Electoral College
This nation has put up with the inequities of the system too long. Now it’s time to fix it.
While the Crimson Tide anticipate another national football championship and the Cougars await a new head coach, we can think of another “college” in the news lately that deserves nothing more than an honorable death. We speak of the Electoral College, an antiquated feature of the U.S. Constitution that long ago outlived its usefulness. In the words of UT Law School Professor Sanford Levinson, the Electoral College “is an undemocratic and perverse part of the American system of government that ill serves the United States.”
To that sentiment, we offer a hearty amen — and an equally hearty request to elected officials to work toward abolishing the system. Levinson’s words, from his 2006 book “Our Democratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How the People Can Correct It),” were published a few years after the 2000 election debacle that placed in office for the fourth time in American history the candidate who lost the popular vote. And now it’s happened a fifth time, with the most unpopular nominee since the origins of polling managing to defeat the second-most-unpopular nominee, despite losing the popular vote by the widest margin ever.
Partisan preferences aside, this nation’s reliance on the Electoral College, whatever the Founders had in mind, undermines basic democratic values and poses a potential threat to political stability in a deeply divided nation.
We’ve been moving toward the oneperson, one-vote ideal, at least since the reapportionment rulings of the 1960s. In a national election, it simply doesn’t make sense — nor is it fair — that Wyoming, with 0.2 percent of the national population, has three times that weight in the Electoral College. We like the Cowboy State as much as the next person, but its residents are no better, or worse, than the rest of us. By awarding undue influence to the small states, the current system violates this nation’s commitment to the equality of all citizens, regardless of where they live.
Eliminating the Electoral College also would eliminate the “battleground state” phenomenon, where candidates basically ignore residents of those states whose electoral votes they take for granted (including Texas). That means skewing the national debate and ignoring issues that may be important to vast numbers of citizens who happen to live in the wrong states.
Essentially, the Electoral College reflects the Founders’ distrust of “the people,” in part because of their lack of information in an overwhelmingly rural new nation with few opportunities to stay abreast of issues and events. More than two centuries later, that’s no longer an issue.
Despite widespread public support for abolishing the system, it’s devilishly difficult to do so. It takes a constitutional amendment, which requires twothirds approval by each house of Congress plus approval by three-fourths of the states. (Remember Wyoming and her little buddies?). As Levinson notes, 13 states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the population can veto any change sought by the others.
The amendment requirements are daunting, and yet there may be what some are calling “a work-around.” A group calling itself the National Popular Vote is pushing for an interstate compact by which states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The measure only would take effect when states making up the majority of the 270 votes sign on.
We’ve put up with the inequities of the Electoral College for a long time. Levinson quotes a prescient letter from a preeminent constitutional expert who noted that the system so lends itself to what he called “a mischievous tendency” that he believed an amendment to the Constitution was necessary. That was James Madison. In 1823. Perhaps by the 200th anniversary of the esteemed Founder’s observation, we could get around to fixing the problem.