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In Defense of the Electoral College
It’s been a while since I wrote something of importance, but this election cycle has brought out the claws again from people wanting to get rid of the vestiges of America’s unique civic structure. I’d like to offer my two cents on why this should be avoided… while also admitting that since we abandoned gold-backed currency in 1971, two cents isn’t worth nearly as much as it used to be. Let’s get into it.
One Nation, Under God, Indivisi-whoops…
The United States is one of the few true success stories of people shedding their colonizing overlords in a fit of self-determination and building something to stand the test of time. Beginning as 13 individual colonies comprising land claimed by England, Spain and France (the three major world powers at the time), the fight for independence crystallized two central attitudes that determined the future of the United States: (1) the need for a central government to present a united front to the outside world while staving off international predators and (2) a desire to avoid imperially-minded leaders forcing a centrally planned culture and lifestyle on the recently-emancipated colonists. The writing and creation of the United States Constitution in 1789 highlighted these two divergent goals by creating a central, federal government and promptly slapping it in the iron shackles of the Bill of Rights — indicating what the Federal government had (should have) no authority over or to do, and installing the 9th and 10th amendments which explicitly remind us that (1) the Constitution is not an exegetical guide to the legal rights of the citizens and (2) if the Constitution does not explicitly give a power to the federal government, it is either reserved to the states or outright banned for the government completely.
The entire point of the US Constitution is to create a central government while maintaining the States’ rights to self-government and self-determination. As it stands, the intention of the United States is to be fifty individual political entities under the broad umbrella of a Federal authority whose primary responsibility is to allow the states to determine their own futures. This plays into everything from the bicameral Federal Legislature, the lack of regulatory powers enshrined in the Constitution and the seemingly random third amendment ban on quartering soldiers in private houses. At the heart of it, this was the ultimate cause of the Civil War — a state’s right to self-determination and governance. It is true that the issue that caused this split is slavery, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this article.
Size matters — but it isn’t the only thing
The bicameral legislature was one of several compromises that have been wildly misunderstood by modern Americans, as evidenced by the changes that have been forced on it. The discussion that happens today about the political power of, say, New York and California versus that of Wyoming and South Dakota is nothing new. Your original 13 colonies still included massive population dispersion between New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware, and an even more pronounced division between those who made their living off of their land (farmers, hunters, tradesmen) and those who made their living off of other people (shop owners, bankers, plumbers, artists, etc). This compromise first shows up in the creation of the Federal legislature between the House of Representatives and the Senate. Representatives were awarded to the states based on their populations and directly elected by the voters, while Senators were awarded 2 to a state and were elected by the State legislatures. As such, the House of Representatives is the voice of the voters, while the Senate is the voice of the State Governments. When you understand that split, certain other quirks become more reasonable — for example, spending bills at the Federal level have to originate in the House of Representatives because that was the reflected voice of the voting majority; contrarily, the Senate has the “advise and consent” role on Presidential appointees that the House does not, balancing the voice of the people with the voice of the state legislatures. What does this have to do with the Electoral College? Pretty much everything. The important takeaway here is that existence shouldn’t be neutralized by a lack of size, but the existence of a minority shouldn’t automatically invalidate the will of the majority. This design philosophy is geared towards the states resolving conflicts with their voices instead of their fists.
Uncle? Try Sugar Daddy Sam
Thrown into this mix is the need for a single, centralized figure to orchestrate the government and serve as the single figurehead for the political federation of 50 different, individual, unique states, as well as serving as a political counter to bad ideas. To quote Calvin Coolidge, “it is more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” Given that the Magna Carta served as a significant cultural influence on the US Constitution, you also have to take into account that the governors do so at the goodwill of the governed. With a federalist structure, it is important that the states (ie, those who are most directly governed by the presidency and the federal authority) have a voice in selecting the president. To say it more bluntly, modern Americans look at their state governments like they are middle management in the “American Corporation”, when the constitutional, Federal structure is actually geared to the President being the States’ ambassador to the global community and an arbiter between the states themselves. Thus, electors are awarded based the number of elected representatives they send to Washington DC — two for each senator, one for each member of the House of Representatives.
