Seven Reasons to Keep the Electoral College

It is a presidental election year so once again the Electoral College is under fire.  We explore the reasons to keep the college, and the true motivations behind those who wish to remove it.  

Transcript

Seven Reasons to Preserve the Electoral College 

June 2024

After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought.

Jeff Greenfield

I'm sorry I ever invented the Electoral College.

Al Gore

Nearly four years ago, I provided a podcast defending the Electoral College.  Given the proclivities of the left, in which institutions are only as good as their ability to produce that which serves leftist interests, opinions, and outcomes, the topic of abolition has risen its ugly head again.  Unless that is, the GOP wins the popular vote, then crickets.  

Whether it be packing the Supreme Court, adding additional states that are overwhelmingly progressive in outlook, or using the judiciary to wage “lawfare” against a presidential candidate, it seems all is fair as long as it accrues to power.  

Unintended consequences?  Never a thought.  It would not occur to these institutional devastators that GOP and Senate could add SCOTUS seats, that other states can be created (South Illinois, North New York, anyone), or that Gretchen Whitmer can be hauled into court over purportedly illegal COVID decisions.  It will be a game: “Whatever you do, I can do better,” all the way down to the destruction of the fabric of our government.  

In terms of the Electoral College, we now have an advocacy group, Abolish the Electoral College, that states, 

” We want to end our antiquated and unjust system of choosing our Nation’s President and Vice President through the electoral college system while working to fight back against extreme voter suppression measures and working to ensure that the fundamental right to vote is protected. We believe the Electoral College and these efforts to restrict the fundamental right to vote to limit our country from a fully participatory democracy and are counter to our belief that every vote matters and our elections should be free, fair, and accessible to every qualified citizen.”

In a 2024 Seattle Times editorial

Racism helped underpin this exclusive voting group, as Southern states were allowed to leverage their enslaved populations through the Three-Fifths Compromise and enhance their influence over the Electoral College vote. Party politics compromised this system soon after its implementation. Electors voted under the heavy influence of the dominant political party in each state. Now, as long as there is no Trumpian attempt to corrupt their vote, today’s electors endorse the candidate who prevails in each state.

That raises the question: Why do we need an Electoral College? The answer is we don’t; more to the point, our Republic cannot afford it.”  

William Becker, writing for the Hill in 2022, makes several points.

• The Constitution’s framers wanted to thwart direct Democracy because they were uncomfortable giving so much power to the people.
• The Electoral College was meant to protect the influence of slave states.
• It gives “disproportionate voting power” to citizens of smaller states. For example, Wyoming’s voters have four times the influence of California’s.
• The Electoral College marginalizes millions of voters in solid red and blue states.
• It’s theoretically possible a candidate could win the presidency with only about 23 percent of the national popular vote.
• To collect electoral votes, presidential candidates don’t pay much attention to states with smaller populations.
•  

And if you noted the default to DEI here, that is not a coincidence.  Since the Civil Rights movement, the charge of racism has been used as a moral cudgel on the part of the left to the point where a guy like Mitt Romney is accused of malfeasance. So we get Donald Trump, who does not care.  

These opinions acknowledge the challenges of going to a viral vote outcome. As a 2019 editorial in the Washington Post noted, “There are worries that direct election might encourage regionalism or third parties at the extremes of political discourse. Any switch to a national system would rightly trigger debates over runoffs or ranked-choice voting to ensure majority rule. And we recognize that the constitutional amendment that would be required isn’t about to happen.” But it concludes with, “Americans are not going to be satisfied with leaders who a majority of voters has rejected, and they’re right not to be. It’s time to let the majority rule.” As we shall see, the Post seems to have missed the differentiation between a majority of votes, and the MOST votes, but I am getting ahead of myself.  

This was not the first time the electoral and popular votes split. Previous presidents who were elected with a majority of the electoral vote include John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and most recently Donald J. Trump in 2016.  

The Post’s contention does have support.  According to a Gallup Poll on September 24, 2019, “Heading into the 2020 presidential election, three in five Americans favor amending the U.S. Constitution to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote system. This preference for electing the president based on who receives the most votes nationwide is driven by 89% of Democrats and 68% of independents. Far fewer Republicans, 23%, share this view, as 77% support keeping the current system in which the candidate with the most votes in the Electoral College wins the election.”  

