“A new poll states that 55 percent of Americans want to get rid of the Electoral College. However, under the Electoral College, 55 percent of the country is not a majority.”
-Seth Myers, March 21, 2019
As happens on those occasions when Democrats don’t control the White House, liberals have suddenly decided that they need to get serious about killing the Electoral College. Let me do a review on the issues involved.
But first, you will note that I do not base my critique of the Electoral College on the premise that it was intended to be a defense of slavery. That is because too much of leftist critique of America comes down to “but slavery.” Like, all the things that Thomas Jefferson did in and out of public service are invalidated “because Sally Hemmings.” And really, if your whole argument with the founding structure of our government is “because slavery” then you need to acknowledge that the whole Constitution is based on the premise of classical liberals compromising with the slaveholder culture (which in the case of Jefferson, for one, was the same person). And that means that the stuff that you like about the Constitution stems from the same premise as the stuff you don’t like. The premise of the Constitution set the stage for what we now call “democracy,” but the government was never intended to be a democracy in either the modern or classical sense. And if you’d rather destroy the Constitution, you should really vote Republican, because they’re doing a much better job with that than the most anti-American leftists.
To be sure, a huge amount of why our government looks the way it does is because the people who wanted a strong central government (mostly in Northern ‘free’ states) had to convince Anti-Federalists and states-rights advocates (in Virginia and other slave states) that giving up some of their sovereignty was worth it. That led to things like the “Three-Fifths Compromise” and other atrocities. But it also needs to be considered that without such concessions we either would not have had a Constitution (and stayed with the ‘states-rights’ Articles of Confederation) or we could have ended up with a Confederate secession 76 years earlier.
In any case, most of the Constitutional rules specifically protecting slavery were ended by the Reconstruction Amendments. The Electoral College was not one of them. And that’s because federalism (the protection of states within a national government) was not the issue on trial. Critique of the EC on grounds including the protection of institutional racism is not automatically invalid, but is is also not automatically valid.
There are two reasons given in promotion of the Electoral College, only one of which has borne out.
The first is that by making the election of the president a state-by-state process rather than a national popular vote, we get a better representation of the country’s demands. If elections can be determined mainly by the votes in New York City and California, that would be “democracy” in the sense of gross popular vote, but people in the states in between wouldn’t find that very representative. This also undermines the ‘it’s all about slavery’ argument: one reason the Founders had to include the slavery faction in the debate on federalism is because the slave states had too much (white) population and influence to ignore. If anything, the white-supremacy faction in modern politics clings to the EC because their numerical advantage no longer exists. Which would seem to be a defense of the pro-slavery position, but if we’re going to say that the debate should no longer be in terms of the 1780s, we should also say that the original context no longer applies.
Which leads to the second point. The second argument for the Electoral College, enumerated by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist No. 68, was that:
“as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.
…The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.“
But as the 2016 election showed, this institution, intended to counter “cabal, intrigue and corruption”, and to prevent a creature of “foreign powers” from demagoguing his way into control of the Republic despite having no talents except “low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” was the very mechanism by which that undesired result occurred. And the best case that can be made against the Electoral College is that the only reason the event it was designed to prevent occurred is because of the very existence of that institution, and that the republic (as well as small d-democracy) would have been better served by a national vote.
The problem there is that just as the racist defense of an Electoral College system isn’t quite the same as the Anti-Federalist opposition to the federal Constitution, the leftist critique of the Electoral College elides the point that it is not quite the institution that the Federalists intended. I had already gone over this at least once, after the election, analyzing the opinion of Art Sisneros, a conservative Texas elector who ultimately wimped out and resigned rather than vote against Trump, but who indirectly explained why the Electoral College is not what it was intended to be. You see, the Founders, coming off their experience with the British parliamentary system, had decided (with some reason) that official partisanship distorted the political process, but rather than either account for it in the new federal Constitution or find some official counter for it in the checks-and-balances system, they simply ignored the possibility and hoped (like Washington) that people would simply choose to avoid it. That turned out not to be a realistic hope. After Washington left the Presidency, the original Constitution dictated that the second-place winner of the presidential (Electoral College) vote would be the Vice President, but this meant that in 1796, President John Adams had to serve with his political rival (second-place finisher) Thomas Jefferson as Vice President. Things got even worse in 1800 when Aaron Burr ran against Jefferson and tied the Electoral College vote. The matter went to the House, where things remained in deadlock until (ironically) Jefferson’s other rival, Hamilton, supported his election because he distrusted Burr more. This is why one of the first Amendments after the Bill of Rights, the Twelfth Amendment, was passed, confirming that the President and Vice President are to be elected separately. In the process, this also confirmed the partisan nature of the process. A separate but related development was the “evolution to the general ticket.” Hamilton’s Federalist proposal was that the people were ultimately voting for the Electors, who were better qualified to make a final decision on the Presidency. However some state governments decided that the presidential candidate favored in their state would have a better chance of winning if all Electors were pledged to the victor. In his column, Sisneros quoted Wikipedia:
“When James Madison and Hamilton, two of the most important architects of the Electoral College, saw this strategy being taken by some states, they protested strongly. Madison and Hamilton both made it clear this approach violated the spirit of the Constitution. According to Hamilton, the selection of the president should be “made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station [of president].” According to Hamilton, the electors were to analyze the list of potential presidents and select the best one. He also used the term “deliberate”. Hamilton considered a pre-pledged elector to violate the spirit of Article II of the Constitution insofar as such electors could make no “analysis” or “deliberate” concerning the candidates. Madison agreed entirely, saying that when the Constitution was written, all of its authors assumed individual electors would be elected in their districts and it was inconceivable a “general ticket” of electors dictated by a state would supplant the concept. Madison wrote to George Hay: ‘The district mode was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted; & was exchanged for the general ticket.'”