This structure lends emphasis to the material compromise made when the Constitution was first signed: large states have more representation commensurate with their larger populations, small states have a larger voice than they “deserve” because they are equal members of the Federal authority. What does this mean practically? Your state legislature (who actually selects the electors that get sent to the College) conducts an election to discover who the voters of that state wish to be President. The state then selects a slate of electors who attend the Electoral College who cast the state’s votes for President. This means that no matter how unified the voters¹ of California (currently about 28 million), Texas (18 million), Florida (14 million) or New York (11 million) may be in any given year, they can’t single-handedly decide an election. The Electoral College is supposed to ensure that the person who won the Presidency is the person who won a majority of the vote in a majority of places.
In addition to giving the states (as the directly-ruled) an inescapable voice in the election, this serves the accidental bonus of (1) making the election harder to “brute force” defraud by decentralizing it across the fifty political districts of the Federal Authority, (2) giving more credence to the winner of the election as someone with a mandate to run the country as opposed to simply being a Favorite Son of one particularly powerful faction and (3) taking the election out of the hands of the federal authority means the President has no civic standing to cancel the Presidential election — it is run by the individual states.
Much has been made about the Electoral College and it’s involvement in the Electoral process over the last decade, as the president lost the “national popular vote” in 2000 and 2016 but still became President. Almost all of those objections have the same core problem in that they misunderstand the Presidential election as a whole. Some examples should be instructive:
(1) The Electoral College is unfair because someone can lose the popular vote and still win the Presidency!
— The dubiously named “national popular vote” is the result of an election that never happened. “The election” is actually 50 different simultaneous elections administrated by the individual states. Remember, the compromise set out in the Constitution is supposed to balance larger populations against the existence of another state while still paying respect to both.
(2) The Electoral College is undemocratic because land doesn’t vote, people do.
— The Electoral College does not award electors on the basis of land size. Remembering that the elections are run by the individual states and not the federal authority, it is helpful to think of the Electoral College like an “area control” board game: the players (the candidates) get two points for winning each individual election and are awarded bonus points on the size of the electorate in that election.
(3) The Electoral College is outdated because the Founders never imagined what would happen to the size and dispersal of the population!
— This argument is fairly recent and just as illogical as the claim that the Second Amendment needs to be repealed because the weapons of the day were single shot muskets. The biggest problem is that it ignores the basic principle that the Electoral College functions on — forgetting that the states are supposed to be equal partners in the Federal authority while balancing power for the states that have the largest populations. Without the Electoral College, you essentially remove states like Wyoming from the electoral process because their populations are too small to make any sizable swings in the election results (a half-million people in a population of 350 million is nothing. 3 votes out of 538 has the potential to matter.)
The underlying assumption to all three of the above objections is the role of the Presidency as the main, driving force of governance. Much as you will hear about people claiming that the Supreme Court needs to be adjusted “to better reflect the views of the electorate”, the expectation does not match the Constitutional role of the office. For the most part, who is president isn’t supposed to matter that much to the every day, rank and file voter because the President’s policy choices (beyond, you know, starting and responding to wars) aren’t supposed to effect the average voter “that much”. If anything, the emphasis for average voters should be on their state government as it sets policy for things that affect everyday life. Rather than pinning (x)Gripe on the Federal Government and who happens to occupy the White House, I find that many more gripes would be more accurately leveled at the people who are insisting that the Federal Government take on far more than it is equipped to handle: ie, Education, Environmental Protection, Income Taxation, Speech laws, etc. Most, if not all of the most pressing issues facing the United States would be handled much more competently and in a manner that would make more citizens happier if they were allowed to be handled at the State level and allow the citizens to “vote with their feet”, as Milton Friedman would say. Is all of this to say that the biggest change I would implement to the US Civic culture is a restoration of Federalism? Maybe. But the moral that we continue to learn (courtesy of the United Nations) is that humans in large groups can only really get along with homogenous cultures or extreme authoritarianism. Part of America’s design philosophy was to encourage the development of those cultures with a basic understanding of “play nice” — and many people have made the mistake of assuming that that means they are all supposed to be the same.
–X
¹It should be noted, these numbers are not real, but are my rough guesstimation of the voting-eligible population based on “total population per worldpopulationreview.com”
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