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The Electoral College and its Consequences

Henry Russell

Political Science Department, St. Mary’s College of Maryland

201-01: American Politics

Professor Matthew Burger

December 3, 2023
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There has never been an institution more hotly debated in American politics than

the Electoral College. Every election cycle, it is debated if it should be gotten rid of or

not. Yet, it has survived since the first days of the Republic. The Founders created this

system as a compromise between direct election by the people and election by the

members of Congress. There were evils on both sides of the argument. If members of

Congress were the ones that elected the President, then the powers between the

legislative and executive branches would not be separate. Yet if the President was

elected by popular vote, it could easily become an example of the tyranny of the

majority. If the President was elected through a populist mob, then they would hold a

threateningly large amount of power. So their compromise was for the states to elect a

group of electors proportional to the population to elect the President. That way, it was

not directly elected by the people but still not picked by top officials. It seemed like a

good compromise, yet throughout American history, there have been five instances

where a candidate won the electoral college but not the popular vote. This is because a

candidate only has to win 51% of the vote and they get all the electoral points. Thus,

creating a situation where the other 49% of vote does not count for anything.

Unsurprisingly, because of this, there have been many calls for the electoral college to

either be reformed or abolished. This would be replaced by something that more

accurately reflects the will of the voters. The Electoral College does not enhance

democracy and its institutions in the US because not everyone’s vote matters. If almost

half of a state's population vote does not count for anything, then that is not democratic.

The Electoral College is undemocratic because it does not represent the will of

the majority. There are many biases that lie within its system. One bias that lies within it
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is based on race due to slavery. When the framers were discussing how to elect the

President, the delegates from the southern states did not support a popular vote

because a third of their population was enslaved, thus decreasing the number of votes

overall in the South (Cordrington). They instead favored an indirect way of electing the

President to overcome this hurdle. Today, the Electoral College diffuses the black vote

in southern states with a high population of African- Americans. Over the past four

decades, these southern states have been reliably Republican while black votere vote

democratic (Codrington). These black voters have never been able to have a proper say

in the Presidential race.

Another reason the Electoral College is unfair is that the candidates disregard

over half of the population to only focus on a few states they need to win. Candidates

only focus on swing states, they do not campaign anywhere else because they know

how those states will end up voting. In this system, three-quarters of the population

lives in states where candidates do not campaign (Codrington). Defenders of it will say

that it allows the candidates to focus on large parts of the country. However, in a popular

election scenario, it is highly unlikely that voters will be disregarded. This is because a

vote from someone in Montana will be equal to someone's vote from California. The

electoral college allows for the minority voice to be more important than the majority

because a candidate could lose the popular vote but not the election.

Even though there is significant evidence to support the claim that the Electoral

College is undemocratic, there are still people who defend it. One of the reasons is that

if one were to look at the data, there is very little bias in it at all. The bias that is being

discussed is that there is a Republican advantage in it. In the election of 2000, without
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the two additional points for senatorial seats, Al Gore would have won (Grofman, Feld).

If the Electoral College were to be replaced with a popular vote, those candidates would

only focus on the locations with the biggest populations (Grofman, Feld). For example, a

candidate might focus on campaigning in large cities on the coasts because that is

where most Americans live, leaving the middle of the country alone. This would not be

democratic at all. Adding on to this, the Electoral College reinforces two-partyism

because a third-party candidate would not stand a chance in the race. However, if there

were to be a popular vote for President, then third-party candidates would be more likely

to run. This could force the House to elect a President if the election is too close. These

third-party candidates could use their running as a way to blackmail major parties to

accept some extremist point of view so they could get enough votes to win. As

explained, even though the Electoral College has bad qualities, it also has some good

design ideas to stabilize the government.

The Constitutional Convention in 1787 featured some of the greatest thinkers in

American history; James Madison, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. These

delegates did not trust man's ability to use power wisely (Turner). To expand on this,

Alexander Hamilton wrote “Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious”. Clearly, the

delegates did not trust the average citizen to make rational decisions on government.

The reason why these delegates were scared to give the citizens the power of direct

election was because of factions. Humans are inherently selfish and can easily be

corrupted by factions, which leads to corruption. To avoid this, they wanted to restrain

the amount of power the people had. Their solution was to have a group of electors in

each state deliberate and vote on the next President. These electors were completely
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separate from any form of government. This ensured the integrity of the officials and the

vote (Turner). This seemed like a good solution, yet its first complaint about it came nine

years later from William Smith of South Carolina who called for a revision of it (Turner).

