In every election in the United States, be it for Senator, Representative, Governor, state representative, mayor, city councilor, town meeting member, dogcatcher, or sixth-grade class president, the slot invariably goes to the person with the most votes. Except for one – the highest office in the land, thanks to the mechanism of the Electoral College.
The Electoral College exists both as a mechanism and as a body. As a mechanism, combined with the three-fifths compromise it was designed to leverage the slave-holding states better political position in the presidential election process. When the Constitution was drafted, white males able to vote in the northern states outnumbered those in the southern slave states by a ratio of three to two. The existing New England states and Pennsylvania had already made various inroads toward formal abolition, Massachusetts having abolished the practice altogether, and such sentiment was gaining traction in New York and New Jersey. (Vermont, soon to join the Union as the 14th state, had also abolished slavery.) Direct democracy would make it impossible for the states of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas on their own to bar from the Executive an abolitionist who might sign into law anti-slavery legislation. The electoral vote ratio, however, was a far more equitable seven to six (49 to 42), easing the ability of the southern slave states to keep an abolitionist President out of the Executive, especially given the original voting procedures made somewhat less byzantine by the Twelfth Amendment, and given that New York and New Jersey still had substantial slave populations thereby allowing for a delegate or two to defect to the southern cause. This, and the moratorium on legislation regarding slavery until 1808 in the original language of the Constitution, clearly point to a fear of abolitionist sympathies gaining political supremacy, and to the Electoral College as a device to alleviate that fear. The history of the American government to the Civil War could be written as this juggling act to keep the slave-holding states from being overwhelmed by abolitionist opposition.
The Thirteenth Amendment rendered that mechanism wholly superfluous, and yet it still abides. The unfair number of electoral votes given to slave-holding states made slave-owners seven of the first fifteen Presidents (George Washington ran unopposed), cost Andrew Jackson the 1824 election and probably cost John Quincy Adams the 1828 election. After the Civil War, the Electoral College kept Samuel Tilden in 1876, Grover Cleveland in 1888, and Al Gore in 2000 out of the White House, even though all won the popular vote. And now we arrive in 2016 at a President-elect Donald Trump, who lost the election to Hillary Clinton by more than 2.8 million votes.
In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton touches upon the justification for the Electoral College as a body. Much attention has been given to that short essay in recent weeks, but this line merits remark:
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption.
Hamilton explains the desire by the framers to guarantee an unassailable body to elect a President in order for that individual to be free from cabal, intrigue, and corruption. Hamilton expounds on precautions taken in the Constitution through the body of the Electoral College, and the election process, to ensure a President worthy of the office. There is no reason to doubt Hamilton’s explanation of the aims for creating the Electoral College when drafting the Constitution in the summer of 1787; after all, he was there.
The Atlantic Monthly, in only one of three endorsements for a presidential candidate in a history dating back to 1857, recommended Hillary Clinton this year. In the body of that endorsement, they argued as much against Trump as for Clinton. That esteemed publication declared Donald Trump to be not merely unfit for the presidency, but indeed “spectacularly unfit.” In his weeks as the President-Elect, he has done nothing to prove that assessment incorrect. If anything, he has demonstrated their assessment was well short of the mark; he is staggeringly and alarmingly unfit to be President. He has made unsubstantiated claims of a victory in the popular vote based on illegal ballots. He has made wholly inappropriate disparagements of a citizen of the United States who criticized him. He has outrageously suggested nullifying the citizenship of Americans if they do something he does not approve. He is apparently already cavalier with the duties of his office, and refuses to quickly and neatly divest himself of all business entanglements that would compromise his integrity as President. His cozying up to Putin’s Russia could easily raise suspicion of using the Office of the President for personal ends, the very reason President Nixon was forced to resign in 1974. He is the first President-elect in history with no previous public service experience. His assignments for Cabinet Secretaries and federal agency directorships are a menagerie of individuals lacking in qualifications or experience. On top of that, his picks seem to have agendas at cross-purposes with the mission of the very departments and agencies that they will head, and would likely undermine those departments and agencies rather than work to solve actual problems. This is all just the tip of the iceberg; what will happen when Mr. Trump and his Cabinet assume power?
The President needs to be the greatest and final defender of the Constitution; it is unlikely Mr. Trump will ever be that. Ms. Clinton not only won the election, but the nation deserves her as President instead of Mr. Trump. This is not a question of ideology. This is a question of simple competence. By every measure, Hillary Clinton is a vastly superior choice for President of the United States over Donald Trump in terms of acumen, temperament, and knowledge.
The mechanism of the Electoral College should have been eliminated in the aftermath of the Civil War, as part of the Reconstruction Amendments, or when the Senate was made open to the popular vote with the Seventeenth Amendment. It is a blight on American democracy, and its continuing effect on presidential elections is the dead hand of the past completely at odds with the proud history of this nation expanding the democratic franchise via the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Fourth Amendments.
The recent election provides an excellent opportunity for the body of the Electoral College to make amends for the ills the mechanism has visited upon this nation. Regardless of any state laws regarding faithless electors, the body of the Electoral College cannot be faithless if it executes its only reason for existence, to keep an individual unworthy of the Presidency from ascending to the office. The needs of the nation outweigh considerations from any individual state. Secretary Clinton won the popular vote by a solid margin. The American people have spoken. On December 19, please heed that voice and elect Hillary Clinton President of the United States with all due dispatch.
