooses its chief executive. One person/one vote makes more sense in today’s America than apportioning Electors according to geographical territories to choose our national leader.)

When our Framers created the Electoral College, their intent was that a group of wiser heads would act as a check on the potential folly of “the will of the people.”

But throughout these generations, the Electors play no such role. They’ve not checked any folly in the electorate, but rather they’ve acted automatically to ratify their electorate. And the Electoral College distorts the electorate—giving too much voice of the least populous states at the expense of the more populous.

Because every state gets two Electors (corresponding to their two Senators), each Democratic voter in low-population Vermont gets more power than their Republican counterparts in high-population Texas. There’s no good reason for that, not for why the thousands of Republicans in Wyoming should have so much more say in the Electoral College than the millions of Democrats of California.

The Electoral College does damage, while doing no good.

(It’s a damaging remnant from an earlier situation, where the formation of the Union required giving assurances to smaller colonies that feared being dominated. That issue is far past, and we are left with something that serves no legitimate purpose.

Unfortunately, the Electoral System is in the Constitution. (The Founders did an extraordinary job: the Constitution is one of humankind’s great achievements.) But unsurprisingly they made some decisions that didn’t work out as they expected. (They didn’t expect political parties, but lo and behold within a decade an acrimonious two-party system emerged.)

Mistake or not, the Electoral College system can only be altered by constitutional amendment, and – for generally good reasons — the founders made that process exceedingly difficult. So getting rid of the Electoral College would have been a big challenge under the best of political times.

On top of that, such a change would require the Republican Party to do something truly noble and heroic. That’s because the Republican Party has been, in these times, the chief beneficiary of the injustice of the present system. (That’s starkly illustrated by how the only presidential winners who lost the popular vote in many generations have been Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump.)

But today’s GOP this is the last Party from which we could hope for unusual nobility– giving up undeserved power because that’s what’s fair – given its routinely cheating these days to get power.

Whether there would ever be a Republican Party willing to sacrifice an unjust advantage– because that’s what America’s democratic values call for, we’re stuck with the Electoral College the Constitution created.

However, some think there’s a legitimate way to work around the Constitution. There’s an ongoing effort, which is making progress, to get enough states to sign onto an agreement pledges them to vote for the popular-vote winner. That agreement would take effect once they collectively represent a majority of the Electoral College. And that would mean that whoever if favored by the majority of American voters would become President.

There’s some disagreement on the constitutionality of such an agreement, but I expect a sound basis can be argued. But the important thing is that it would make the distribution of power in America more just, and – in terms of our traditional shared American values — there’s no downside.