Has The Electoral College Outlived Its Usefulness?
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Ohio’s delegation to the Electoral College certify their votes in the Columbus statehouse in December 2004.
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Has the Electoral College Outlived Its Usefulness?
The Electoral College is a perennial debate topic
05 October 2007
Two scholars debate the pros and cons of the Electoral College, the system by which each state appoints electors who choose the U.S. president after the popular vote has been cast. Ross K. Baker makes the case for retaining the Electoral College as it was established by the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Baker is a professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Jamie Raskin presents the arguments for adapting the Electoral College system to ensure that election results reflect the national popular vote. Raskin is a Maryland state
senator and a professor of constitutional law at American University in Washington, D.C. He introduced legislation that made Maryland the first state in the country to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
PRO
The Electoral College: Still Useful in the 21st Century By Ross K. Baker
On the evening of November 7, 2000, the newly elected Democratic senator from the state of New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton, addressed a cheering crowd of supporters in Manhattan and vowed to go to Washington and work to abolish the “archaic and undemocratic” Electoral College that had failed to produce a clearcut winner in the presidential election.
No one thought of pointing out to her that the institution to which she had just been elected, the U.S. Senate, was both archaic (it was established in 1789) and undemocratic (each state, irrespective of its population, is represented by two senators). If we apply to the U.S. Constitution the standard that all of its provisions be modern and democratic, there in fact would not be much left of this very durable and successful plan of government.
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The U.S. Constitution is full of features that some critics would consider outmoded, including the system of federalism whereby the national government shares power with the 50 states. It would probably be more efficient for the United States to be run exclusively from the nation’s capital in Washington, D.C., but the men who wrote the Constitution did not think of efficiency as a priority. They valued liberty much more highly and felt it was safer to fragment political power. One feature of that fragmentation is that the national, or federal, government shares power with the states.
One important aspect of American federalism is the inclusion of the 50 states, as states, in the selection of the president. This system — the Electoral College — gives every state a number of electoral votes equivalent to the combined number of its members in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, where states receive seats proportionate to their population. The presidential candidate who is able to win the popular vote in a number of states whose electoral votes constitute a majority of all electoral votes (currently 270 out of 538) becomes president.
Critics of this system argue for the simplicity of direct election. You just count up the votes nationally, ignoring the vote totals in the individual states, and declare a winner. If the United States adopted such a system, candidates would have an incentive to campaign only in the most populous states and seek to get the largest number of votes in those places, ignoring states with smaller populations.
The Electoral College forces candidates to reach out beyond the large population centers and campaign in places that would be ignored in a direct election system. It would be possible, in theory at least, for candidates to campaign only in the 12 most populous states and win the presidency. That means that candidates would have every reason to ignore the other 38. But under the Electoral College system, it would be highly unlikely that any candidate could win enough electoral votes by campaigning only in the 12 most populous states. A Democratic presidential candidate could probably count on winning New York, California, and Massachusetts. And a Republican would likely win the electoral votes of Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. In order to win the minimum 270 electoral votes necessary to go to the White House, however, each would need to capture not only the larger socalled swing states — places such as Ohio and Florida where party strength is more evenly divided — but also states with smaller populations. Since all states are guaranteed at least three electoral votes, candidates cannot afford to neglect even these places.
The Electoral College also makes it much less likely that a strictly regional candidate will be elected, since no single region of the United States contains enough electoral votes to choose a president. Critics of the Electoral College system dwell strictly on the number of voters; defenders of the system point to the distribution of those votes and whether they are drawn from a broad crosssection of states and regions of the country.
Throughout American history, the Electoral College system also has made it more difficult for minor party or thirdparty candidates to be successful in presidential races. Some critics of the present system might point to this as a negative feature of U.S. politics, but the twoparty system has served the United States well. By imposing a degree of moderation on American politics, the twoparty system has been a major factor in the country’s stability. It discourages extremist movements, but, at the same time, if a minor party or candidate proposes ideas that prove popular with the voters, one of the major
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A Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice is sworn in at the Electoral College proceedings in Harrisburg in December 2004.
parties probably will adopt them. An extremist candidate might be able to win the popular vote and the electoral votes in a few states — as happened with Strom Thurmond and his segregationist States Rights party in the 1948 election — but would be unlikely to win the presidency. There is room for protest in American politics under the Electoral College system, but extremism is discouraged.
Furthermore, while political extremism is discouraged by the Electoral College system, racial and ethnic minority groups are actually empowered by it. Hispanics, for example, constitute only about 12 percent of the U.S. population and an even smaller share of the electorate. In a directelection system, their influence would be greatly reduced, but their numbers are large enough in some states to have considerable influence. In Arizona, which has tended to be a political swing state, the percentage of Hispanics is about 25 percent, or double the national average, giving this minority group much more political influence under the Electoral College system than it otherwise would have. Likewise, in a state such as Virginia, African Americans number almost 20 percent of the population and, thus, make the politics of that state much more competitive.
Finally, there is the larger question of the health of the federal system. The writers of the Constitution saw in the division of power between the national and state governments an important safeguard for individual freedoms, yet the trend over recent years has been for the federal government to assume more and more power in areas that traditionally have been the responsibility of the states. To diminish the influence of the states even further by abolishing the Electoral College would undercut one of the main pillars of a political system that has withstood the challenges that have faced it over 220 years of American history.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
CON
Let’s Use the Electoral College to Give the United States a National Popular Vote for President By Jamie Raskin
As Americans, it is in our character to promote democracy and sweeping political reform all over the world.