The sentiment of giving the election to the one with the most votes directly from the citizens is understandable.  In most aspects of life, whether sports, business, or most political elections, the winner is almost always the person with the most significant numbers. Golf is the exception, but golf is excellent, infuriating, and irritating, so that can be dismissed. It was this concept of balancing the choice of the citizens versus the sanctity and liberty of each citizen as an individual and as many of a particular state that was something the founders wrestled with at the inception of the Republic.  

Before 1776, American colonists were citizens of the English King, whose government was run not by a popularly elected magistrate but through a parliament. Up until this day, Rishi Sunak is not the guy with the most votes; rather, his party, which had the votes in parliament, chose the Prime Minister and the cabinet. Other European states, from Italy to Germany, are managed in this fashion, France being the exception.

At the inception of the Electoral College in the late 1700s, most of the world was still ruled by monarchs who owed their positions to their accident of birth. These monarchs, in turn, chose their chief ministers.  

In an article for History.com by Dave Roos, the author notes, “At the time of the Philadelphia convention, no other country in the world directly elected its chief executive, so the delegates were wading into uncharted territory. Further complicating the task was a deep-rooted distrust of executive power. After all, the fledgling nation had just fought out from under a tyrannical king and overreaching colonial governors. They didn’t want another despot on their hands.” 

Roos adds, “Another camp was dead set against letting the people elect the president by a straight popular vote:

1. They thought 18th-century voters needed more resources to be fully informed about the candidates, especially in rural outposts.
2. They feared a headstrong “democratic mob” steering the country astray.
3. A populist president appealing directly to the people could command dangerous power.”

Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” to cast the presidency’s ballots.

However, the argument would go that this is not the 18th century but the 21st, and we can look to a more enlightened age. It is a little rich for those who denigrate Trump with labels such as authoritarian or tyrant are now rejecting a system designed to prevent just that type of one-person rule. However, because the one vote, one person concept is prevalent, it is time for a full-throated defense of a system that has worked better than any other in history. 

The Electoral College has served the nation well for 58 peaceful and non-peaceful power transfers. There are distinct advantages to continuing the system in the future. Here are seven reasons to keep it. 

Reason #1: Love recounts and election ambiguity? Then you will love a popular election.

In 2000, the country endured over a month of ambiguity concerning the election’s validity in a single state, Florida. It was just a few counties within Florida, but the president’s election came down to about 500 votes. In 2020, mainly at the behest of President Trump and some of his less scrupulous supporters, we have had challenges in about 5-6 states, including battlegrounds Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. The Democrats love to say that Hillary “won” by 3 million votes cast out of a total of 129 million. These numbers seem broad, but the percentage is slightly over 2% of the entire group. The Biden margin is more considerable, nearing a six million vote margin comprising a 3% gap. 

But what if a litigiously enterprising soul such as Donald Trump challenges this? And let us not fool ourselves; Democrats contested the 1980 and 2000 elections and even claimed that 2016 was “illegitimate.” That means the loser needs to flip only a margin of 2%. Where? Everywhere.  

Forget five or even ten states. We would be recounting in all fifty states. This would not be a few weeks or even a month. Lawsuits across 50 states, or even a more significant number of counties, would be unending. Do you think Trump’s or Gore’s actions inhibited the transition to the next administration? No one would be available to administer the oath of office to the (possibly) incoming president because all SCOTUS members would be busy hearing election lawsuits. 

Karl Rove, writing for The Wall Street Journal in 2019, notes, “Imagine how many recounts there would be if the popular vote decided it all. Even safely Republican and solidly Democratic states would order recounts as each party tried adding to its national numbers. They’d have every reason to: James Garfield’s popular vote margin 1880 was only 1,898 ballots or 0.09% of the nationwide vote. John F. Kennedy won in 1960 by 0.17%, Grover Cleveland in 1884 by 0.57%, Richard Nixon in 1968 by 0.7%, James Polk in 1844 by 1.45%, and Jimmy Carter in 1976 by 2.06%. The winner had a healthy Electoral College margin in each of these six instances.”

