The Electoral College worked as designed.

Great Debates
1

Subsequent to the 2000 Presidential election, there were calls by some of the “offended” to sponsor legislation to abolish the Electoral College. But, why fix it, if it ain’t broke? Rather than the election proving the Electoral College to be an antiquated institution that has outlived it’s usefulness, just the opposite has become manifest.

Despite Vice President Al Gore winning the popular vote by some 500,000 votes (Un-offical as all absentee ballots, especially military, were not counted) the Electoral College has worked as designed by the framers of the Constitution.

Contrary to popular opinion and repetitive platitudes extolling the virtues of democracy and “the will of the people”, The United States was founded on the principles of a republic, not a democracy. Specifically, Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution states, “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union, a republican form of government,…”.

James Madison, often referred to as the “father of the Constitution”, alluding to the dangers of unrestricted majority rule (democracy), stated, “In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.”

When forming the union, the “several states”, vigilant in protecting their sovereignty, created a central (federal) government that was to be constrained by a constitution. The powers of the federal government, as described by Madison, were “few and defined”. The states, on the other hand, were to retain most of their original sovereignty with powers described as “numerous and indefinite”.

When creating the federal legislature, the Founders decided on a bicameral (two-house) system, consisting of a lower house (the House of Representatives) and an upper house (the Senate). The members of the House of Representatives were to be apportioned according to each state’s population, while members of the Senate, as an added protection to states with small populations, were limited to the equal representation of two from each state.

Reinforcing the principles of a republic, the House of Representatives was the only legislative body that was to be elected by a direct vote of the people. The senators for each state, unlike today, were not elected by popular vote, but were appointed by each state’s legislature. As a concern for campaign finance reform, this might be a system that we should reconsider. Senatorial appointments would insulate a senator’s allegiance from campaign contributions.

In the matter of electing a President, the Framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College. The Electoral College was to serve two purposes.

First, the Electoral College would protect the integrity of the Presidency by limiting the influence of those who do not possess the faculties required to decipher the intricacies of a “butterfly ballot”.

As Alexander Hamilton put it, writing under the pseudonym, “Publius”, in Federalist Paper No. 68: “A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations…”.

George Mason referred to the proposition of the President being elected by a popular vote of the people at large as “an act that ought to be performed by those who know most of eminent characters and qualifications should be performed by those who know least.”

The second purpose of the Electoral College was to protect those states with small populations from the undue influence of states with large populations. This was accomplished by assigning each state a number of electors equal to the combined number of representatives and senators of that state.

While crowing over Vice President Gore’s winning the popular vote by a razor-thin margin after the media prematurely declared Gore the winner in Florida, which undoubtedly cost Bush votes, not only in Florida, but in the western states as well, partisan Democrats sway attention away from the fact that Governor Bush won 60% of the states. Breaking it down further, Governor Bush won 80% of the counties nationwide. And let us not forget, in 1996, then Vice President Al Gore presided over project Citizenship USA where the citizenship process was expidited for over one million immigrants, many unqualified for citizenship due to criminal records, for the purpose of bolstering the Democratic party base. In perspective, if just the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Fransisco and their surrounding counties were subtracted from the total count, George W. Bush would have won popular vote.

I wonder what percentage of localities across the nation are willing allow the political climate that reigns in Los Angeles and San Fransisco to reign nationwide. I suspect, not many.

No, the Electoral College is working just fine.

G. C. Collinsworth

2

Personally, I think a districting plan might be worth trying, rather than the all-or-nothing form in place now, but it’s not my country and I bring it up only for academic reasons.

3

I guess some of us just don’t get it, Raz. Some of us cling to the notion that the Electoral College was cobbled together as a device to manifest the will of the voters, rather than a sophistic bit of sleight of hand to contradict that will.

One cannot fail to notice that you depend so much on the opinions of Founders whose view of the general public was, to be charitable, elitist. Men who were determined to keep the government in the hands of the rich and powerful, as God intended. Myself, when it comes to Founders, I much prefer Tom Paine.

Your digression into the civic sins of the Democrats, in thier cynical and fiendish pursuit of power seems as if lifted straight from the political philosophy of Noonan and Coulter. No doubt you are already embarassed by such claptrap, and blush to see it mentioned. Let’s just tactfully draw a veil over such Bushwah, and pretend it never happened.

4

Do we fellow citizens in fact select these people? I was under the impression they were selected by a handful of the upper echelon of the respective parties from among the delegates that vote in the primaries. Inotherwords, the most mindless obedient sheep that will vote the way they’re instructed to insure no one would actually choose to follow their conscience. Am I wrong?

