Founding Fathers still smartest in the room
There is an effort by some members of Congress unhappy with the results of the 2016 presidential election, to change how votes are counted in presidential elections. This is being marketed with a claim of more vote equality. This claim states that for each vote to count equally, presidential elections should be run as a national, not state by state, election. To do this, the Electoral College would be dismantled. These marketers claim that this is what a true democracy does.
They have a point. This is what a true democracy would look like. Except that the United States is not, and never was, a true democracy. It is a representative republic. Voters do not generally vote on specific issues but elect public officials who vote for them. That’s what Congress and state legislatures are.
Does this system of voting create imbalances? Interestingly, the correction of one of the largest voting imbalances found in presidential elections is why the Electoral College was conceived in the first place.
What does the Electoral College actually do? It rebalances the state by state voters in U.S. presidential elections by ensuring that voters in less populated states are not overrun by voters in larger populated states. Alexander Hamilton explained the need for an Electoral College in The Federalist Paper number 68, “The Mode of Electing the President,” published Friday, March 14, 1788.
There are 538 Electoral College voters (called electors), each with one vote. The electors are distributed to each state based on each states’ number of U.S. House of Representatives, which is based on population. California, with a population 39,560,000, or
12 percent of the nation’s 327,200,000, has
55 House Representatives and therefore gets gets 55 electoral votes. Wyoming’s population of
578,000, or 1.7 percent, gets it three. California has
12 percent of the U.S. population (Wyoming has 1.7 percent) and 10 percent of the electors (Wyoming has .55 percent ). It would take more than 68 Wyomings to equal one California. To be elected, a presidential candidate must get 270 electoral votes (or 50 percent plus one out of the 538 total). What chance would voters in Wyoming have?
Consider the U.S. Senate where each state has two senators, each with equal voting authority. A senator from Wyoming has the same voting power as a senator from California. Some might consider that an imbalance, but what it does do is protect voters in Wyoming from being overrun by voters in California. This same philosophy is one of the primary reasons the Electoral College was created, to protect small states such as Delaware, Rhode Island and Connecticut from the larger Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, the larger states at the time.
The House of Representatives shows a similar imbalance, where the number of representatives per state is based on state populations, with a minimum guarantee of at least one House Representative. The total number of Representatives was fixed by law in 1911 at 435 House Representatives. This law makes the number of Representatives each state gets a zero sum game — for each representative one state gets, another state loses one. As people move from one state to another, power shifts. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has complained recently that New York is losing state tax revenue as people leave the state. New York may also start losing representatives in the U.S. House. That means a loss of voting power. It is not only for whom a vote is cast, it is where it is cast.
And power, not fairness, is what the Electoral College debate is all about. The issue has never really been about one person-one vote. It’s really about the weight that each vote has. There have been five presidential elections is which the candidate with more popular votes lost due to fewer votes in the Electoral College. The winners of these elections were: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016. Through 2016, there have been 58 presidential elections, so this has happened only 8.6 percent of all presidential elections. It is an actually very unusual occurrence.
So why change it now? Some are not happy with recent election results. Winners wine. Losers whine. That may be what is happening with this attempt to change the voting methodology. While not perfect, the electoral college protects the smaller state voters from the larger, and has for more than 200 years. The Founding Fathers saw this need. They were, and still are, the smartest guys in the room.
This is what a true democracy would look like. Except that the United States is not, and never was, a true democracy. It is a representative
republic. Voters do not generally vote on specific issues but elect public officials who vote for them. That’s what Congress and state legislatures are.