Electoral College is invitation to disaster
If you voted in the 2020 presidential election, you own a share of something that America did just right. With record numbers and the highest turnout rate since 1908, it was remarkable for how smoothly the voting and counting went. And it came off against the worst pandemic in a century. Everyone can be proud of that. From coast to coast and from the right to the left, election officials, independent legal experts and federal prosecutors are on the same page: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The returns are accurate. There are no grounds to overturn the election. There were no glitches in Florida this time.
However, there are lessons to apply. The most urgent is a familiar one. The Electoral College is an invitation to disaster. It should either be abolished or made to reflect the popular vote.
It was evident on election night that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his running mate, Kamala Harris, had an insurmountable lead in the popular vote, but close counts in swing states left the Electoral College outcome in doubt. That gave an opening to unseemly attempts by President Trump and his enablers to overturn the election.
The other lesson is that voting by mail is here to stay after the pandemic has passed. It needs to be easier. All states should begin processing the ballots before election day, as Florida does. Although it’s wise to take the time to get the returns right, long counts can feed conspiratorial fantasies, as we have seen this month.
States like New York that require an excuse for not voting in person should rescind that archaic restriction. There’s no necessity for witnesses, either.
Those improvements could be accomplished relatively easily, assuming the Republicans understand how Trump’s false objections to mail balloting may have suppressed his own vote.
Ridding America of the curse of the Electoral College will be harder but not impossible.
It is a perpetual threat to our modern concept of democracy, which didn’t exist when the Constitution was proposed in 1787.
Five times now, the latest in 2000 and 2016, the Electoral College resulted in a president who had lost the popular vote.
Even when the electoral totals reflect the popular vote, as they did this time, the system will have distorted how the campaigns were run and denied millions of voters the satisfaction of knowing that their votes were registered where it mattered.
This year, that’s some 60 million citizens. Their votes were counted, but they won’t count in the Electoral College. Some 35 million were Trump supporters in states that he lost; 25 million voted for the Biden-Harris ticket in Florida, Texas and other states that remained red. None will have electors representing them on Dec. 14.
But for the Electoral College anachronism, it wouldn’t have taken four days to know who won. The electoral outcome depended on very close, necessarily drawn-out counts in critical swing states like Pennsylvania, where suspense was expected, and in Georgia, where it wasn’t.
That’s why the Electoral College is dangerous as well as undemocratic. Trump’s post-election propaganda wouldn’t fall on so many credulous ears if he were attacking Biden’s national lead of more than 5 million votes rather than contesting fewer than 300,000 votes in just six states. Fortunately, Republican legislative leaders in four of those states have already ruled out tampering with their electors, leaving Trump no rational expectation of success.
The Constitution’s provisions for electing the president were written by men who didn’t trust even the white male property owners who comprised the entire electorate. They assumed that elected surrogates, sure to be prominent citizens just like themselves, would do a better job. Writing in the Federalist papers, Alexander Hamilton promised “a moral certainty” that the presidency “would seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
The Constitution and the Federalist were written with quill pens, dispatched to the nation by stagecoach and horseback, and printed for the public on type set by hand, one letter at a time. Prudently, the Founders provided for amendments. There have been 27. The next one should be a modern system of electing a president by the whole nation, rather than by just some of the states.
The Electoral College was one of the last decisions the Founders made at Philadelphia in 1787, after twice rejecting direct election. It was modeled on the great compromise that gave each state two senators as protection against a House apportioned by population.
The undue influence of the small states is an obvious disincentive to any serious effort to abolish the Electoral College by constitutional amendment. However, there is a practical remedy called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
State legislatures that vote for the compact commit their electors to vote for whomever wins the most votes nationwide. That contract goes into effect when states representing at least 270 electoral votes have joined. So far, 15 states and the District of Columbia, accounting for 196 electoral votes, are participating. Florida isn’t but should. Our 29 electors would be a significant boost toward the 270.
In Colorado, the latest state to join, opponents put a repeal referendum on the Nov. 3 ballot. The people voted 52 to 48% to remain in the compact.
No Republican state has joined, regrettably, although the Arizona House and the Oklahoma Senate have voted in favor.
While the compact would likely be unwelcome at Florida’s Republican Capitol, it is quite possibly something the voters could accomplish by initiative despite the Constitution specifying that legislatures determine how electors will be chosen. Supreme Court precedents establishing the people’s power to act by initiative in place of a legislature suggest a favorable outcome for direct popular vote.
The Electoral College is a time bomb with a short fuse. Florida should join the compact, one way or another.