5

I’ve always found that discussions of the Electoral College get muddied up because people tend to talk about two very distinct issues as though they were one. One issue is the Electoral College itself - the elite few who are supposed to keep the hoi polloi in check. The other issue is the de facto winner-take-all arrangement by which they are chosen.

Which aspect are we debating here?

6

It’s important to remember the limitations of travel and communications in the 18th as opposed to the 21st century. When the Constitution was written, almost no one had timely “news.” Knowledge of a person in another state, let alone several states away, would be minimal. There was no way that the general popular vote could result in a valid election of the President. The original idea was that the E.C. members would indeed be locally well-respected men that the voters could trust to exercise their own good judgement in selecting the chief executive. Later they came to be trusted party members pledged to vote for a specific candidate.

Also, the Founding Fathers did not envision the President as being a really important position (as compared to Congress), but merely an executive pledged to administer and carry out Congress’s directives. They were also practically paranoid about the possibility of conspiracies, and quite jealous of the relative rights of the states. The E.C. was their answer, arrived at only after very lengthy debates of several other options.

A really good book on this topic is Carol Berkin’s A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution.

7

Does this strike anyone else as something of a bloodless coup for the one party system we have masquarading as a two party system? It certainly isn’t anything constututionally provided for. I’d be more inclined to send local judges devoid of declared party affiliation

8

If all the states aportioned electors per the vote in the electors’ district, with the two “senatorial” elctors going to the overall winner, it would be damn close to having the president simply elected by the popular vote. States are free to set that up however they wish, but:

  1. You’ll never get the large states to do this as they will lose too much clout

and

  1. You will never get the small states to give up the electoral concept itself as they will lose too much clout.

Sounds like a peaceful, coexisting stalemate to me. The brilliance of the constitution is that it balances so many counteracting forces and has produced one of the stablest countries the world has ever seen (the Civil War notwithstanding). Tinker with that masterpiece at your peril.

Having said that, how many times has the popular vote gone against the electoral one? Precious few. And you don’t know if those elections would have been the same anyway, as the candidates set their campaign strategy based on the rules in place at the time. If differenet rules werre in place, it could have produced a different popular vote result. We’ll never know.

9

I forgot to add:

Raz:

That’s got to be the best OP of yours that I’ve see so far: the highest fact-to-political-rant ratio yet. Please keep going in that direction.

10

Huh???
It certainly is constitutional. Read the whole thing plus the amendments. Local judges? Please. Many of them are mere political hacks. Just because someone has not declared a party affiliation does not mean they are not favorites of one party or another.

Of course if you think Ronald Reagan is JUST LIKE Jimmy Carter, who is JUST LIKE Richard Nixon, who is JUST LIKE Bill Clinton, who is JUST LIKE G.W. Bush (or his father), then yes, I guess it is a one party system.

11

I’ll go back and check. Last time I read it, I don’t recall it mentioning Democrats or Republicans, let alone that their parties were bestowed with the sole right of choosing our electors.

12

So start a new third party. What’s stopping you? Are ya lazy or something?

13

frithrah, all the parties choose electors for each state they’re running in, on the chance that they win the state. Just because the Republicans and Democrats win every state almost every time doesn’t indict the electoral college system for anything nefarious.

14

Thanks Spectrum. My point is that this is a bit different from having the state populace or state legeslature select a group of “individuals they feel can be trusted to wisely represent their interests”[paraphrased],
and having 2 different sets (or more) of individuals that are effectively owned by each party respectively with the winning party sending their particular group to do the voting. Neither of these groups can be trusted to use their conscience to vote in what they feel is in the best interest of their state. Only to blindly represent their party.

15

From my understanding, the group of electors chosen are from the party of the person that collected the most votes from that state. So they would be doing the will of the people for the most part. The phrase “what’s in the best interest of the state” is not very definitive. It could be different for each different person in that state. Who is to say what is best? So following the will of the people seems the most fair to me.

16

Imagine that the dot com boom lasted a little bit longer. Millions moved to CA and WA. The entire presidential election was decided by those two state and the platform was based on the needs of those two states. Bad New Bears for the rest of us.

17

First of all, the Electoral College doesn’t work as intended by the writers of the Constitution because those men tried desperately to avoid the evils of “faction”, which we today call political parties. By the same workings, the Senate has long since ceased to represent the collection of bright minds and well-respected men that it was originally intended to house. So it is silly to assert that the E.C. is working as intended, except in a very limited sense.