Back at home, we are more reticent. We call our election practices “democracy” without ever measuring them against our democratic principles, much less the best practices that have emerged in other nations.
This complacency is embarrassing in light of the fact that some of our current electoral practices reflect the nation’s beginnings in a far less democratic context.
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The most dramatic example is in how we choose our president, a convoluted process that turns all the major principles of democracy on their heads. Consider how the basic precepts of democracy are capsized in a U.S. presidential election:
• The majority rules — but not in our presidential elections. Majority rule is the heart of political democracy, but in the United States it is not the winner of the national popular vote who becomes president. It is the winner of the Electoral College, a system by which each state appoints a certain number of “electors” who then choose the president. In the muchpublicized election of 2000, Vice President Al Gore beat Governor George W. Bush by more than 500,000 votes in the national popular tally but lost in the Electoral College because of a lastminute, 537vote margin in Florida. Popularvote losers have prevailed in the Electoral College in three other elections, and there are many nearmiss elections in which a small shift of popular votes would have propelled popularvote losers to the White House.
• The people vote for their president — but not in the United States. Here, the people vote for the electors from states who then choose the president. Of course, most people believe that they are voting for the president.
• Every vote counts equally — but not in the weird arithmetic of the Electoral College, where a citizen’s vote in Delaware or North Dakota is mathematically worth far more (measured by the ratio of voters to the state’s electors) than a single vote in larger states like California or Texas or New York. But if you weight the votes by the likelihood that voters will actually have an impact on who wins a state’s electors, the arbitrariness changes and the disparities grow even more striking. For example, in 2004 the presidential election was settled by a 365vote difference in the state of New Mexico but by a 312,043vote difference in Utah, meaning that a voter in New Mexico was hundreds of times more likely to influence the appointment of electors than a voter in Utah.
• Every voter should have an equal incentive to vote — but in the United States we don’t. The vast majority of people live in states that are considered “safe” areas where the Republicans or Democrats have a presumptive lock on the state’s presidential electors. Twothirds of the states have thus become flyover territory as the candidates rush to the dwindling band of “swing” states. In the last two election cycles, the two parties spent 99 percent of their campaign resources on a mere 16 states and an astonishing 70 percent in five states. Most of us — including people living in Texas, New York, and California, three of the four largest states — are spectators to the real campaign that takes place in Florida and Ohio and a handful of other states. The bypassing of most of the country depresses turnout in the forgotten states. Voter turnout in the general election approaches 70 percent in swing states but hovers in the low50s in demoralized spectator states, driving our national turnout rates down to among the lowest on earth.
What can be done about the perverse dynamics of our presidential elections? Public opinion polls have long shown that upwards of 65 percent of Americans favor a direct national popular vote for president in which all of our votes count the same regardless of geography. People want the president to represent all Americans, not a patchwork of states stitched together through partisan manipulation. The puzzle has been how to reconcile the instinctive desire for a national popular election with the antique mechanics of the Electoral College, a vexed institution that Thomas Jefferson called “the most
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dangerous blot on our Constitution.”
But now the state of Maryland has taken a bold and historic step to show how we can use the Electoral College to get to a national popular vote for president. On April 10, 2007, Governor Martin O’Malley signed into law a plan to have Maryland enter and launch an interstate compact in which all member states agree to cast their Electoral College votes for the winner of the national popular vote. The agreement takes effect when it is enacted by a number of states representing a majority of electoral votes (270). The plan, which passed overwhelmingly in the Maryland Senate and House of Delegates, has passed in a dozen state legislative chambers already and in both chambers in California, Hawaii, and Illinois. It is being driven by the sense that our presidential elections depart dramatically from “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
The National Popular Vote plan rests on the powers that states have to create interstate compacts and to appoint electors. Article II, Section I, of the U.S. Constitution provides: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” This power has been deployed by legislatures in different ways. When the nation began, the legislatures mostly named electors directly. The Electoral College operated as a deliberative body and each elector voted his conscience. In 1800, for example, Maryland saw seven of its electors vote for Adams and four for Jefferson. When states began to award their electors in winnertakeall fashion based on a statewide popular vote, smaller states complained that this newfangled “unit” bloc voting diluted the power of small states (and they were right). They sued — and lost. In Delaware v. New York (1966), the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the challenge, emphasizing that the states’ power to award electors may be exercised in any manner they see fit. The state’s power is total, “plenary.”
Thus, from California to New Jersey, from Texas to Utah, our legislatures — led by the spectator states — can now unite and use their constitutional powers to give the United States something we have promoted for the rest of the world but never achieved at home: a truly national election for president based on principles of majority rule, one personone vote, and every vote counting equally. Such an election will revitalize our lethargic lowturnout democracy by energizing tens of millions of currently superfluous voters. It will also bring us into line with the way democracies all over the world elect their presidents.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov)
KEYWORDS: Ross K. Baker, Jamie Raskin, Electoral College, U.S. Senate, vote, president, U.S. Constitution, House of Delegates, American history, U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. politics
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