The Electoral College is unfair. The Electoral College is outdated. The Electoral College is undemocratic. All true. But the Electoral College is not going away.
On November 3, the United States had 51 different Presidential elections, one in each state and Washington DC. Except in Maine and Nebraska, whoever won one of the mini-elections, got all that states electoral votes with 270 out of 538 required to be elected President. As of this writing, most reports agree that Joe Biden was elected with 306 electoral votes and over 75 million popular votes, about 5 million more than Donald Trump.
But the popular vote and the electoral vote don’t have to go the same way. In 2000 George W. Bush and in 2016 Donald Trump had more electoral votes even though fewer people voted for them. The reason is that Bush and Trump won some states narrowly while their Democratic Party opponents won their states by wider margins. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 29 electoral votes from New York State, which she won by a margin of 1.7 million votes. Donald Trump received 29 electoral votes from Florida, which he won by 113,000 votes. Clinton had 1.6 million more votes in the two states, but both candidates got the same number of electoral vote.
Now that the votes are cast, Joe Biden in the projected winner but not the official President-elect. According to federal law, state recounts and court challenges must be completed by December 8. On Monday, December 14, electors, members of the Electoral College chosen on November 3, meet in each state and cast their ballots for president and vice president. Their vote tally must be forwarded to the United States Senate by December 23. On January 6, 2021, a joint session of Congress formally meets to “count” the electoral votes and declare a President-elect who is then inaugurated as President on January 20, 2021. This is the calendar of events unless Donald Trump, who has so far refused to concede the election, is somehow able to disrupt the process in an effort to prevent his defeat and removal from office.
Two questions that need to be addressed are why does the United States have this system in the first place and why don’t we get rid of it.
Why does the United States have electoral votes and an Electoral College?
There are basically two parts to the answer. The authors of the Constitution did not believe in democracy, in fact they feared majority rule, and endorsed slavery.
In the original states, the franchise was limited to white men who owned property. From his letters, we know that George Washington believed in government by “the better kind of people” because “mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.” According to Washington, “Experience has taught us that men will not adopt, and carry into execution, measures the best calculated for their own good, without the intervention of coercive power.” (The Writings of George Washington, ed., John C. Fitzpartrick, 1939). The election of the President by a direct popular vote would put pressure on state governments to expand who could vote and lesson the influence of the “better kind of people.”
In the Federalist Papers, James Madison opposed majority rule because “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Madison believed “A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischief of factions. A republic promises the cure for which we are seeking.” Alexander Hamilton of Broadway fame believed that an Electoral College, populated by “men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station” would ensure “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.”
The original Constitution of the United States never mentioned slavery, but protecting the institution of slavery and balancing the competing interests of different sections of the country, were major sticking points at the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia and drew up the document in 1787. One of the Convention’s key decisions was the 3/5th Compromise. The enslavement of African Americans, designated as “other Persons” in the Constitution, was at the core of the social and economic system of the South but was of diminishing importance in New England and the Middle States. The South wanted enslaved Africans counted as population when assigning Congressional representation and electoral votes, but the North believed this would give the Slavocracy too much power in the new government. So the South could protect slavery without overwhelming the government, the founders agreed to count enslaved Africans as 3/5 of a person when assigning state voting power. Partly as a result of the 3/5 Compromise, five of the first seven Presidents were slaveholders.
Why doesn’t the United States abandon an outdated and unfair Presidential election system?
Eliminating the Electoral College and shifting to the direct election of Presidents would require a Constitutional Amendment approved by two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states. This is not going to happen for multiple reasons. It would shift national attention and campaign dollars away from largely white rural areas to largely minority urban areas where there are a lot more votes to claim. It would increase minority influence in government and divert federal subsidies from the farmland to the cities. Looking at the racial divide in the United States in the 2016 and 2020 elections, white rural Republican voters would never support an amendment to eliminate the Electoral College and reduce their political clout.
Seventeen NO votes by states can block a Constitutional Amendment. Five solid Republican leaning states, Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming each has 3 electoral votes. These five states, with a total population of 4,025,803 have fifteen electoral votes, more electoral votes than Democratic leaning New Jersey (14) with a population of 8,882,190, Virginia (13) with a population of 8,535,519, and the State of Washington (12) with a population of 7,614893. Other low population “Red States” include: Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, Kansas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Alabama, and South Carolina. These twelve states combined have a population of approximately 39 million people. That means seventeen states representing 43 million people, the same as the population of California and Oregon combined, can veto a Constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College.
These seventeen states currently have a combined 77 electoral votes, 16 more than California and Oregon. In order for a Constitutional Amendment to pass, small Republican states that benefit from the current system would have to approve it, and that is not going to happen.
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