In just a few short weeks, Americans will head to the polls and elect their next President. Right?
Wrong. It’s perfectly possible that whichever candidate gets the most votes might actually lose the election this year – it’s exactly what happened in 2016, and 2000, and 1888 before that.
“The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election,” wrote Joshua Holzer, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Westminster College, Missouri, in an article for The Conversation this month. “Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history.”
So, here’s a question: why does the US even have an Electoral College, if all it does is put the wrong person in charge every so often? Was there any justification for it?
And, more to the point, will the US ever want – or be able – to get rid of it?
Why was the Electoral College originally created?
Larry David once said that “a good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied.” By that metric, the Electoral College is a fantastic institution.
“The Electoral College has always been an oddity. Since it was first used, it has been criticized,” said Jonathan Geinapp, Associate Professor of both History and Law at Stanford University, in 2022
“The Electoral College [was chosen] not because it was the most desirable option, but because it was the least undesirable,” he explained. “The leading alternatives – legislative selection by Congress or a national popular vote – were met with powerful objections.”
For a quick civics refresher: when you cast your vote in a US presidential election, your ballot is actually used to direct your state’s “electors” – a group of individuals loyal to state and national parties, the number of whom is decided more or less by your state’s population – on how to vote in the real election: the meeting of the Electoral College.
There are 538 of these electors, and so 270 votes will win the Presidency. In almost every case, as one elector votes for a state, they all do – only in Maine and Nebraska can votes be split between candidates.
It may sound like an exercise in disenfranchisement, and it kind of is – but that’s by design. While there were certainly founders in favor of a national popular vote – James Madison in particular advocated for it, as did Gouverneur Morris and several delegates from smaller states – in general, the idea had little support.
“Delegates were adamant that there be an indirect way of electing the president,” Holzer wrote, “to provide a buffer against what Thomas Jefferson called ‘well-meaning, but uninformed people’.”
“Mason, for instance, suggested that allowing voters to pick the president would be akin to ‘refer(ring) a trial of colors to a blind man,” he noted.
That wasn’t the only motivation for the creation of an Electoral College, however. Even today, supporters of the system point to its ability to raise the profile of smaller states, and the same was true back in the 1700s – though with slightly less palatable biases: it “empower[ed] states where enslavement was legal,” explained William Field, a teaching professor in the Department of Political Science at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, and deputy director of the Center for Critical Intelligence Studies, earlier this month.
“While enslaved people could not vote, their numbers contributed to the number of electoral votes assigned to that state.”
Here’s the thing, though: in the 21st century, practically all of those reasons are null and void. Slavery is (almost) illegal in the US; the country is in the thrall of a seemingly unshakeable two-party system; and the electors themselves “now actually just serve no purpose,” Carolyn Dupont, a history professor at Eastern Kentucky University and author of Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College and Why It Matters Today, told CNN earlier this month.
“They don’t make a choice,” she pointed out; “they’re actually not allowed to make a choice, and that’s because state statutes require them to honor the wishes of the voters in their state.”
Meanwhile, thanks to the internet and wall-to-wall advertising and news coverage, unfamiliarity with candidates is hardly an issue anymore. “We have maybe the opposite problem now,” Dupont said. “We have too much information about national characters. So I think the reason that some of [the founders] didn’t like it, that reason has disappeared.”
Which raises the question…
Why does the Electoral College still exist?
Perhaps the Electoral College made sense in the 18th century. But with almost every reason for its creation either changed or nullified, is it still justifiable today?
Many would say no. “What this system does is allow the candidate who lost confidence of the American people to occupy the White House. And that seems very problematic to me,” pointed out Dupont.
“To me, what we need is a national popular vote where every vote is equal,” she said. “That’s really the problem with the Electoral College – it distorts our votes so that some weigh more than others. It’s institutionalized political inequality.”
Dupont is far from the first person to point this out. “Today, the vote of a citizen in Wyoming is four times as powerful as the vote of a citizen in Michigan. The vote of a citizen in Vermont is three times as powerful as a vote in Missouri,” wrote Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and a 2016 Democratic primary presidential candidate, in the wake of that year’s presidential election – one of only five (so far) in which the winner has been the candidate who received fewer votes nationally.
“This denies Americans the fundamental value of a representative democracy – equal citizenship,” Lessig argued.
It’s a compelling argument – but, some would say, a fundamental misunderstanding of the Electoral College’s value. Those who support it point to its supposed equalizing effect at an inter-state level: were the president to be decided via a popular vote, they point out, then California – a state with a population of 39 million – would have more sway than the 22 least-populated states combined. Why, then, would a presidential hopeful waste time courting, say, Nebraska?
“The Electoral College […] gives a slight edge to candidates with broad-based support in many states over those who rack up huge majorities in just a few large states,” argued Michael W. McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a former judge of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, in 2016. “That probably promotes a more national and less regional vision.”
There is, of course, a flaw with this position: “Not everybody in California votes the same, or even in LA,” countered Dupont. “This idea that one place, or even one or two places, is going to overpower the vote of the whole country, it really won’t happen, because those places are actually very diverse.”
“25 percent of Angelinos voted for Donald Trump,” she pointed out. “Donald Trump got more votes from California than any other state.”
Will the Electoral College always exist?
Regardless of any arguments for or against the Electoral College, there’s one very large, very practical issue standing in the way of its abolition: the Constitution.
“There are calls to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by a pure popular vote, but this would require amending the Constitution,” explained Field. And that would be… difficult, to say the least. “We have a built-in pro-Republican bias, since many of the small states, like Montana, are rural and ‘deep red’.”
“The small states like their outsized influence and the political bias that extra influence provides,” he said, “so getting their support would be hard.”
But reforming – or even outright abolishing – the Electoral College wasn’t always such a partisan issue. In fact, there was a vote in the House as recently as 1969 to ditch it – and it passed by an astonishing margin, with 83 percent of Representatives voting in support of the amendment.
“I find that astounding,” Dupont told CNN. “That there was that much agreement in the House and […] but it never got to a vote in the Senate because Strom Thurmond and two other Southern segregationists filibustered it.”
Indeed, in the centuries since its creation few things have united the US political spectrum more than dislike of the Electoral College. “There have been probably 1,000 or more constitutional amendments to change it or get rid of it filed since 1800,” wrote historian Alexander Keyssar in his book Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, noting that “at one time or another, serious criticism has been aimed at every distinctive feature of the institution.”
Meanwhile, most Americans are confused by the Electoral College – and no national opinion poll since the 1940s has shown a majority of Americans in favor of keeping the system. Even McConnell, in his defense of the institution, admitted that “almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch.”
Perhaps, then, there may be a future in which the US abolishes the Electoral College entirely. After all, every other democracy that created one has now thrown it away: “Colombia adopted an electoral college in 1821. Chile adopted one in 1828. Argentina adopted one in 1853 […] In Europe, Finland adopted an electoral college to elect its president in 1925, and France adopted an electoral college in 1958,” noted Holzer.
“Over time, however, these countries changed their minds,” he explained. “All of them abandoned their electoral colleges and switched to directly electing their presidents by votes of the people. Colombia did so in 1910, Chile in 1925, France in 1965, Finland in 1994, and Argentina in 1995 […] The U.S. is the only democratic presidential system left that still uses an electoral college.”
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