He claimed that in time, there may be problems with this system. Little did he know that

from then until the present day, hundreds of ideas have been put forth to fix this unfair

problem.

Most revisions to the Electoral College change it to a direct election of a

President. This is one of the most popular solutions, but there are others. There is a

solution to keep the overall integrity of the Electoral College but also change how votes

get allocated. Instead of the candidate getting all the electoral points for a state, they

could give the points proportional to the state's population. For example, if a state has

seven electoral points and a candidate wins between 43%- 57% of the state's popular

vote, that candidate would get four out of the seven points (Fon). One can also make a

system where the amount of points someone gets is the amount of districts they win in

the state. Nebraska and Maine currently use a system like this. In Maine, the candidate

who wins the popular vote in a district gets that electoral point. This way, people have

more of a direct say on which candidate is getting their state's electoral points. As a

reward, the candidate who wins the majority of the vote in Maine also gets two

additional points from the Senate seats. The proportional allocation of points to a

candidate is a solution where the Electoral College stays but the voters have more of an

impact on who wins the Presidency.

In 1977, Senator Birch Bayh supported an amendment to the Constitution that

would eliminate the Electoral College and have the President elected through popular
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vote. He was a member of the Constitutional Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary

Committee (Diamond, Bayh). During the amendment deliberations, they had a

testimony from Martin Diamond, who was a professor political scientist and supporter of

the Electoral College. Mr. Diamond had two central arguments for its continued use.

The first was that if it has worked for two hundred years, then there is no need to

change it (Diamond, Bayh). He explains that people want to get rid of the institution

because it is old, and when people hear old, they think it needs to be replaced. He tells

Senator Bayh that the Electoral College is old but also very adaptive. If it has survived

two hundred years of American history with very little change to it, then clearly it is an

efficient and functional system (Diamond, Bayh). His second argument was that

America is a federal system, made up of states. The states should decide who elects

the President because they form the union (Diamond, Bayh). By keeping the Electoral

College, America will continue being a federal democracy. The Presidency is a federal

office, not a national one (Diamond, Bayh). To become President, the candidate must

win states. If the states were to be left out of the decision to pick the chief federal

official, it would be dangerous (Diamond, Bayh). Professor Diamond’s arguments are

decent in defending the institution, but they cannot explain how it is democratic to

completely discount half of a state's votes. Even in a federal democracy. People's votes

should count for something.

In the Electoral College, not everyone's vote counts. Yet, some votes are more

important than others. African-American votes do not mean as much as white votes,

specifically in the South. As discussed previously in the paper, the impacts of slavery

have created an imbalance that favors white votes over black ones. The Electoral
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College was created because Southern states would not have the same amount of

voters as Northern states because there were so many slaves. When slavery was

abolished, black people had a brief moment of political freedom after the Civil War.

Then, when the Reconstruction Era ended and Union troops left the South, black people

felt the same oppression they felt during slavery (Codrington). Except now, Jim Crow

laws prevented them from voting, and white supremacy kept them away from the polls.

During this time, the South held unwieldy power over national politics. Now that African-

Americans can be counted as people, the states could have more representatives in

Congress. Yet, a good portion of the population could not vote because they were black.

So the Southern white democrats benefitted from the black people in their states. Many

politicians in the North blasted this form of representation. General Henry Edwin

Tremain stated that in 1904, Delaware and Georgia cast approximately the same

amount of votes but Georgia had 11 representatives and Delaware only had 1

(Keyssar). Then from 1911 to 1913, Representative Richmond Pearson Hobson

proposed six resolutions to abolish the Electoral College in favor of a direct national

vote. Hobson was a progressive democrat from Alabama who defended the rights of

African- Americans and pushed for women's suffrage. In 1913, Alabama’s senator died

in office so Hobson decided to run. His opponent in the race was Oscar Underwood, a

prominent Democrat in Congress. Hobson was very well-liked, so Underwood decided

to attack his ideas about the abolition of the Electoral College. He stated that under

direct election, the vote of every white man would be equal to the vote of every black

man (Keyssar). With these attacks, Underwood won the election because white people

in Alabama would not want to give up their power. If the direct election of the President
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were to happen then, the Southern states would have to either give up their electoral

power or take away voting restrictions on black people (Keyssar). Clearly, the Electoral

College is rooted in the disenfranchisement of black voters to maintain Southern white

dominance in government.

