Contending with tyranny

We shouldn’t do away with Electoral College

The more history I read, the more I realize how little I know, and how many stories and how much understanding I wasn’t able to pass along to my students. When a homesick Gen. Washington designs Mount Vernon’s fireplace moldings, when you read John and Abigail’s trans-Atlantic letters, when Madison worries about his health; they become mortal, and their sense of honor and duty, their commitment to reason even more heroic.

My admiration for our first presidents doesn’t blind me to their faults. For Adams, that includes his signature on the Sedition Act. For the Virginians, it includes slavery. Their tortured rationalizations and heartfelt condemnation of our “national evil” don’t cover over their complicity in what Madison denounced as “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”

Despite their failings, I trust the judgment of our first five presidents over our most recent five. I trust the Constitutional Convention over our current Congress. I trust Alexander Hamilton more than Steve Mnuchin. That’s why I’m reluctant to alter the fundamentals of the government the founders gave us. Amending the Constitution on the advice of contemporary politicians leaves me cold, even fearful.

I always explained the Electoral College to my students, but ever since Bush became president, even though more Americans had voted for Gore, I’ve prepared them for the recurring objections to the Electoral College they’d likely hear in their lifetimes. Now several Democratic candidates have called for its elimination. Their underlying objection is the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Ironically, they’re echoing Donald Trump. He denounced the Electoral College as a “total sham,” “travesty” and “disaster for democracy” until it elected him, even though Hillary Clinton won 3 million more votes than he did. That’s when he declared it was “actually genius.”

The Electoral College mechanism is simple. Each state is allotted electoral votes equivalent to its members in the House of Representatives, which is based on population, plus two for its equal allotment of senators. The candidate who wins a majority of the electoral votes nationwide wins the election.

Each state gets to choose how its voters will select its electors and cast their electoral votes. Most states in recent history have awarded their electoral votes, winner take all, to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state, but they don’t have to. Maine and Nebraska sensibly apportion their electoral votes based on which candidate wins each of their state’s congressional districts, with the two additional votes going to the overall popular vote winner in their state.

Some states are negotiating a compact whereby they’d convey their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the nationwide popular vote. This would reduce the possibility, as occurred in 2016 and in four other elections, that a candidate could become president even though fewer Americans actually voted for him or her.

Critics counter that we could entirely eliminate that possibility by simply eliminating the Electoral College. I don’t think we should. Initially, electors were free to exercise their judgment. Hamilton reasoned that allowing the “sense of the people” to choose electors “most capable of analyzing” candidates’ “qualities” would best guard against electing presidents with “talents for low intrigue” and “the little arts of popularity.” Madison was confident that “the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom.”

Electors generally no longer exercise that discretion. Modern Americans bristle at allowing someone with “information and discernment” to make the choice for us. Except that’s the fundamental principle of representative government. We choose people to govern us for us. We may no longer wish to elect presidents that way, but there’s nothing unfair or un-American about it.

Critics also object to the disproportionate share of electoral votes and resulting power the system gives less populous states. California, for example, has 64 times Vermont’s population, but the Electoral College formula leaves California with 55 electors to Vermont’s three. They voice the same complaint about the Senate, where every state has two senators regardless of population.

Neither arrangement would make sense electorally if state boundaries had no meaning apart from elections. According to Madison, however, our Constitutional country is a blend of a national government established by the people and a federal union of the states. That’s why for much of our history we referred to ourselves as “the United States are,” not “the United States is.”

It took the Civil War to effect that language change.

The shameful fact that the principle of states’ rights has been soiled by slavery and segregation doesn’t invalidate legitimate arguments on behalf of states’ hybrid sovereignty or alter the fact that less populous states were induced to ratify the Constitution by the assurance that its provisions would protect them against being overwhelmed by more populous, powerful states.

It was a compromise. It moderates majority rule to protect the minority. As much as he was an ardent Republican, as that word used to be meant, Madison feared most the “tyranny of the majority,” the resulting “factions” and “commotions,” and the ultimate “loss of liberty” that had undone republics throughout history.

We’re presently awash in factions and intolerance for contrary views. Virtue staggers. Obstinacy and stridency have rendered us all but impotent to contend with the tyrannies the framers hoped to arm us against.

It would be a shame if we reflexively altered the fundamental government they gave us and disarmed ourselves further.