George F Will, writing in 2016 for The Washington Post, states, “And the electoral vote system quarantines electoral disputes. Imagine the 1960 election under direct popular election: John F. Kennedy’s popular vote margin over Richard M. Nixon was 118,574. If all 68,838,219 popular votes had been poured into a single national bucket, there would have been powerful incentives to challenge the results in many of the nation’s 170,000 precincts.” Rove goes on to identify those contests where the eventual winner did not even have a majority of all votes, something prevalent when third party candidates enter the fray, “then consider the 19 contests—nearly one-third of all presidential races—in which the president came into office with less than 50% of the popular vote. Their substantial Electoral College victories provided mandates to govern.”  This is where the Post should have stated the person with the most votes instead of a “majority.” 

Consider the case of Bill Clinton. He only commanded 43% of the popular vote. His two opponents’ combined votes were substantially more significant. Yet Clinton had an overwhelming majority of the Electoral College. Is the Post suggesting that Clinton did not have the mandate to govern? And there was also the pesky election of 1860 in which the victor only received 40% of the vote. And though some extremists working at The New York Times wish to denigrate Abraham Lincoln, I doubt a majority of Americans are willing to go that far. I think that 40% got it right.

Reason #2: We are not “America.” We are the United States of America

There is France. There is Russia. There was a Czechoslovakia, but now there is the Czech Republic and a Slovakia. There is the United Kingdom, but the pieces of that union are England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. There is no “America” in a single-state sense. The compromises to achieve a union depended on a limited government that owed its legitimacy to the people. However, 13 mini-countries were brought together by a union at the inception. 

Some of the states’ differentiation aspects, such as New York’s focus on merchants and banking, were positive. Some were not, such as the existence of slavery, which was eliminated in 1865 in the Southern states. However, the point of having individual states, each with rules and regulations of their own, was to curb the power of a central government to rule over the people and drive decision-making to the local level as much as possible. Again, the protestations of progressives over Trump’s supposedly dictatorial ambitions are wind compared to their desires to eliminate the very limitations of government imposed by the founders to keep Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, or Donald Trump in check-literally in terms of checks and balances.  

We have a Senate for this reason. As the online Senate.gov page notes, “The framers of the Constitution created the United States Senate to protect the rights of individual states and safeguard minority opinion in a system of government designed to give greater power to the national government.”  

Writing for National Affairs, historian Allen Guelzo says, “Abolishing the Electoral College now might satisfy an irritated yearning for direct Democracy, but it would also mean dismantling federalism. After that, there would be no sense in having a Senate (which, after all, represents the interests of the states), and eventually, no sense in even having states, except as administrative departments of the central government.” Do Texans yearn to be treated with the same central authority as New Yorkers or Californians? 

Reason #3: Be careful what you wish for. Version 1: Republicans Ascendant

There is a thought among the democrats that they would automatically match the totals of the past elections. But no Republican candidate has seriously campaigned in California or New York in twenty years. The Democrats, however, have campaigned in typically red states such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia. As an opinion writer for The Washington Post, Charles Lane stated in September 2020, “This is partly because the Electoral College skews candidates’ campaigns, causing them to focus their mobilization efforts more on, say, rural Wisconsin than on populous Los Angeles, contrary to what they’d do in a direct election.” 

In states that are virtually one-party rule, such as California, there is an indirect suppression of Republican voters due to their understanding that their vote is nearly meaningless. But what would Donald Trump do in this state? What would a Central Valley rally in Fresno look like?  

A contention to this theory is that a state like California consistently skews for the Democrats despite a Democratic candidate not actively working in the state. Trump did not go there, nor did Clinton or Biden, except to pick up some big checks. But the Democrats do have plenty of people working in the state. It has been 14 years since a Republican was even competitive, and since that time, CA has had a supermajority of Democrats. What would happen if Republicans were to try in some of these states?

As David Harsanyi, a columnist for the Federalist, notes, “Running up the score in big states gives partisan activists fodder, but it is irrelevant. If Donald Trump ran for the national vote, he might have won it by spending all his time in California and New York talking about things that matter to Californians and New Yorkers.” 

