Wednesday, November 9, 2016

The Electoral College

In the reaction to last night’s presidential election, I’ve seen a number of derogatory postings about the “archaic” Electoral College and how the “will of the people” is being thwarted. This same topic comes up during many presidential elections. But I think that many of the comments are from people who do not understand why this process was selected by those who wrote our Constitution and why it was designed the way that it is.

Article 2 of the Constitution, in addition to other things about the President, states, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” This was modified by the 23rd Amendment which also gave electoral votes to the District of Columbia in the same proportion as the states. For this reason there are 538 Electors – one each for the 435 members of the House of Representative, one each for the 100 Senators, and three for the District of Columbia (the equivalent of two Senate seats and one House seat which it would have had if it were a state).

There are other parts of the Constitution which are also involved, the main ones, in addition to the 23rd mentioned above, being the 12th Amendment which better defines the process and indicates what to do if there are ties (which is why they mentioned last night that if Donald Trump received 269 (exactly 50%) that he would then be the winner because the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives). There are also restrictions on who may be an elector, how the electors are chosen, etc. The 12th Amendment also changed the method of voting to being just votes for President with the person taking 2nd place becoming the Vice-President (which was how it was done originally) to voting the two positions separately. But these are not pertinent to why I am writing this.

The reason why people express their “hate” of this system/process (and I don’t think that hate is too strong a word based on some of the postings that I have seen) is that they want to results of the election to mirror the popular vote. But the fact that it does not always do so is one of the geniuses of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers who wrote it.

While it’s true that 220+ years ago there was certainly a convenience factor – a state could appoint their electors who would then travel (often by horseback) to a central location where the final “election” would take place, there is a lot more involved than that. After all, they could have chosen a proportional allocation so that each state could have electors in proportion to their population, or even carried a signed paper indicating the results in that state. But the Electoral College system was designed to mirror the bicameral nature of our legislature.

In many countries, there is only a single legislative body. But the Founding Fathers wanted to have a balance between state and federal interests. One article put it very succinctly that they “sought to reconcile differing state and federal interest, provide a degree of popular participation in the election, give the less populous states some additional leverage in the process by providing ‘senatorial’ electors, preserve the presidency as independent of Congress, and generally insulate the election process from political manipulation.”

It is this desire to give some degree of leverage to the states that gives rise to our system of having both a House of Representative and a Senate (both of which have to agree in order to pass legislation) and also creates the difference between purely personal votes and the allocation of the electors. The allocation is “skewed” in two ways.

First, although the House of Representatives (and the corresponding electors) has members that are proportional to the population of the state, the Senate (and those corresponding electors) are even distributed to each state (two per state). This gives smaller states much more influence that the larger states. So a small state which has a very small population has not just a single Elector, but has a minimum of three Electors. This also means that a presidential candidate can’t just spend all his/her time speaking to the major urban areas as that’s where the population is, but must give some attention to even the smaller states as they have more “Electors per person” than the larger states. Without this provision the whole election process would have the candidates spending all their time in the cities and ignoring all the rest of the country.

Secondly, most states appoint their Electors on a “winner take all” basis. This also has the effect of requiring candidates to address the broader audience instead of just concentrating their efforts in the urban centers.

It should be noted that there have been changes in the election process over the years. In addition to the above mentioned 12th and 23rd Amendment, in the early years of our country the electors in many states were often chosen by the State House and State Senate and there were no Presidential elections at all. Now all states have a direct elections for President and Vice-President and the actual selection of Electors, etc. is almost a hidden part of the process.

So, while it may a bit confusing to some, and the discrepancy of results between the popular vote and the Electoral College results sometimes generates a certain amount of angst, if one has any appreciation for the wisdom of having both a House of Representative AND a Senate, then one should also appreciate the wisdom in having an Electoral College that also strives to maintain a balance between popular votes and state’s rights.

References:


No comments:

Post a Comment