Whenever I hear someone say that the Electoral College ought to be abolished I always think, “wow, has this person never read even a teeny-tiny bit of The Federalist Papers?” Considering that so many of the people who want it done away with are supposed to be smart (college professors, lawyers, etc.) it really makes me wonder if we are giving those people too much credit. I’d rather have cousin Vinny.
I have always thought that the reasoning given by the American founders in The Federalist Papers for creating the Electoral College is brilliant, fundamentally sound, and hard to find a fault in. Alexander Hamilton wasn’t shy about that. He literally wrote, “I venture somewhat further, and hesitate not to affirm, that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.” The real Hamilton, unlike the fake stage Hamilton, was a baller.
So in this article, rather than doing some long boring dissection of how the Electoral College works, which has been done plenty of times (and with some actual flavor here and here), let’s look at the reasoning given by the founders — particularly in Federalist 68 which I’m going to quote to an unhealthy degree. Then you can tell me whether you still think it should be abolished.
Just in case you don’t know what the Electoral College is, this is the shortest explanation ever so that I can get to the much longer main points:
It is a group of 538 people chosen in each election by popular vote to then vote for a president. That’s actually what you are voting for in the popular election.
See? Super brief. Read more about it on wikipedia or something if you want a deep dive, or read Federalist 68 by Alexander Hamilton, or the Constitution, or the videos from PragerU I linked before, yada yada. The information is out there, but here is how it goes in Federalist 68 since I need to quote this later anyway:
“the people of each State shall choose a number of persons as electors, equal to the number of senators and representatives of such State in the national government, who shall assemble within the State, and vote for some fit person as President. Their votes, thus given, are to be transmitted to the seat of the national government, and the person who may happen to have a majority of the whole number of votes will be the President. But as a majority of the votes might not always happen to centre in one man, and as it might be unsafe to permit less than a majority to be conclusive, it is provided that, in such a contingency, the House of Representatives shall select out of the candidates who shall have the five highest number of votes, the man who in their opinion may be best qualified for the office.” — Federalist 68
In a nutshell, every opposition to the Electoral College hinges on the idea that the people are disenfranchised by not having a direct popular vote to determine the president. They say that it makes votes in less populous states more valuable than votes in more populous states. They say that there have been elections in which the candidate with the most votes nationwide still lost. They say that these are unfair situations.
In a nutshell, every modern supportive argument hinges on the idea that a pure democracy leads to mob rule or rule by the minority. Supporters of the Electoral College say that a pure popular vote would mean a few populous states or cities would decide for the whole country. They say that these are unfair situations.
The irony is that everything the modern opponents and critics have to say are technically correct. Either way you slice it, voting is an unfair way of making a decision about anything. But in getting caught up on the issue of what’s a fair way to vote, neither side is addressing what the founders were concerned about when they came up with the Electoral College.
When Hamilton wrote Federalist 68 he was exclusively concerned with making the point that the Electoral College system would best lead to the selection of a President fit for the job AND least likely to create factions within the nation.
A quality Candidate:
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” — Federalist 68
Unlikely to create factions:
“The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” — Federalist 68
Given that all forms of voting will have some inherent level of unfairness and disappointment (even when you win, sometimes it’s not your ideal candidate), Hamilton and the other founders were also focussed on making a system that would be as cheat-proof as possible while also honoring the republican system of government outlined throughout the Constitution.
“Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” — Federalist 68
Unlike modern commentators (except in this article, duh), the founders could acknowledge that picking a president was a lot less about giving everyone their say than it was about preventing actively malignant parties from having their sway. Let’s look at the methods by which the Electoral College achieves those ends.
How the hell do we get around to that funky number 538 anyway? Well, recall way above like 400 words ago that Federalist 68 describes selecting a number of electors from each state equal to the state’s number of representatives in the House and Senate. In other words, the Electoral College is a temporary Congress dedicated to selecting the President and it performs the same representative republican duty that our standing Congress performs in all other tasks. So I’d love to hear opponents of the Electoral College explain why it should be abolished but not Congress itself. They are conceptually-identical bodies founded on the same philosophical principles — if you don’t believe that you are represented by the Electoral College, how can you believe you are represented by Congress?
But if Congress and the Electoral College are fundamentally alike, why should we need a temporary Congress to elect the President instead of just letting the boring regular Congress do it? Well just look at how bought-and-paid-for the members of our regular Congress are already. Do any of them not have a lobbyist in their pocket giving their tushy a squish? Hamilton was very worried about the tushy-squishing special interests and the fact that standing members of Congress were sitting ducks for manipulation, explaining thus:
“They (the Constitutional Convention) have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.” — Federalist 68
The advantage of a temporary Congress is two-fold. First, the members are pretty well hidden from the public eye and are only visible for a short time while they serve their role. So it’s hard to approach a bunch of them to convince them to “prostitute their votes.” Second, they only have one job to do, so there’s no room for typical politician stuff like, “Hey Nancy, if you get me votes for my bill of money-wasting crap, I’ll get you votes for your bill of money-wasting crap too. It’ll make our respective lobbyists really happy and I’m sure we both could use bonuses for our new mansions. Love, Mitch.”
In a nutshell, if you want to manipulate the electing officers, the Electoral College doesn’t provide very much time to identify them before their job is done.
The Electoral College is also spatially different from regular Congress in that the members do not all meet together in the same place to vote.
“as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.” — Federalist 68
What’s the advantage in having the electors vote in separate, simultaneous elections? There are several actually. On the one hand, this is yet another way that cheating is prevented. It’s much harder to bribe, blackmail, interrupt or tamper with 51 simultaneous voting procedures than a single one.
