LET THE PEOPLE PICK THE PRESIDENT

The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

By Jesse Wegman

It’s hard to imagine a political institution less suited to a 21st-century liberal democracy than the Electoral College. It arose from a convoluted compromise hammered out late in the Constitutional Convention, and the rise of political parties in the late 18th century and the spread of democratic ideals in the early 19th quickly undermined its rationales. If it didn’t exist, no one today would consider creating it.

But the Electoral College is worse than merely useless. Its primary function is to malapportion political power, and it does so — indeed, has always done so — with strikingly awful consequences. A state is entitled to a number of electors equal to its number of senators and representatives. Before the Civil War, the combination of the Electoral College and the Three-Fifths Clause, counting a slave as three-fifths of a person, gave the Slave Power outsize control in electing the president, with the consequence that antebellum presidents were almost always either slaveholders or at least friendly to their interests (the major exceptions were both named Adams). After the war, every person counted as a full person for apportionment purposes — but with the collapse of Reconstruction and the violent disfranchisement of African-Americans throughout the South, that increase in representation once again redounded only to the benefit of white male power-holders, a situation that was not largely rectified until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Because a state’s number of electors is based on total population, not actual voters, it gives the states no incentive to enfranchise new groups of people, or to make voting easier for those eligible. And because states want to maximize their influence in selecting the president, they also have a strong incentive to use a winner-take-all approach to awarding electors, which all but two states currently do. The result — as we’ve now seen twice in the last two decades — is that a popular vote loser can be an Electoral College winner.

In a liberal democracy, not everything need be decided by majority vote. But once something is put to a vote, it is hard to understand why the side getting fewer votes should win. And Americans have long understood themselves to be voting for their president, not for presidential electors. It is long past time to get rid of the Electoral College.