By MIKE MANNO
A few years ago when I was teaching college, I used to ask my U.S. government students how many had voted in the last presidential election. Most, if not all, would raise their hands. I’d count the students’ hands, announced that 20 or so claimed to have voted for president, and then I’d feign surprise and ask, “How can you all have voted when only seven people in Iowa cast the official ballots?”
That’s how I’d open the discussion on the Electoral College. Of course, after the 2000 election my jig was up, but until then it was a pretty effective opening.
One of the things about teaching political science was how much I found that students didn’t know or — in some instances — didn’t care about. Until the Bush-Gore election the Electoral College was something most had only heard about, but didn’t know how it worked, or why we had it, or why they should care. And even after that election, many still didn’t understand why or how it worked.
And now, without fully understanding the Electoral College themselves, most of the progressive left wants to abolish or modify it.
American government is best taught, I believe, from a historical perspective. So to understand the Electoral College, we must go back to the beginning. Once the French fleet blocked Lord Cornwallis’ escape from Yorktown, the British surrender brought about a new problem for the former British Colonies.
As the colonies tried to form a government, one of their abiding principles was the equality of the states. From the time of the earliest colonial assemblies, each colony had an equal say in how the assembly voted. Thus, when it came to what is now referred to as the Constitutional Convention, each state, regardless of the number of delegates, had only one vote.
Additionally, the states were very jealous of their individual prerogatives and were very reluctant to cede authority to a national government. The failure of the Articles of Confederation, however, brought a new realization that a stronger national government was necessary.
Thus the framers created a federal system whereby power would be shared between the national and state governments, with the state ceding only as much power as necessary to the federal government. The underlying premise was to spread power so that no one person or group could monopolize it, thus the separation of powers.
Obviously, over time more and more power was given to the federal government, but the idea still stands that the national government is one of limited powers as enumerated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
The design for Congress was a compromise between those who wanted representation by population, favored by the large states, versus those who wanted to continue the policy of equality of states, represented by the smaller states. The compromise, of course, was a House of Representatives, elected by the people based on population, and a Senate in which the states were represented equally with members appointed by the state legislatures. Popular election of senators was not adopted until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.
Now, with that original framework and policy choices in mind, the delegates turned to the election of the president. All knew that the presiding officer of the convention, Gen. George Washington, would be the first president, but how would you choose after that?
There were many plans suggested, but most had fatal drawbacks. If Congress selected the president, would he become subservient to Congress? Delegates rejected that, sticking to their concept of separation of powers. What if he was given only one term? Again rejected, the president should be allowed to remain in office as long as he proved worthy and popular.
How about direct election by the people? Well, that presented problems of its own: Could an election be held in a rural America in which ease of communication was almost unheard of? Would a popular vote mean that candidates would have to campaign for the office, which was frowned upon by the founders? And wouldn’t a popular election allow the large states to dominate the executive branch?
The problems, of course, were not insurmountable. The answer was the Electoral College and the idea was to work like this:
The states would elect the president; each would be given the same number of votes as they had representatives in Congress. The electors could not be members of Congress or hold any office under the federal government. Each elector was to consider the great men of the day and vote for two persons, only one of whom could be a resident of the elector’s state. The candidate with a majority vote would be president, the runner-up vice president. If no one received the majority vote, the House would select the president from the top electoral vote getters with each state — not each congressman — getting one vote.
The thought by many was that for most elections after General Washington, the Electoral College would serve more as a nominating body, with the House, voting by state, making the final selection. Thus the federal system they were designing gave great deference to the states in the selection of a president.
Now it didn’t take long for the system to break down. The delegates did not foresee the rise of political parties and in 1800 when running-mates Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied and sent the election to the House, the system was quickly changed so that the electors voted separately for president and vice-president, adding that unresolved vice-presidential elections would be decided in the Senate, each senator getting one vote.
That’s pretty much where we stand today with one critical difference. The choice of a state’s electors was gradually given over to the people who now, in each state, vote for a slate of electors pledged to a particular candidate. In all but two states, the winner of the popular vote gets all the state’s electors who, incidentally, are not bound to vote as pledged. In Maine and Nebraska the electors are chosen by congressional district with the state victor getting the two “senatorial” or at-large electors.
The result is that candidates now must “win” enough states to obtain a majority of the electoral votes, 270. This, of course, requires candidates to campaign and gain support from various regions of the nation. A purely regional candidate cannot win and neither can the populist, big city states control the outcome. It takes a broad base of support to win, as recent history has shown.
But now members of the progressive left, having tried and failed to bribe 2016 Republican electors not to vote for Mr. Trump, are attacking the Electoral College. There have always been naysayers and complaints about it, but now the attacks are getting serious. One part of the left wants to eliminate the Electoral College and go to direct popular vote, the other part wants the states to band together to pledge their electoral vote to the popular vote winner regardless of who wins their state.
Here’s the problem with both. Direct vote eliminates the need for a candidate to gain a cross-sectional victory. Large states, with their large pool of voters, will have the ability to capture the presidency and relegate smaller states to a less than equal status. States, remember, also determine voter eligibility, so a state wishing to have a larger impact in the presidential election can “soften” its voting eligibility by lowering its voting age or allowing non-citizen residents to vote, as is often heard on the campaign trail nowadays.
Since a victorious candidate needs a majority of the electoral votes, it has caused parties to avoid extremes and stick close to the political center and it provides for a clear-cut winner. Popular vote would only encourage multiple parties and candidates, spreading the vote among a mishmash of parties with no real clear winner. Then what?
Abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment which would be unlikely to pass. However, the compact between the states would be much easier to do if enough states agreed to select their electors on the basis of the national popular vote; a very dangerous proposition which could easily leave the country in turmoil as competing court cases played out in individual states.
Like so many other issues that the progressive left is now proposing, one has to wonder if their arguments aren’t based more on sour grapes than on our historical tradition of federalism and separation of powers. And, scary as it may be, the proponents of these changes are, by and large, the same folks who claim voter ID laws are racist and unconstitutional.
Wake up to this fraud!
(You can contact Mike at Deacon
Mike@q.com.)
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