The Electoral College is Slavery-Era Horseshit
The New York Times ran an interesting election story yesterday about the Electoral College.
As you probably know, the Electoral College has tended to significantly favor Republicans over the past couple of decades, allowing them to win two elections — in 2000 and 2016 — despite their candidate losing the popular vote. It also made Donald Trump far more competitive in 2020 than a candidate who lost the popular vote by over 7 million has ever been.
What the New York Times story says, however, is that the Republican advantage in the EC this year is not as big as it has been in the past. That’s because Trump’s popular vote support this year has been spread out some, to where he’s getting a lot more support in states he really has no chance of winning, like New York, than in previous elections where his support was more concentrated in battleground states. This does not mean that he doesn’t still have an advantage, of course. Per the New York Times’ latest projections he can still lose the popular vote and win, but he can’t lose it by as much as he did in the last two elections. Harris still has no path to lose the popular vote and win the EC.
That’s all interesting, but it’s still enraging to have to deal with the inherently antidemocratic horseshit that is the Electoral College every four years. And yes, I would still believe it is horseshit if a Democrat won the presidency with a minority of the popular vote. I realize that my political leanings are obvious and so it may be reasonable not to believe me when I say that, but it’s true. It's stupid in principle. It's stupid in practice. And because I’m sufficiently worked up about it, I’m gonna put my professor hat on and lecture about it some. I know many of you know this stuff already but feel free to copy and paste however much of it you want for your Facebook page or to forward it on to someone you know who doesn’t know it and could use it.
The Electoral College exists because of slavery. There is no way to get around that. To understand why this is so, you must understand the Three-Fifths Compromise.
As you may remember from school, there was a big problem trying to figure out how to structure Congress at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The big idea – giving states equal representation in one house, the Senate, while giving larger states more sway in the House of Representatives – was eventually agreed upon. The small states, however, were still sort of freaked out about it because the big states like Pennsylvania and New York were SO MUCH BIGGER than the small states, almost all of which were down south in slave territory. So they proposed doing something they’d never do in the normal course: they suggested counting their slaves as people.
The northern delegates were NOT having that. Partially, I assume, because even most of them didn’t consider slaves to be human beings, but mostly because doing so would give a ton of power to the south. So a compromise was reached: “we’ll count your slaves to determine your number of congressmen, but not on a one-to-one basis. How about each slave counts as 60% of a person?” The deal was done and the Three-Fifths Compromise was enshrined in the Constitution.
Most history and civics classes end this here, with Congress, and handle the method of electing the president as a totally separate subject. But they’re not separate at all. The ugly struggle for power and attendant racism which allowed for the Three-Fifths Compromise was just as responsible for the adoption of the Electoral College. Indeed, the existence of the Three-Fifths Compromise made its adoption possible.
When it came to the business of electing the president, some delegates, including James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who was a primary author of the Three-Fifths compromise, proposed a direct national election of the president with the winner of the popular vote prevailing. The popular conception about this is that the idea was rejected because the population was considered to be too ignorant or too widely dispersed to handle the task. This may have been a sentiment held by some, but it was not the sentiment which ultimately put the kibosh on direct elections. Rather, it was the same concern which caused the Three-Fifths Compromise to come into being. James Madison, a slave owner from Virginia, knew what was up. He said this on the matter of a direct presidential election at the Convention:
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes”
The solution: the Electoral College, which ties the election of the president to the number of representatives each state has in Congress, which was itself set by the Three-Fifths Compromise to deal with the problem of those pesky Negroes. Without it, the Electoral College would’ve been a nonsensical non-starter. The same slavery-inspired, dehumanizing solution for Congressional matters was the primary selling point for the Electoral College. The Three-Fifths Compromise is now a repealed and notorious bit of darkness in our nation’s history. Yet one of its most significant products – the Electoral College – remains as fruit of that poisonous tree.
The Electoral College’s existence is not illegal, obviously, and disposing of slavery as we did in the wake of the Civil War did not, technically speaking, require us to dispose of all of its remnants. But do we not have a moral obligation to dispose with as many of those remnants as we can? Do we not owe it to our national conscience to erase as much of that legacy as we possibly can? And to put past wrongs right as much as we possibly can? The intention behind the Electoral College was indisputably bound up in our nation’s most egregious collective sin — it literally would not have existed without it — and, on that basis alone, it is odious.
