NOV 7, 2024 | OPINION | By Olivia Link
What the fuck is the electoral college, anyway?
I don’t believe there is a single soul alive who actually knows. You may be thinking to yourself, “I do know, I’m not like the others,” but after extensive research, I can confirm that you do not. Is it a genius, ground-breaking invention, the best thing since sliced bread? Proof of America’s superiority? Of our stupidity? Don’t worry, I did the work (and wasted my whole Sunday afternoon) so you don’t have to.
Here is my terrifying and mind-numbing takeaway: when you cast a ballot for President, you are not voting in a national election to pick your next leader. You are telling your state which candidate to vote for at the meeting of electors. Each state has a group of approved electors, the number of which is based on population, usually chosen by the party that won the popular vote in that state. The electors that are picked to vote do so — a majority of 270 electoral votes is needed to win the presidency.
The best part about this is that there is no national law mandating electors to follow the popular vote, nor are there substantial consequences for these so-called “faithless electors,” who cannot be prosecuted for failing to uphold the popular vote. Simply put, your vote does not matter directly, but it is a mere suggestion for your electors, who can decide whether they agree.
This brilliant stroke of political ingenuity is why some presidents lost the popular vote, sometimes by millions of ballots, but were nevertheless still elected (see the results of the 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 elections). Nothing could undermine American political legitimacy more; it is a horrifying comment on the state of our democracy that elections are unpredictable and potentially even random. So why do we do this?
Like all proper American things, racism is undeniably a key factor in the birth of the Electoral College. As if the eventual invention of poll taxes, literacy tests and gerrymandering weren’t enough to ensure that Black people had no voice, there is also everyone’s favorite Constitutional amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise!
By counting enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person, Southern states were able to inflate representation in Congress (and thus the Electoral College) without actually giving them rights: for instance, 500 enslaved Black Americans would have counted as 300 people in terms of representation even though they could not actually vote. An election during this time period gave additional electoral votes to Southern states, as the large numbers of enslaved people greatly increased national representation.
The notion of electing the president based on population was beneficial to slaveholders, many of whom were the very authors of the system (what a coincidence). The stain of white supremacy on the Electoral College did not end with the abolition of slavery, though: people who live in American colonies like Puerto Rico do not get any electoral votes either and, therefore, have no say over who will occupy the most powerful position in the country. This just means further disenfranchisement of people of color — sounds democratic, right?
You may be wondering: what about states’ rights? Besides being an angsty teenage white boy’s justification for the Civil War, this is an issue often raised in defense of the Electoral College. Doesn’t it protect smaller states and keep their votes from being drowned out by the Californians? In reality, research shows that it gives less populated states too much weight; for example, Wyoming has 5.18 electoral votes per million residents. Texas has 1.31 electoral votes per million residents, meaning that Texan voters have around one-fifth of the influence of Wyoming voters.
This seems to go against everything that direct elections and democracy stand for, where some groups of people have more voting power than others by mere chance of being born in less populated states. I am confident that Wyoming only has two escalators in the entire state. Are we really sure they deserve to play such an outsized role in electing the president?
I also call into question the idea that a national election should give special attention to certain states. A state’s size does not necessarily dictate its residents’ real political preferences like the Electoral College imagines it does. Furthermore, there is no logical reason to count the popular vote by state: why would it matter how people vote in Michigan versus how they vote in Kansas? Both states have diverse political enclaves that are only tied together by the arbitrary designations of borders and the false import given to this distinction by the electoral college system.
Now that we’ve debunked the dominant arguments, let’s consider some more reasonable ones. There is a rather unglamorous but much more likely explanation for why the Electoral College was created. Although many people still think of the Founding Fathers as brave champions of democracy, they were an elite group of wealthy property owners whose class interests may not have aligned with the rest of America. The idea of direct democracy was far too radical and threatening to them: why let the masses decide when they could instead pick more informed (richer, whiter) representatives to choose instead?
Many of our nation’s early leaders feared factions of the possibility that any political project deemed undesirable to elites could garner support from a majority of people. The electoral college provided a perfect way out of this conundrum — a facade of democracy and rule by the people that conceals a rather undemocratic political system.
The final nail in the coffin of direct elections was the limited communication and slower flow of information in the 18th century, which naturally made voting much more difficult. This technicality is another example of why the Constitution should not be read as the unchangeable, final word on all political issues — we live in a society, and, like it or not, it is not the same society as Hamilton’s anymore.
While most Americans support a switch to the popular vote to elect the president, our typical, bull-headed stubbornness shows that this support wanes when explicitly asked about amending the Constitution. There is some uniquely American reverence of founding documents and a deep-rooted fear that updating them would constitute a cardinal sin. Despite this, over 700 proposals to abolish or reform the Electoral College have been presented to Congress since its inception. Many public policy groups like the American Bar Association have advocated for change, as polling tells us that 69% of lawyers (nice) would prefer to eliminate it entirely. Whether you agree with them or not, that’s for you to decide.