American elections all have one basic thing in common: The people cast their ballots, and the candidate getting the most votes wins. That practice holds in just about every race, from the U.S. Senate down to local school boards. There is, however, one notable exception: the presidency. It’s an exception that may have made sense 215 years ago, when the Constitution was ratified, but it’s one that has outlived its time.
As many Americans discovered to their dismay four years ago, the people don’t choose the president by a direct vote. They merely vote in statewide elections for delegates to the Electoral College, who cast ballots according to the results in their states.
What this means is that it’s entirely possible for a candidate to lose in the popular balloting and still win the election. That has happened in some elections, including 1876, 1888 and 2000. If Ohio had gone for John Kerry on Tuesday, it would have happened yet again.
It also means, as the campaign dramatized in the last two months, that small “swing” states get far more attention than they would if candidates actually went where the voters are. George Bush and John Kerry shunned Illinois, which was considered a lock for the Democrats, after winning their party nominations. But they came close to taking up residence in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. The nature of the game discourages candidates from fashioning broad appeals to the entire electorate and pushes them to pander to narrow regional interests.
The absence of a presidential campaign may not be a tragedy for those of us whose states are bypassed, given the level of campaign discourse this year. But it highlights another peculiarity of the Electoral College–the outsized weight it gives to voters in small states.
Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has representatives in Congress. So Wyoming, with barely half a million people, has three electoral votes, which is one per 167,000 people, while Illinois, with a population of 12.6 million, has 21 electoral votes, or one for every 600,000 people. The average Wyoming voter thus has more than three times the impact of the average Illinoisan.
Defenders of the Electoral College think it would be folly to tamper with the design of the framers. But this is one area where they had only a hazy idea how their creation would work.
The greater weight given to small states, for example, presumed that their residents would consistently have interests different from residents of large states. In fact, Texans have far less in common with New Yorkers than with the folks in Arkansas. There’s no conspicuous difference in the outlook of the big-state people who live in Rock Island, Ill., on the east bank of the Mississippi River, and the small-state residents of Davenport, Iowa, on the far shore.
James Madison, who perceived all this, actually favored direct popular election. But his colleagues, lacking a national mass media, feared voters would know very little about the candidates. They created the Electoral College, assuming that each state legislature, not the people, would choose electors. But today, we entrust that task to voters. And the voters have an abundance of means to inform themselves about the people running for president.
One modern fear is that direct election would lead to a splintering of the vote among several parties. But the biggest deterrent to small parties is the reluctance of most Americans to cast a ballot for someone who can’t win, and the Libertarians and Greens will face that same obstacle even under a new system. Besides, the danger looks greatly exaggerated. What causes partisan fractionalization in other countries is a parliamentary system of government, particularly if it’s combined with proportional representation–neither of which is in prospect here.
Direct popular election, keep in mind, is the universal norm in other American elections, yet there has been no proliferation of minor parties in races for governor, state representative or sheriff. If this approach works at the state and local level, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t work equally well in a national election.
The best argument in favor of the status quo is that the electoral college only rarely gives the presidency to the candidate who comes in second in the popular vote. Before 2000, the last time was 1888. In this view, the chief merit of the Electoral College is that it usually replicates the will of the people.
That’s true–but in that case, why use a proxy for the will of the people? Better to rely on the real thing, as expressed in the popular vote.
Another argument against a direct vote is that it would invite endless recounts nationwide, which would be even worse than the brouhaha in Florida four years ago. Not so. In Florida, the election hung on a few hundred votes, making a recount worth pursuing. Had the national popular vote been the deciding factor, though, the loser would have had to come up with more than half a million votes–making a recount anywhere almost certainly futile. In races for governor and senator, close races are not uncommon, but recounts are exceedingly rare.
Talk of eliminating the Electoral College collides with a political reality: There are enough small states whose voting strength would be diminished to block a constitutional amendment. So it may be unrealistic to hope for such a change. But there are changes that could be made to ameliorate the flaws of the current system. One, known as the District Plan, would give one electoral vote to the candidate winning each congressional district, with the statewide winner getting an additional two electoral votes. Another, the Proportional Plan, would divide each state’s electoral votes between the candidates in proportion to their share of the popular vote in the state as a whole.
Either option would induce candidates to contest for votes in states like Illinois and California that are now ignored because the statewide winner is not in doubt. They would also probably make the electoral vote a more accurate mirror of the popular vote.
But neither would infallibly prevent a candidate from losing the popular vote and gaining the White House. As Texas A&M University political scientist George C. Edwards III notes in his book “Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America,” Bush would have won in 2000 under the Proportional Plan, and there would have been an Electoral College deadlock under the District Plan–sending the election into the House of Representatives.
These options are better than nothing, but the best solution is to amend the Constitution. That is not something to be done for transient or trivial reasons. But the framers didn’t think their creation was beyond improvement, or they wouldn’t have provided for an amendment procedure. Many of the amendments adopted over the last two centuries–direct election of senators (who originally were chosen by state legislatures), voting rights for women, abolishing the poll tax, lowering the voting age to 18–have had the valuable effect of making our system of government more responsive to the will of the people. They were all worth doing.
When it comes to the central event of our national polity, it’s hard to justify a system whose only function is to periodically deny the American people the choice they have made at the ballot box. Abolishing the Electoral College would be a welcome step toward a more democratic democracy.