In a post-2020 election article dated November 6 from NBC News, Carmen Sesin noted that “From the time President Donald Trump took office, he focused on the Latino vote in Florida, and according to figures coming out of the state, it paid off on Election Day, especially in Miami-Dade County, the most populous in the state. According to NBC News exit polls, around 55 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, while 30 percent of Puerto Ricans and 48 percent of “other Latinos” backed Trump. Trump won the coveted battleground state with 29 electoral votes. Trump drastically improved his support in Miami-Dade County, going from 333,999 votes in 2016 to at least 529,160 this year.” However, this article’s insight comes when the Democratic vote is examined, and like Trump, Biden and the Democrats also worked in Florida, but with a lesser outcome. “Biden, however, couldn’t grow Democratic support in the county. Clinton got 624,146 votes there in 2016, and with 95 percent of the vote tallied, Biden had 613,086.”

Florida is a battleground state, and Trump even has a residence there. But what would happen if Trump worked over California Latinos as assiduously as he focused on those within Florida?  

Reason #4: Be careful what you wish for Version 2: The Jackson Chronicles and Majoritarianism

Because of their track record of success in total votes, the Democrats feel that a popular vote would suit Democracy by being good for Democrats. They are joined in equating their needs with the needs of the country. Churchill famously stated in 1947, “Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that Democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried occasionally.” Sometimes, the benighted “American People” so breathlessly cited by politicians of every stripe get it wrong. James Buchanan won the popular vote. So did eugenicist Woodrow Wilson win the most votes in 1912 and a majority in 1916. But one of those who did not win the Electoral College but did win a plurality of votes was Andrew Jackson in the election of 1824. 

Jackson, not a quitter, then won outright in 1828 and proceeded to send tens of thousands of Native Americans to their doom in the Trail of Tears. Meanwhile, the Electoral College winner of 1824, John Quincy Adams, would be a champion of the abolition of slavery. We are not a Democracy but rather a Republic. We are a nation of limited government and checks and balances to prevent people from obtaining absolute power and becoming the threat that the Democrats perceive Trump to be. The Electoral College is part of that system meant to limit anyone’s ability, even when that power is a majority. As in the cases stated above, sometimes, but not always, majorities can get it very wrong.  

Jackson was the most popular president between Washington and Franklin Roosevelt. The majority had no issue that he was a slave owner, that he fought duals, that he wreaked havoc upon the Seminole nation, and perpetuated an abominable policy towards Native Americans. Heck, to some 1800s voters, these were virtues. But of course, that would never happen today, right? The people who elected Jackson were confident of their beliefs as the progressives and MAGA crowd are today. The difference is that true conservatives believe in government limitations as enlightened by the Electoral College and not just by Presidents. 

The Senate page states, “James Madison, paraphrasing Edmund Randolph, explained in his notes that the Senate’s role was “first to protect the people against their rulers [and] secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they might be led.”

Harsanyi adds, “The fact that the Electoral College doesn’t align with the “popular vote” isn’t alarming; it is the point. If the Electoral College synchronized with the outcome of the direct democratic national vote tally every election, it wouldn’t need to exist. It isn’t a loophole; it is a bulwark. The Electoral College exists to diffuse the very thing the Post claims is most beneficial: the “overbearing majority,” as James Madison put it. If majoritarianism is genuinely the best means of deciding an issue, then the Post would support a mere majority of states being able to overturn the First Amendment or choose abortion policy.”

And one simple change.  If COVID had not happened, it is possible that Donald Trump would have won the popular vote.  We are talking about a simple 3% swing without a once-in-a-century plague.  Now, how hot are Democrats in this scenario?  As much as President Sanders or Warren, Donald Trump is the reason for limited government and a bulwark against majoritarianism.  

Reason #5: Fractionalization

Gridlock! Polarization! Divisiveness! These are the catchwords of those on both sides of the political divide, though more shrill on the left, regarding government today. Because the founders believed in limited government, the ability to “get things done” was purposely made more difficult. These checks were meant to limit government, but not permanently.  However, consider what would happen without the Electoral College’s ability, which tends to drive all focus onto two parties. Guelzo and James Hulme, in a column for The Wall Street Journal, state, “Without the electoral college, there would be no effective brake on the number of “viable” presidential candidates. Abolish it, and it would not be difficult to imagine a scenario where, in a field of a dozen micro-candidates, the “winner” only needs 10 percent of the vote, and represents less than 5 percent of the electorate. And presidents elected with smaller and smaller pluralities will only aggravate the sense that an elected president is governing without a real electoral mandate.”  

