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:
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