ACTION

“The American founders saw democracy as part of a republic form of government prone to descend into corrupt and/or mob rule and demagoguery. Which is why they attempted to protect against that with constitutional provisions limiting the power of the government and mandating an electoral college to bring into balance the interests of both small and large members.”—Frank Salter

Plato’s Republic heavily influenced Madison and the other Framers to devise a constitution that protected the minority. Plato held that the ideal (aka just) form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between workers, warriors, and rulers. Madison held that the ideal (aka American) form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between judges, lawmakers, and rulers. Inspired as it is, our Constitution protects the minority while preserving the best of democracy: we the people elect representatives to run the government (republic) and we do so by majority vote (democracy). Ergo, this is a democratic republic. Ergo, the Electoral College.

The purpose of the Electoral College is to balance voting power across states so no one region of the country can gain too much control. If a president is elected by a simple majority of votes, a candidate who is wildly popular in one region (e.g., Ted Cruz in Texas, Ron DeSantis in Florida) can ignore smaller regions and campaign only where large majorities are possible. The founders designed the Electoral College to help ensure that states, with diverse preferences among them, could cohere under a single federal government.

Anyone who thinks this concern is irrelevant today hasn’t been paying attention to the current polarization in American politics. The Electoral College helps check polarization by forcing Presidential candidates to campaign in competitive states across the country, instead of spending all their time trying to motivate turnout in populous partisan strongholds.

Presidential elections often do not produce popular majorities. In 2016 neither mrs.b.j Clinton (nor did her husband in the 1990’s) nor Trump won 50%. “Plurality rules” doesn’t have the same ring to it. In the absence of the Electoral College, the winner’s vote share would likely be significantly smaller than is common today. 3rd, or 4th, or 5th, etc.  party candidates who can’t realistically win a majority in any state would have a greater incentive to enter the race. What if a President was elected with 30% of the vote in an election featuring 5 formidable 3rd-party candidates? A free-for-all plebiscite would hurt the system’s legitimacy. The Electoral College helps narrow the field to usually 2, occasionally 3 serious contenders, as voters decide not to waste their vote on candidates who have no chance to win.

The Electoral College also contributes to political stability by delegating vote-counting to the states and thus delivering with rare exceptions a faster result. The uncertainty arising from a nationwide recount for President amid myriad regional irregularities—as happened in North Carolina and Florida in 2018—would make Florida 2000 look tame.

Consider the practical implications of this radical plan to remove an institution that has stabilized our political life for more than 200 years. The urban centers of America, run almost exclusively by left-wing/democrats for decades, which would become dominant under the plan, are also the centers of America’s crime problems, gun homicides, intractable poverty, failed public schools, high taxes, over-burdening regulations and political corruption. Do we really want to replicate for all America the failed welfare & economic policies that have created a permanent underclass in cities like Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore, San Franciso, Philadelphia, etc, etc.?

The electoral college was an integral part of the federal plan, part of a very successful plan for balancing power and has helped maintain a high level of tranquility and cooperation. It made a place for the states as well as the people in electing presidents. Without the electoral college there be no sense in having states, except as administrative apparatus for a centralized government.

What remains in question is that in a desperately divided society does there still remain the will to not just recognize the important issues but also the impact of their breath and depth, in time? The Founders’ ingenious design to produce compromise between competing factions and to put checks and balances on radical adventures was never more needed than now, when the country is divided in a way that it has not been seen since the Civil War. But apparently this is the perfect time for an out-of-touch and increasingly out-of-control left-wing/democratic Party to undermine the constitutional foundations of the nation, push a divisive agenda, and move the nation towards a one-party state, with all the dangers to our freedom and prosperity that entails. 

The national popular vote movement is a left-wing/democrat scheme that proposes an interstate compact in which participating states agree in advance to automatically allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, disregarding the popular vote results in their states or what the relevant legislatures might then desire. It would put the fate of every Presidential election in the hands of the voters in as few as 11 states and thus undermine the protections that the Electoral College affords to smaller states. It is an expedient way to circumvent the Electoral College without formally amending the Constitution.