The United States Electoral College, established in the original Constitution, has been a topic of heated debate from its inception. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, delegates evaluated various ways to elect leadership, including through popular vote, gubernatorial vote, legislative processes, and even a lottery system. Ultimately, an Electoral College of state-appointed electors was created as a compromise between a popular vote and congressional selection - designed to preserve states’ rights and allow citizens a vote, but with an “added safeguard of a group of knowledgeable electors with final say on who would ultimately lead the country.”
Along with the creation of the Electoral College, House of Representatives, and other population-based initiatives, came the difficult subject of state representation. Southern states, which had a significantly smaller free population than the large cities of the North, feared being governed by the will of the more populous northern states. They asserted that state populations should be counted to include all persons, both free and enslaved; this would greatly increase their number of electoral votes, as about 40% of the population in the South was enslaved at the time. Northern delegates argued that it was unfair to grant southern slaveowners additional representation in government on behalf of their slaves, who were not able to vote for themselves. Considering that, at the time, only white men who owned property were given the right to vote, this compromise represented a significant shift in representation between the North and the South. Convention delegates finally established the three-fifths compromise, an agreement where three of every five enslaved persons would count toward government representation.
The Electoral College remains the most popular subject of Constitutional reform, with more than 700 amendments proposed since its original ratification. Common criticisms of the Electoral College system include
The Electoral College does not represent everyone’s vote. Because most states use a winner-take-all approach to assigning electors, anyone who did not vote for the winning candidate in their state is not represented in the Electoral College. For example, the 5.9 million people who voted for Trump in California this year – 34% of the state’s votes – are effectively ignored in the Electoral College, as all 55 of California’s electoral votes are designated to Biden.
The system perpetuates systemic racism. In addition to its role as a “vestige of slavery” in assigning political power, the winner-take-all approach to dedicating electors affects non-white populations more negatively. More than half of America’s Black population, for example, lives in 15 states in the South; however, despite high turnout of Black voters, who predominantly vote Democratic, the Republican party won 12 of the Southern states in 2016 as the majority-white populations overpowered minority votes, giving 162 electoral votes to Trump and only 29 to Clinton. This effectively eliminates representation of southern Black voters in the Electoral College.
The elected president is not always the candidate who receives the most votes nationally. There have been five instances – two of which occurred within the last six elections – where a candidate won the presidency while losing the popular vote. These instances again demonstrate that the Electoral College system does not accurately reflect the will of voters.
Many electors are not technically required to vote for their designated candidate. Though most electors vote as expected based on their states’ popular vote, only 26 states and D.C. actually “bind” their electors to their designated candidate through oaths, fines, or other measures. There have been 15 “faithless electors” since 1948 – including seven on the 2016 presidential ballot. Faithless electors have never changed the outcome of a presidency, but that doesn’t mean they can’t (or won’t) in the future.
The current setup forces candidates to place a disproportionate amount of attention in swing states – and to ignore everyone else. Because many states are predictable in their popular vote (Delaware, for example, has been a reliably blue state since 1992), candidates must focus mainly on winning in non-guaranteed states to reach the required 270 electoral votes. And indeed they do; in the nine weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, 12 battleground states hosted 204 of the 212 Trump and Biden campaign events – and 33 states hosted no events for either candidate. Battleground state voters receive greater favor not just during elections, either; these states also receive 7% more federal grants and twice as many presidential disaster declarations than non-battleground states, for example.
So, why do we still use the electoral college system? According to Harvard Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar, amending or eliminating the Electoral College system remains a question of “a mix of politics, constitutional law, structural racism, and more.” Because the election process includes many different parts, it’s more difficult to reform any one section without affecting others. At the same time, reforming the entire process is a huge undertaking, with many opportunities for the reform to be stymied or killed by opposition. Furthermore, because each state determines how to allocate its electoral votes, says Keyssar, “there's almost invariably a state's rights resistance to any attempt to impose a national standard.” And finally, intense partisanship of the two major political parties makes attempts at reform a partisan issue – “political leaders not surprisingly start reviewing and evaluating potential reforms in terms of what will help their party or their faction, not in terms of what will be good for the country. […] Since the late 1970s, the Republican party has been largely convinced that the electoral college benefits its candidates, and thus Republicans have been utterly uninterested in anything that would reform it.”
While it may be difficult to amend the Electoral College or eliminate it altogether, some states are working toward new options, such as how they designate their electors. Two states – Maine and Nebraska – designate their electors according to each congressional district’s popular plurality in addition to the plurality winner of the full state. An initiative called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a bill that provides a state-based approach to designating electors based on the country-wide popular vote winner, rather than on a state-by-state basis. Fifteen states (including Delaware) and D.C. have signed on to the initiative so far, representing 196 electoral votes. The bill will go into effect when enacted in enough states to comprise the 270 electoral votes required for a presidential win.
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