Of course, even if you do not find the Electoral College’s origin and history odious – even if you believe that what has gone on in the past is over and should not be dwelled on in the present – it is hard to dispute the inherent inequality the Electoral College system continues to foster. Indeed, it’s obvious for the reasons I alluded to above. To get more specific with that, and to dispose of some other common defenses of the Electoral College:
* Under the Electoral College, even the smallest states are guaranteed three Electoral College votes. As a result, roughly four percent of the country’s population in the smallest states end up being allotted around 8 percent of Electoral College votes. That’s horseshit in and of itself but it’s worse horseshit given the putative field-leveling purpose of the Electoral College;
* While we’ve had multiple elections in which a candidate who received the minority of the popular vote with the Electoral College, we still have not seen the most extreme potential examples of that. Indeed, if you play around with the Electoral College map you can devise a way in which one can win the presidency by carrying 37 states which possess only 45% of the nation’s voters. That’s even worse than Trump in 2016;
* Many defend the Electoral College by saying that it ensures that rural areas aren’t placed at a disadvantage to urban areas in elections. This is dumb because people vote, not topographical or demographic areas. But even if it did put rural areas at a disadvantage, why would that be a bad thing? Sixty-three percent of the our nation’s population lives in cities. And that percentage is growing. The people who make policy should be selected with that in mind;
* Inherent in Electoral College defense is this implied notion — sometimes made quite explicit, actually — that people who live in rural, heartland areas are somehow “real Americans” while city dwellers are not. Which is demographically inaccurate, insulting, and condescending. Any defense of rural areas over urban areas in this context is either (a) an exercise in elevating acreage over people in terms of importance; or (b) elevating a particular sort of person over another in terms of Americanness or importance. In a democracy, no person’s vote should count more than any other person’s. The Electoral College, however, ensures this to be the case.
* There’s also this idea that under a popular vote system candidates would only go to the Big States during their campaigns. I doubt that — and we’re well past the era of the whistle stop anyway — but again, why is that any worse than the system we have now, in which only eight states matter at all? I don’t have the 2020 figures, but in 2016 Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton concentrated something like 94 percent of their campaign events in the then-12 swing states and all but ignored campaigning in states which hold 70% of the population. There are even fewer swing states now, making the concentration problem even worse. Anyone who makes the argument that a popular vote would silo-off campaigns to a few small areas is ignoring the reality that the Electoral College system already does this far, far more effectively;
* Electoral College defenders have also pretended to be concerned about candidates under a popular vote system not getting 50% of the popular vote, thereby sowing chaos, even if they seem to be just fine with that already when a Republican wins that way. But if this is a concern, we could easily implement an instant runoff voting system or some other measure. We elect candidates by popular vote in literally every other office in the country, so I’m pretty sure we can do it with the the presidency.
I could go on for another few thousand words but I won’t. Mostly because, realistically, there’s no getting out of this any time soon. The only surefire way to get rid of the Electoral College is to amend the Constitution, and given how polarized this country is we’re unlikely to see another Constitutional Amendment in our lifetimes. Especially one which will be perceived to put one political party at a disadvantage. These days it’s Republicans who would burn down the country before losing the Electoral College, but I have no doubt, however, that if the shoe was on the other foot — as it has been at various points in the past — Democrats would fight its abolition every bit as hard.
The only other possible way to bypass the inherent inequality and idiocy of the Electoral College is via something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I’ve gone on for a long time already so you can just follow that link to get the upshot of what that is. It’s clever, I’ll give it that, but (a) there are several plausible arguments against it being Constitutional; and (b) even if those are weak arguments, I would bet the lives of everyone that I love that the U.S. Supreme Court as currently constructed — constructed largely by Republican presidents who won despite losing the popular vote! — would strike it down regardless. The current Supreme Court is a right wing political body which exists to advance Republican interests, full stop, and we can expect nothing less than that for the foreseeable future.
If we were drawing up the system today, there is no way on Earth we would ever implement the Electoral College. It is nonsensical and exists out of nothing but corrupt, racist, historical inertia. We should abolish it as quickly as possible. It’s total horseshit.