Having said that, the E.C. does still maintain the federal nature of our government. Contrary to what many have attempted, from both parties, we are not a single nation of people, but a collection of states who have organized together a unified political entity, and have handed to that polity control over a selection of issues which, since the 30’s, have swallowed virtually everything that can be controlled. But, in the end, it is states that a presidential candidate has to win the votes of, not people.

As for what states might be willing to change the system, one should note that two states do apportion electors according to congressional district; both are “small” states. But it isn’t the states that don’t want to change the system, it is the parties, who use the system to help maintain their dualistic control over federal government.

18

First off, it’s broke.
In the other current electoral college it has been made plain just how unfair it is. Over there would be a good place to start for anyone caring to dispute the actual facts of the matter. I have already demolished the alleged benefits of the districting plan as well as the myth that the electoral college discourages regional dominance.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the details of the 2000 election but I will point out that all of the official totals are in and have been for years. Not all the votes were counted it’s true but that doesn’t make the official totals unofficial. I would also like to point out the incongruity of complaining about uncounted military absentee ballots ( presumably Republican ) with the argument that George Bush would have won a majority if even more votes were left uncounted.

Moving on. America has never held a direct election for the presidency so we can’t know who would have won a particular election if we had. People don’t cast their ballot in a vacuum. Outside factors effect the vote. Under the electoral college a Democrat in Alabama might figure they have no chance of seeing there vote go to their preferred candidate so they might not bother to show up or perhaps do some Nadertrading with a Green Party supporter in a contested state or they may just feel the pressure to go with the flow in their state. The point is, a person’s voting strategy is based upon the voting system itself. We can’t look at the the numbers from the 2000 election and say that Al Gore got more votes so he would have won a direct election. We didn’t hold a popular vote in 2000 so we can’t know who would have won it.

That principle holds for elections in the past as well. It is incorrect to claim that only a few times has the electoral college prevented the more popular candidate from the White House. It would be hard to argue that Reagan wouldn’t have won anyway in 1984 but most elections aren’t landslides. For all we know the electoral college has enthroned the true majority candidate less than half the time.

I would also like to challenge the idea that there was any unified “intent of the Founders” for the electoral college. The manner of choosing a president was a bone that the Framers fought over from the beginning of June until early September. There were a plethora of plans. Hell, Elbridge Gerry offered a plethora all by himself. In the end the electoral college system won out over election by Congress but it a near thing. Given all of that disagreement and compromise I don’t see how it is possible to claim that a given principle was “The Founders’ Purpose” for the electoral college. And lets not forget that the system they worked out in 1787 was so flawed that it was deemed necessary to modify it with the 12th Amendment during Jefferson’s first term of office.

That is how it seems to me. Perhaps I am wrong but if so nothing posted here has forced me to rethink this. Determining Hamilton’s original intent from Federalist #68 doesn’t help because he assumed that the most able from among us would be left to their own wisdom to make the choice. Amusingly he also wrote that:
“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”

To clarify, I believe that it is unhelpful to discuss the electoral college in terms of the design of the Framers but I am not directly contradicting Razorsharp’s assertion that an elitist view of humanity and a desire to enhance the electoral power of the small states were major reasons that we have the electoral system that we do. What I am objecting to is that these factors are presented as the 2 main purposes. We should remember that there were many purposes, some contradictory.

19

Sadly, it appears that the great minds here are among the tiny minority in this country who understand that it is NOT a popular vote for president. The general level of ignorance about the EC is one of the saddest features of the general American public’s ignorance of how our system of government actually works.

Otherwise, I dare not wade into this discussion. You folks are GOOD! I will sit back and admire and learn.

20

A few words of caution concerning the words of **DSYoungEsq **:

I would argue that the US hasn’t been a federal union since the ratification of the Constitution. Here is a repost of what I said on this topic in the other thread:

I also object to the easy identification of “faction” with modern political parties. The exact meaning of “faction” as used at the end of the 18th Century is a matter of some disputed by today’s historians but it certainly doesn’t refer to a mass party because no such animal existed back then. Jackson Turner Main ( Political Parties Before The Constitution ) put it this way:

Other historians have other views. In the book I am reading right now ( The American Counter Revolution: A Retreat From Liberty, 1783-1800 ) Larry E. Tise points out that the counterrevolutionaries ( the “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain” crowd ) claimed that those Americans continuing to proclaim the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality after the Revolution was won were dividing America into warring factions. It seems that what he is getting at is that the cries of “faction” were just one side calling their opponents partisan because they wouldn’t go along with the conservative trend. But perhaps that is just something I’m reading into it.