Even more important though is the idea of avoiding “heats and ferments.” Basically, you can imagine that electors meeting only with other people from their own state are going to have more in common and therefore reach a selection together more easily than if members of all the states gathered together. Hamilton isn’t alive to tell us, but I doubt he wanted Gangs of New York to play out every four years when choosing the President.
I also want to point out that the distributed election system does more to strengthen the Union than a single popular vote ever could. Each state is its own country in many respects, and the people of each state tend to have a sense that they are not just Americans, but also Texans, Californians, Iowans, etc. Selecting your electors is like selecting your state legislature. It’s therefore healthy to let the decisions happen at the state level because it reinforces the importance of states’ rights at the federal level.
Let’s step back a second and think about how crazy it is that every four years we have nearly 400 million people getting together to pick a new leader (for lack of a better word) to represent our interests. These are risky times and were it not for the Electoral College violence would be an inevitable aspect of elections.
I mean, you can’t get six people in a room to agree what toppings belong on pizza and even that might get heated. Inevitably it turns out that one of their mom owns a pizzeria, and wrote the book on pizza. All of a sudden, everything is a family sleight. Next thing you know we’re in court for manslaughter. By the way pineapple on pizza is not just ok, it is an improvement.
So how do we end up with a system that enables nearly half a billion people to weigh candidates who may or may not take your guns, freedoms, and money away without devolving into civil war, when half of you just lost your shit over the previous sentence?
Well, the first thing is that by putting the decision into the hands of a much fewer number of people, the Electoral College gives everybody someone to blame that isn’t everybody on the other side. If your district elects Frank to represent it in the Electoral College in your state and he comes back having voted for Kamala then everyone can blame Frank later when the stores are empty and we don’t even have pineapple for the pizzas. You will still have social strife, but it’ll all be directed at Frank. And in a manner of speaking he would totally deserve it and we can all unite over the fact that Frank sucks and he’s not getting chosen next time.
Clearly though, the founders hoped that the selection of Electors would lead to more qualified, intelligent members of the population to be selected. Frank can’t be just some random guy. No, he needs to be Frank M.D., who reads the newspaper daily, serves on the local fire brigade, father of 6 strapping sons, 6 beautiful daughters, who all pray and sing in the local choir. He’s the guy everyone knows and trusts to go make a good choice that will favor the town. It’s our version of sending the strongest warrior to the mountain to slay the beast.
“It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” — Federalist 68
It’s a reality we’re all struggling with today when we look at undecided voters: How can they be so dumb when the facts are so clear? Well the founders looked at that and had no bones about the issue. Most people should not have much to say about the President. Although Hamilton does say that “It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided”, that clearly wasn’t an invitation for every uninformed boob to take to the ballot.
When they said, “The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” they meant that if informed, intelligent, interested people did the choosing then they’d certainly pick a person at least as qualified as they were. I doubt any of the writers who ever quoted that line out of context after the 2016 elections would make the cut, by the way.
By breaking the election into several miniature representative elections, the founders intended to raise the saturation of informed participants involved. Popular votes do the opposite: They dilute the informed participants among idiots. Thus the Electoral College ultimately mitigates the social risk of unwanted election results. Informed people can look at Frank and say, “Man I can’t believe he got that wrong. I always thought he was smart, but I guess we’ll have to do better next time.” In their turn, dumb people can say, “uh, well maybe he knows sumthin better than me and that was actually a good choice.”
The important thing is that we don’t all end up kicking each others’ asses or burning down the town because of an election result.
A seriously overlooked flaw in the idea of a pure popular vote is that it completely violates the intricate system of checks and balances that our founders set up throughout the Constitution. Often, that concept is simplified to include only the three major federal branches of government but there are checks at the state and local levels as well. The Electoral College itself serves as one in the ways discussed already — the Congress cannot exert undo power in selecting a president, nor can the existing state legislatures.
However, the founders were even concerned about resolving the issue of the citizens having undo sway. So in the event that the people cannot determine a proper candidate through their selected electors, the decision then returns to the House of Representatives:
“as a majority of the votes might not always happen to centre in one man, and as it might be unsafe to permit less than a majority to be conclusive, it is provided that, in such a contingency, the House of Representatives shall select out of the candidates who shall have the five highest number of votes, the man who in their opinion may be best qualified for the office.” — Federalist 68
We ought to be able to acknowledge the brilliance of this. On the one hand, the founders had to contend with the risk of letting Congress pick a President, which would basically make Presidential candidates pander to Representatives and owe them favors later, rather than to the people, which would undermine the independence of the Executive branch. On the other hand, they had to acknowledge that it’s a bit odd to say to Congressional members, “hey I know you all got elected to represent the people but you just can’t be entrusted with this important decision you corrupt bastards.” Yet another problem was that the masses are generally not to be trusted either and sometimes Frank, the best of them, is still a jackass.
The founders balanced that whole can of worms by saying, look, if it turns out that the people can’t be counted on to reach a consensus, then we’re going back to the House to choose among the top 5 options. That’s a brilliant solution that allows the Federal government to resolve an issue among the states — checking the power of the states and the people to mess up a critical issue of federal leadership. Popular votes do not have any form of backup plan like this — hell, we can’t even audit our votes anymore.
I felt compelled to write this too-long-for-the-internet post because I’m just infuriated by the usual arguments bandied about regarding the Electoral College. We’re often too caught up looking at the results of doing this or that as if the results we see are even half as relevant as the results avoided by doing this or that. The Electoral College was fully developed as a problem-preventing mechanism and we need to factor that into our discussions. Dissolve it, and we’ll be inviting a whole slew of undesirable consequences that aren’t even on most peoples’ mental maps. But they were certainly on the minds of the Founders.
Stay tuned for my follow up piece: Actual problems with the Electoral College worth Considering