The process of choosing electors in correspondence with popular vote began in 1789 with Pennsylvania and Maryland although district voting in other states continued through the 1800s. As of now only Maine and Nebraska use a district system for electors, although even these rules are fairly recent (Maine passed its election law in 1972 and Nebraska changed theirs in 1996).
To Hamilton, this process defeated the whole point of the Electoral College system; rather than rendering the heated process of popular vote subject to deliberation from an objective body, objectivity was eliminated in order to facilitate the partisan process, which he had warned would allow the “little arts of popularity” to prevail and encourage the selection of the unqualified.
The irony is that the attack on the EC is coming from liberal Democrats on the grounds that it thwarts democracy, but as Sisneros implies in his column, the change, along with several “Progressive” measures in American history, was intended to make the process more democratic. “Conservatives aren’t much better. They don’t mind that the representatives in a republic exist as long as, contrary to Webster’s definition, no “power is lodged in their representatives.” They want the power in the people directly. The representatives are only there to do what the people demand. They want a democracy, not a republic. They want the power to vote for Skittles for dinner. This is evident by how they approach their legislators. They want them to do X, Y or Z because that is what “we the people” demand. The Constitutionality of it only matters when the legislators are listening to another faction of their constituency. “
This touches on the point that in American politics, we confuse the popular and academic definitions of “democracy” and “republic,” a confusion that is often encouraged by the political class. It at least explains how the same people who bray “it’s a republic, not a democracy!” will in the next breath whine that anybody who wants a Republican president to follow the rule of law is “thwarting democracy!”
And if as leftists insist, it all comes down to racism, that’s not necessarily because that was the specific intent of the Electoral College system. Rather, the people who think that “democracy” means that only their people get the vote, and who opposed the Federalist Constitution because they would have less rights than they did in the Articles of Confederacy – which is why they later formed the Confederate States of America – are using the anti-majoritarian premises of the federalist republic to get their way against the greater majority nationwide. This only happens because of what George Washington described in his Farewell Address as the dynamic “for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views” and in which “(the) disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As I have said, if there was an Original Sin in the Constitutional system, it was not slavery, which could be and technically was corrected. The original sin was that it did not address the system of party loyalty which was contrary to the American project, and which reactionaries have used to maintain the spirit of institutional racism even when the Constitution allows for it to be corrected by law.
It’s not as though liberals (liberals in general, as opposed to the Democratic Party as an institution) are completely unaware of this, or have not proposed ideas. However, up until fairly recently, the prospect that a popular vote winner could lose the Electoral College was not something seriously considered by the political class. To the extent that it was, it was often Republicans complaining that they would not accept their candidate losing the Electoral College if he won the popular vote. But generally, liberal Democrats had gone along with the system because it is deliberately hard to change the Constitution (although obviously it’s not too hard to subvert it). Not only that, there had been a general impression that they could afford to lose Texas and roll the dice on Florida as long as California and New York were in the bag. Obviously that’s not the case anymore.
There’s also a new article in Vox about a specific alternative. The article by Lee Drutman goes over the various proposed alternatives including the gross national vote (which has much the same ‘first-past-the-post’ issue as non-presidential races). The main proposed alternative would be a two-round system (similar to France) which would basically be a national runoff. Drutman’s proposal is ranked choice voting: in this system, a voter would not vote only once for president but would place their first choice, then their second-preferred choice, third preference, and so on. This has certain advantages over the runoff; first obviously being that the election campaign doesn’t require a second round and would be less expensive. Another benefit is that while runoff voting still creates “first past the post” style issues where voters have to second-guess themselves to avoid “spoiling” a ballot with their preferred choice (which was a possibility for Democrats in California’s last all-party primary round), ranked voting still allows the possibility that a “minor” candidate can be in play without “spoiling” the vote for everyone else. While Drutman does not focus on this, the other implication is that this would also solve a lot of problems with other American elections that have nothing to do with the Electoral College.
All of which is academic (literally and figuratively) because not only is the Constitution deliberately hard to change on paper, the two party process makes it that much harder to change it.
But still, some of these changes can be introduced on the state level without introducing constitutional amendments. It would in theory be easier to make electors proportional to the actual vote in each state, or to introduce runoff or ranked voting than eliminate the EC, and if we minimize the psychology of “first past the post” and blind party loyalty, that would address much of the complaints with the Electoral College right there.
But tribalism is a universal. Motivated ignorance is a universal. The American election system is a particular. And while it, like the Democratic Party, has “worked” well enough for most purposes, its existing weaknesses have only recently become critical, because only now did we have not only a candidate who was so unethical and power-hungry as to deliberately game the system to target its specific weaknesses, but had a сахарный папа with enough resources to help him do it.
And if the position of Democrats is that if you vote for the wrong party, the republic is endangered, then that is not a condemnation of the other party, however rotten and dysfunctional it is. It is a condemnation of a first-past-the-post, two-party structure that incentivizes perverse motivations. This is a structure that began as flawed but workable but due to the machinations of the two ruling parties – one of which has usually been the Democrats – it changed from being merely flawed to an active threat to the intent of a democratic republic.
Typically, Democrats only care about this now that their own self-preservation is the issue, and there are two ironies in that. One, it may be too late. Two, for Democrats to make any headway on electoral reform, they have to risk losing what built-in advantage they still have. And that is a factor that may influence their willingness to proceed.