Monday morning wisdom from Stephen L. Hall.
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A certain correspondent for the New York Times, one Rukmini Callimachi, inquired of the interwebs, “I need an explainer on the electoral college. How is it that the person who got the most votes in this election is the one who lost?” I would be remiss to allow such an inquiry to go unanswered when the answer is so obvious and simple that even someone who works for the NY Times should be able to understand it.
The purpose of the electoral college is to place outside the political class the election of the President, to place a layer of citizenry between the legislatures and the selection of the Presidency. For instance, it generally falls upon the respective Secretaries of State to oversee the elections within any state.
Imagine one of the argued alternatives of the time, that simply the representatives in Congress should act as the voter’s electors in the selecting of a President. Having a majority of one party in Congress would almost surely guarantee a president of that same party.
No, it was important to the architects of our Constitution that the office of President, or the nation’s chief magistrate as they called it in the Federalist Paper #68, be directly elected by the people and separate from the existing political structure and office holders.
Imagine that a number of those Secretaries of State would collude together to determine what the vote tallies would be in their respective states. A number of state governments colluding to determine the President would simply create a different form of cabal to influence national politics.
It was a guarantee of the independence of the electoral college separate from the politicians which prohibited office holders from being electors; which had the electors meet in their respective states where they could be less apt to be influenced by what we would now call “protestors” as it would be difficult to coordinate such activities simultaneously in multiple states.
There was an insistence that the electoral college essentially bypass the political class to have a more direct determination of the President from the people rather than either the states or the federal government. The founding fathers had little faith in a perpetual political class keeping the interests of the citizen foremost in their minds.
Of course, in the absence of the Electoral College choosing by a clear majority the President, then the President would be chosen by the House of Representatives, but only from the top five choices of the Electoral College, because the President should not be chosen by a mere plurality. Likewise, though now superseded, the Vice-President would be then selected by the Senate in a like manner.
This also demonstrates that the Founding Fathers thought of the House of Representatives as the main chamber of Congress rather than the Senate. However, these were the concerns of the Founding Fathers and not the concerns which are currently being expressed against the Electoral College in the modern era, because the modern objections are just so transparently and obviously foolish that the Founding Father would never think people would ever make such objection.
If you wish to more fully understand the Founding Fathers’ perspective on the Electoral College, I would urge you to read Federalist Paper #68.
However, Ms. Callimachi’s tweet makes it all too clear that the modern objection is not based upon the political independence of the Electoral College; rather the fact that too many people are under the misconception that we are a democracy rather than a republic. “How is it that the person who got the most votes in this election is the one who lost?”, she asked.
Well, as we all know, the Electoral College assigns votes to each state according to their congressional representation, one vote for every Representative plus one vote for every Senator. This confuses people who have fraudulently been told that we live in a democracy who expect the person who gets the most votes to win. But what is the purpose for having Electoral College votes assigned by way of the state’s membership in Congress rather than just by population?
Contrary to the publicly stated opinions of such pseudo-intellectuals as Joyce Carol Oates that, “electoral college will forever tip balance to rural/conservative/”white”/older voters –a concession to slave-holders originally.” Of course, being the brilliant mind that she is, in one simple tweet she managed to be wrong on multiple points.
There was not, at the time of the founding of our country, any philosophical division and distinction which could be remotely termed “conservative”. The Founding Fathers considered themselves “liberals” and “radicals” but there was not history of the United States to be conserved. There simply was not the divisions in America which has been the bread and butter of “progressives” who corrupted the word “liberal” for the last century.
At the time of the creation of the Electoral College, the entire country was what you would call “rural” as the largest towns in America were not urban like the big cities of Europe. So the Electoral College did not contemplate a rural/urban distinction as she implied.
Neither was “whiteness” a consideration in the creation of the electoral college as there were virtually no, if any, non-white people who would have been considered citizens at the time the Electoral College was created..
It was not a concession to slave-holders, it was just the opposite. One of those slave-holding states was Virginia, then the largest state in the proposed union.
The actual concession was TO the small states; to Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, & Delaware. The concession was FROM the big states like Virginia, North Carolina, & Georgia.
The fear of the small New England states was that their voice in the federal government would be overwhelmed by the larger states. The Electoral College exists specifically to keep the President from being elected purely on a popular vote. It was designed to keep large population centers from completely dominating the elections. The Electoral College is a defense of the little guy.
Update it to the modern era, when a huge state like California has 55 electoral votes, 53 for their Representatives and 2 for their Senators, compared to a very rural state like Montana which has 3 electoral votes, 1 for the their Representative, and 2 for their Senators.
California has more than 18 times the input of Montana in electing the President, however, without the Electoral College, that would be 53 times the voice of Montana. No Presidential candidate would even bother to campaign in many electorally small states.
A republic is not bound to give every vote equal weight. We sought independence from the United Kingdom because they thought to represent voters on the basis of social class, where the Founding Fathers argued that geographic differences needed to be represented. Thus in establishing representation in our republic, the Senate represented the geographic differences by representing the states. The Electoral College is thus a blend of geographic and population representation, not merely a representation of the populace.
The nearly universal policy of the states to give all of their state’s electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote within that state already distorts the original geographic representation anticipated in the Constitution. With certain states such as New York and Illinois where not only does nearly half of the population of the state live in one city, but that city is located in a corner of that state, much of those states are held hostage to the dense population centers of Chicago and New York City.
Eliminating the Electoral College would make the country largely like those states, with half of the population in small urban concentrations politically dominating the other 90% of the country. While a technical majority of the population, geographically it would become a tyranny of the minority, 10% of the country dominating the other 90%.
It is not an accident that urban areas are the most socialistic, because they are the most dependent upon the rest of the country. They are dependent for food and water. New York City has for or five major aqueducts providing water from upstate areas. Welfare and government handouts help sustain the high urban populations along with being a destination point for immigrants, legal and illegal.
Leftists depend upon these urban areas for their political power because their public policies require a dependant and pliant population. Leftists only support eliminating the Electoral College to increase their political power at the expense of everyone else.
What would the nation’s political climate look like if the states would go the other direction, to give the more rural areas in these leftist states more of a chance at self determination?
I propose a different solution. I propose that each elector be voted upon by Congressional District and not by a winner take all domination which favors the liberal urban elites. Of course, in every state two of the electors would be by popular vote of the whole state, but each Congressional District would elect their own elector to the Electoral College. Give the people in these rural districts in New York and Illinois an actual voice in the Presidential race rather than have their voices shouted down by these urban political bullies.
