Graduating from the Electoral College
The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic institution that does not belong in our society. The odds are against our being able to rid ourselves of it, but the reasons are compelling enough to seriously consider reform.
With the elections now over, having avoided a possible repeat of the last presidential election, in which Gore won the popular vote but lost the election, discussion of the flaws and benefits of the Electoral College has again disappeared from popular media and most internet discussion sites. With respect to this issue, it would have been nice had Kerry won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, giving food for thought to both sides of the aisle. Alas, it appears that it will be at least four more years before pundits again discuss the Electoral College. Despite the fact that the rest of the world has passed on to other topics, it’s still worth hashing out the arguments and seeing its true value.There are a number of compelling reasons for scrapping the Electoral College, as expressed in a New York Times editorial and a better piece on Slate. In short, it’s undemocratic in three different ways: the presidential vote of one voting for the less-favored candidate in a “solid” state essentially does not count; the electoral votes are weighted towards small-population states, making some votes count more than others; and the institution itself is flawed– the electors could ignore popular opinion entirely, and elections can be thrown to the House. Add to these concerns the fact that the United States has evolved into a more tightly-integrated nation over the past two centuries, and we have good reason to reconsider our broken system.
Everyone of voting age in the U.S. is familiar with the futility of voting (for President) in most states. A vote in Texas for a Democratic President has all the value of a CNN QuickVote: it’s an interesting curiosity of no import. “Vote pairing” schemes seek to mitigate this inequity by facilitating handshake agreements: you vote for my candidate in a state where it matters, and I’ll vote for your (usually third-party) candidate in one where it doesn’t. The obvious incentive to cheat on the agreement aside, such schemes only seek to offer a solution to one particular scenario, and in no way address the larger problem at hand. It’s no wonder that voter turnout in the U.S. is so low, given that an individual’s vote for the highest office is often a throwaway.
Supporters of the Electoral College argue that a vote for a candidate in a state he cannot win is no more a throwaway than a vote for any losing candidate, anywhere. This is disingenuous. On the surface it’s an accurate argument: since we’re voting for slates of electors and not the President directly, a minority-party voter in a heavily “red” or “blue” state isn’t wasting his vote any more than anyone else who votes for losing candidate. There are obviously two problems with this, however. First, it’s a blatant attempt to dodge the point. The question is whether we should be voting for electors or directly for the President; stating that a vote isn’t technically wasted in the context of the electoral college system is meaningless. Second, in dodging the question, this critique completely misses the demographic underpinnings of the original argument. If a single individual voting Democratic in Texas (or Republican in California) were to move to Ohio or Florida, the same individual vote would have a far greater chance of affecting the outcome of the race. Thus, changing demographics can have a significant and undemocratic impact on the outcome of elections; a vote’s value is dependent on where it is cast.
The weighting used in the Electoral College system is derived from the way electors are assigned: each state gets one elector for each Senator and Representative in Congress. This assigns for a minimum of three electors for each state, regardless of population, and results in a bias towards smaller (population) states. A single electoral vote in Wyoming, for example, is representative of 167,080 people; the same single electoral vote in California represents 645,171 people. This system is deemed as necessary by some who argue that otherwise, a handful of cities alone would elect the President. While it is interesting to see such support for affirmative action from areas normally known for conservative values, what is most notable about this argument is that it is wrong. If one actually looks at any Presidential election in recent history, many urban areas have consistently voted Democratic, but six of the last twelve Presidential elections have gone to Republicans according to the popular vote. It’s obvious, then, that the urban vote isn’t by any means electing the President. This is because while the Democrats have a stronghold in urban areas in the Northeast, Republicans have an equal stronghold in rural areas. Repbublican partisans, however, would like that rural vote to count more than the urban vote.
This is political opportunism at the expense of Democracy. It could perhaps be better argued that since urban areas tend to subsidize rural areas and thus have a greater fiscal interest in the office of the President, Electoral votes should be weighted toward urban states, but such an argument would also undermine the basic principles of Democracy. Each individual in a Democracy should be given an equal voice, regardless of where that individual chooses to locate himself. A Rawlsian thought experiment bears this out: if you were to choose between weighting votes towards area A, area B, or not at all, and would then be placed at random in area A or B (with no option of migrating to the other area), how would you choose to distribute the votes? Clearly, the best option for any risk-averse individual in this world (one stripped of undemocratic political calculus) is to give each individual an equal voice.
In theory, there exists an even greater danger within the Electoral College system, one that has never yet been borne out in practice, but which is indicative of a fundamental flaw: faithless Electors. While several Electors have defied the voters in their state, none has yet tipped the balance of a Presidential election. The fact remains, however, that the Electoral College as it is used today is a hack of sorts– it mostly represents the will of the American people, yet it does not have to. It is possible that either through the direct vote of the Electoral College or due to “Electoral shedding,” an individual recieving 0% of the popular vote could become President. This scenario may be unlikely, it is difficult to deny that any system that allows this outcome is definitively undemocratic.