Much is made of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. However, without an electoral college, Trump would hold a significant bloc of votes in a purely popular election. He could be a political force not in the Republican Party but a Trump Party all his own. With the Electoral College, third parties have traditionally struggled to gain traction; in 1992, Ross Perot garnered 19% of the popular vote and no electoral ones. Imagine Trump in the same scenario but with over 30% of the popular vote.  

Will adds, “Far from being an unchanged anachronism, frozen like a fly in 18th-century amber, the electoral college has evolved, shaping and shaped by the party system. American majorities are not spontaneous growths, like dandelions. They are built by a two-party system that assembles them by the Electoral College’s distribution incentive for geographical breadth in a coalition of states. So, the electoral college shapes the character of majorities by helping to generate those that are neither geographically nor ideologically narrow, and that depict, more than the popular vote does, national decisiveness.”

Reason #6: History

Two presidents, both Republicans, lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote in the latter part of the 19th century. Rutherford B. Hayes beat the popular Samuel Tilden in 1876, and Grover Cleveland, the only elected Democratic president between 1860 and 1912, was bested by Benjamin Harrison in 1888. In Tilden’s case, he never ran for president again. In Cleveland’s case, he ran for the third time, won the popular vote for the third time, and was elected in 1892, just in time to run his presidency into the buzzsaw of the Panic of 1893. Yet, as Karl Rove notes in a 2019 column for the Wall Street Journal, “Winning GOP candidates may have fallen short in the popular vote in 1876 and 1888 only because the black Republican vote in the South was being extinguished by violence.” This is why historical comparisons can be problematic.  It is one thing for Stacey Abrams to claim voter suppression, with no evidence in 2016 when these things can be checked and examined.  But for the post-Bellum South voting boards, counting votes for the Republicans was not only frowned upon; it could be mortally hazardous.

We have now added to this total of three with the elections in 2000 and 2016. However, in none of these cases did this tear the nation’s fabric so that the American people did not turn out to vote in subsequent elections. The election of 2020 is telling. Both candidates received the highest vote totals in United States history. The use of the Electoral College has not, nor will it, diminish our electoral system’s belief as long as the rules therein are followed. At this point, we are now up to a total of 5 out of 58 elections that have seen a split. That means a little under 92% of the polls align.  

The left also likes to cite the governmental decisions of other countries, especially the Nordic ones. But international comparisons undermine their case. “Most free nations don’t have democratic majority votes for their executives. Parliamentary systems, for example, are not national polls. Between 1935 and 2017, most British voters backed the party that formed a government on only two occasions. Voters do not even cast a ballot directly for the prime minister. In 2019, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “lost” the “popular vote.” By eliminating the Electoral College, we are far more likely to spark the creation of smaller parties that would keep presidents from gaining a majority. Of historical interest: Vladimir Putin was elected through a direct national poll.” Adds Harsanyi.  

Want to know genuine threats to our voting elections? Ballot harvesting, use of illegal votes, and outright fraud involved in mass mail-in voting. And finally, assuming the system is fair. The Electoral College system is the game. Perhaps the Democrats should spend more time connecting with those in the battleground states (coincidentally, many are in the Midwest) necessary to win elections, which they successively have in five of the last eight elections, than worrying about changing the system’s rules.  

Reason #7 – The Unknown

Recently, the state of CA raised the minimum wage. Business closures and mass layoffs occurred almost immediately as these primarily small businesses could no longer compete with the massive new labor costs.  The measure hurt the very people it was purportedly supposed to help.

This was both predicted and predictable.  I have provided a series of possible predictions above, but I have no history of the post-electoral College world.  All I have is the desire of Democrats to eliminate it because two presidential elections, 2000 and 2016, led to a GOP winner without a popular vote.  The fact that it was George W Bush, who many Dems said was the worst president of our lifetime until 2016, tells you all you need to know.  This is not about improvement in government or Democracy. It is a naked power grab, one that may come back to sting the ones currently desiring this measure, but one that may hurt the nation as a whole.