Why We Have Been Stuck with the Electoral College

 The Presidential election of 2024 is near upon us and we are once again wondering how our nation managed to stumble into the Electoral College as a means for selecting a President.  How could such a bizarre and complicated approach have been arrived at, and what did the Electoral College have to do with democracy?  In his book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?,

Alexander Keyssar provides an explanation for why it was chosen and why it has survived all these years even though everyone seems to agree that it was a dumb idea.

One must recall the constraints faced by those tasked with writing a constitution for the intended United States.  They had to come up with a document that would gain the approval of all the states while each state had its own desires and concerns.  Of most significance were the small states whose influence might be totally lost to those much more highly populated.  Also, the slave states had to be convinced that slavery would continue unhindered under any constitution.  In addition, each state was hesitant to give up too much of their power to a federal government.  If there was to be an executive branch led by a president, then the simplest approach would be for the members of the legislative branch to make the selection.  Keyssar tells the reader that this was the first plan considered and the one the convention returned to after every failure to find an alternative.  However, there were influential people who believed the two branches should be independent.  A second option that drew considerable interest was selection of the president by a national election.  Such a path would produce significant logistical difficulties, but none that could not be overcome.  However, the southern slave states were not in favor of any process in which their influence depended on the number of votes cast.  Much of their population consisted of nonvoting slaves.  The smaller states were bought off by creating an upper legislative body, the Senate, where all states had equal representation.  The slave states were bought off by allowing each slave to be counted as three-fifths of a resident.  The slaves would thus be included in the population used for allocating seats in the lower legislative body, the House. 

Discussions continued but time was running out.

“It was against this backdrop—months of indecision, disagreement, and ‘reiterated discussions’—that the weary delegates, at the end of August, finally turned the issue over to a committee on ‘postponed parts’…chaired by David Brearly of New Jersey.  In less than a week, that committee, which counted Madison and Morris among its members, returned with a proposal for the institutional configuration that, with a slight revision, would come to be called ‘the Electoral College.’  Each state would be entitled to a number of electors equivalent to its total membership in Congress…and the legislature of each state would determine the manner in which those electors would be chosen (giving state governments significant influence in the process while allowing for the possibility of a popular vote to choose electors.)”

“Indeed, as historian Jack Rakove has pointed out, the key to the outcome in the Convention was not that the Electoral College had great and unmistakable virtues but that it had fewer perceived disadvantages than the leading alternatives.  It was, in effect, a consensus second choice, made acceptable, in part, by the remarkably complex details that themselves constituted compromises among, or gestures towards, particular constituencies and convictions.”

“At heart, the architecture of the electoral system represented a compromise between those who favored a selection by Congress and those who insisted that such a process had fatal flaws.  In its composition, the Electoral college was (and is) a temporary replica of Congress populated by ‘electors’ (chosen by the states) who would assemble only once (in their home states) and who would have no ongoing dealings with the national government.  It was, in effect, a temporary legislature, an assembly that could not legislate and thus could not wield ongoing influence or be corrupted.  It also would disband after carrying out its one function.”

These electors were assumed to be selections of the best and brightest men who would make choices not tainted by partisan politics but rather only focused on what was best for the nation.  But with the states in control of the selection process, the electors quickly became mere tools of those in control of the state government.  And since there were multiple options for selecting electors, the exact process utilized was often the one that produced the greatest partisan advantage.  It was not long before the shortcomings of the system became obvious. 

“The first three presidential elections, conducted in accordance with the constitutional blueprint, proceeded fairly smoothly, although they revealed some wrinkles in the electoral process, suggesting a potential lack of alignment between the Constitution’s directives and the emerging practice of presidential politics.  The fourth contest between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, precipitated a severe and messy electoral crisis that was resolved in the House of Representatives only after prolonged public and behind-the-scenes drama.”

There were immediate calls for changes to the presidential election process.  Over the years, there would be hundreds of attempts to introduce changes that would make the process more consistent with the assumption that the United States was a democracy, but little was accomplished.  The Constitution made it too easy for minorities to stymy the will of the majority.  The original compromises made to protect the power of slave-states and that of low-population states provided benefits that are not likely to ever be given up.

“The proposal adopted by the Convention carried over into presidential selection the advantages that had been granted to small and slave states with respect to representation in Congress; in so doing, it gave both groups influence in presidential elections disproportionate to their free (or voting) populations.  This disproportionate power could affect the outcome of elections, as would soon become clear when electoral votes attributed to slaves provided Thomas Jefferson’s margin of victory over John Adams in 1800; it remained clear in 2000 when George W. Bush became president despite losing the popular vote, thanks to his having won most of the smallest states in the nation.”

“Another significant consequence of this design—unforeseen and probably unforeseeable at the time—was that it laid the groundwork for an alliance between small states and the South that would, in future decades and centuries, be a potential source of resistance to reforms of the electoral system.”

The three-fifths valuation of nonvoting slaves became a five-fifths advantage when Jim Crow took over after the Civil War increasing the extra representation of the former slave states relative to their voting population.

“As Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson observed in 1944, the ‘Southern States now have 25.2 percent of the nation’s vote in the Electoral College’ while casting ‘only 12 percent of the popular vote.’  This was an advantage that white southerners welcomed and fought to keep; they also knew that a national vote would create pressures to broaden the franchise in their states.  The design of the Electoral College was such that states did not lose any influence by imposing restrictions on the right to vote.”

We have now come to the point where the Republican Party is mainly composed of former slave states and low-population states.  Neither of which has ever seen any advantage to majority rule inherent in a democracy.  There is no future for that party in a democracy; therefore, democracy must be inhibited.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.