Proponents of the Electoral College, such as the Wall Street Journal offer a series of arguments on behalf of the system, which appear to be motivated more by partisanship than by honest reasoning. It’s worth reading the Journal’s argument, if only to understand why it’s wrong. The key elements to the argument are as follows:
1. It’s worked for this long; our founders probably got it right.
2. The system really isn’t undemocratic.
3. The majority probably wouldn’t rule under a direct popular election either.
4. The Electoral College tends to strengthen the presidency.
5. Popular voting would increase corruption.
To these, we can add a few other arguments that have been floated:
6. Smaller states would be ignored in campaigns.
7. The United States is a republic, not a democracy.
The first argument, which consists of a combination between an appeal to authority (our nation’s founders) and the idea that if we haven’t crashed yet, things must be going all right, is quite stupid. Any appeal to authority cannot apply in the case of the Electoral College, due to the fact that it already does not function in the way the founders intended. This is, of course, a good thing: the tightly-integrated United States we live in today has flourished in part because of the diminished importance of state boundaries. This, and the changed role of the Presidency, particularly under Jefferson and Jackson, provides good reason to reconsider our now outdated approach to electing a President. If we were still a nation in which people identified themselves more strongly with their state than with the nation (ie., seeing themselves as Floridians rather than Americans), perhaps having the states vote for President would still make sense. Instead, this appeal to our founders is like most of the others: a heartfelt and brain-dead glorification of the status quo.
Arguing that the electoral college has worked fairly well so far is equally flawed. The mere survival of our nation for 200-plus years is surely due to factors other than the Electoral College, and the fact that this flawed component has not managed to bring everything crashing down around us is no reason to keep it around. This reasoning would have us all napping on railroad tracks because we hadn’t been killed yet. In much the same way as a mattress is infinitely more comfortable than rail ties, a popular election would be more democratic than the current system, without even needing to address the potential threat posed by our current mode of operation.
The second argument, that the system is not undemocratic, is a classic example of intellectual dishonesty. To quote the Journal:
The rap against the Electoral College is that it’s undemocratic. As one recent newspaper editorial complained, “The majority does not rule.” Strictly speaking, that’s not true. The Constitution requires a majority of electors to choose a President; otherwise, the House decides, which hasn’t happened since 1824. True, the popular majority doesn’t rule, but only one Presidential candidate–Samuel Tilden, in the disputed election of 1876–has ever lost while exceeding 50% of the popular vote. [emphasis added]
Yes, if by “democracy,” we mean a system in which the will of the people is subordinate to the will of a small group that happens to but is not required to be chosen by the people, then yes, strictly speaking, the Electoral College is not undemocratic at all. The phrasing of the second part, noting that only Samuel Tilden ever lost with a strict majority, is a clever way of ignoring the plurality defeat of President Bush four years ago (and a similar situation in 1888), but should not wash with a serious reader.
The third argument flows smoothly from the second, if only in the baffling dishonesty behind the reasoning. The Journal asks the following question, one worthy of response:
If it’s an outrage against majority rule that President Bush was elected while receiving only 47.9% of the popular vote, would it be that much less so if Mr. Gore had won with 48.4%? And what about Bill Clinton, who mustered a mere 43% of the popular vote in 1992?
Yes, it is generally be much less outrageous when the candidate preferred by more people wins the election. One can understand where the concern comes from, that in an election by popular vote, a large field of candidates could theoretically result in a President being elected with only a small fraction of the population voting for him. There are two basic problems with this concern, however. In such a case, the Electoral College would not perform better and would likely perform worse, by throwing the election to the House, where the majority party would install the next President according to their whims. Further, this concern is based on the assumption that the President would be elected under a plurality vote, rather than using a runoff system or other, more advanced voting system. We’ll save the discussion of voting systems for another day, but it is worth one’s time to not make any assumptions about what would replace our flawed system when thinking about dismantling it.
Fourth, it is sometimes argued that the Electoral College somehow “strengthens” the mandate of a President elected by a slim margin or without a majority. This is questionable based on the experience of the past four years, with many individuals continually questioning the legitimacy of the Bush Presidency, regardless of what the Electoral College results said. If the majority of the nation wanted someone else to be President, that cannot translate in any rational mind into a mandate. Mandates come from the people, not from the Electors. Timothy Noah does a good job of making this point.
In fact, Timothy does a very good job with the fifth and sixth arguments as well, showing that corruption (and resultant recount battles) would not increase under a popular vote, and that most states would see more campaigning under a popular vote, not the concentration of campaigning in urban areas prophesied by some pundits.
The seventh argument is one that we’ve already addressed in two different ways. While our constitution as a federal republic is a fact, that’s all it is. It’s not a death pact, by any means; it’s something that we can change at any time. And given that our nation has grown and changed a lot in the past 200-odd years since its birth, now is as good a time as any to start making sure our way of doing things is as relevant and wise as ever.