Today, even though black voters are now finally able to vote freely and fairly, one

can still see the bias towards white voters. In the South, most African- Americans vote

Democrat, while most whites vote Republican. This creates a highly polarized voting

system which, along with the winner-take-all system, means much of the black vote

does not get expressed in Presidential elections (Keyssar). The electoral college allows

for the continuation of the suppression of black voters because it favors white voters in

the South.

The Electoral College is not just unfair to African- Americans in the South, it is

also unfair to small states. Small states have fewer points than large states. Thus,

creating a situation where candidates will only campaign in big states with lots of points

than in small states (Harvard Law Review). If one uses the 2000 Presidential Election

and creates a fake country that has three states, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Florida, one

can see the bias. Rhode Island and Hawaii both have 4 electoral points and Florida had

25. Al Gore would have won the popular vote by over 180,000 out of these three states.

Yet, he would have lost the Electoral College by 25-8 (Harvard Law Review). This is

because he captured Hawaii and Rhode Island’s popular vote but barely missed

Florida’s. This proves the the Electoral College is biased because even though Al Gore

won more states, he lost because smaller states are not worth as much as larger states.

Voters living in these smaller states do not have much of a say on who should be
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President. Therefore, their votes do not mean as much as someone who lives in a big

state.

The Electoral College also disproportionately inflates the winner's margin of

victory. If the candidate wins a state, they get that many electoral points plus two

additional points because of the Senate seats. This two-point addition makes it seem

like the winner won by much more than they did. In a study on this topic, researchers

used data from the 2000 Presidential election and ran it in a randomized simulation one

million times. Out of all those times, they found that the election would have been

reversed approximately 25,000 times. They also found that the electoral college winner

is awarded 0.42 more points because of the two-point advantage. Working with this

data, they concluded that the 1916 and 2000 elections would have been reversed if

there were no two extra points. This is another example of how the electoral system

continues to allow for people's votes not to count because it awards extra points to

candidates who won the state. And if the election was close, these extra points could be

the difference between winning and losing.

Frustration over this way of electing a President has been growing. It seems

increasingly clear that the Electoral College does not reflect the will of the voters. Black

voters do not have as much say as white voters and small states do not have as much

influence as large states. This frustration is leading to a decay in our democratic

institutions. If the person who is elected to the Presidency does not reflect the will of the

voters, this will lead to government sclerosis. Government sclerosis is when institutions

function painfully and there is a decline of trust in them. Ross Douthat argues in his
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book, The Decadent Society, that when this happens, democratic institutions start to

decay. People will not have trust in the Presidency if they do not get elected fairly.

Obviously, something needs to be done to fix this so people can once again trust

the person in the Oval Office. The easy solution would be to switch to a popular vote,

yet there is substantial evidence that that would not work. America is so successful

because it is a federal democracy. If it were not, then it would be very difficult to keep all

the 50 states together. A popular vote would eliminate the federal system, which could

have dangerous repercussions. Ideas have been brought up to change it to the model

that Maine and Nebraska use. This is where the winner of a district in the state gets that

electoral point. This may seem like a good idea but a candidate can still win without

winning the popular vote (Fon). The solution that seems the best is the proportional

system. This was discussed earlier in the paper but this means that a candidate wins

the the amount of points proportional to the amount of votes they got in a state. This

way, a candidate could win 4 points for the amount of votes they got, and the other

person gets the other 3 if there was a total of 7 points. Yet, there is still a chance that

someone could win the election without the popular vote. However, this way provides

the best representation for everyone, and this may be a price people would have to pay

to revise but keep the Electoral College (Fon). There may not be a perfect system, but

there must be a revision to the Electoral College to preserve American democracy.

In conclusion, the Electoral College is undemocratic because in this system, not

everyone's vote counts and they are not made equal. When a candidate wins a state,

the votes that were for the other candidate do not count for anything. The system is also

rooted in slavery and the repression of African- Americans. It was a way for Southern
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states to have power during slavery. After slavery, it was used to increase the South’s

influence in government while oppressing its black populations. It also creates a bias

where small states are not worth as much as large states. Finally, it inflates the winner

because of the two additional points. Without these, the elections of 1916 and 2000

would have been reversed. Even though it is unfair, some goods come from it. Its main

good is that it keeps the integrity of the federal system. It also stabilizes the government

with the two-party system. In order to keep our American democracy, this institution

needs some kind of revision so Americans can have faith in the President once again.