As a student of political science, it consistently irks me when people refer to the government of the United States as a democracy. While the constitution of the United States adopts a democratic approach in how it makes many of it’s decisions, citizens are ultimately tasked with electing representatives who they feel will act in their best interest. Therefore, calling the United States a democratic republic is far more accurate than calling it a true democracy. This simultaneously tired and important distinction needs to be made every four years, like clockwork, when the legitimacy of the Electoral College is inevitably called into question following a presidential election.
As an institution, the Electoral College has been in place since the birth of our country as a means of electing our president. It was actually written about in the nation’s formative years by many of the framers of the constitution, sometimes in great deal. For example, president John Quincy Adams once wrote, “The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.” In saying this, he is absolutely right. Pure democracies, while fair and laudable on paper, are completely unworkable in practice.
In a pure democracy, which would be the institution that would naturally replace the Electoral College were it to cease operation, is problematic by its very nature. For a true democracy to operate, the demos, that is the voting public, are to decide on all matters of state, large and small. Naturally, this would force citizens to vote on issues that they have little to no information on, and it would be nearly impossible to keep the populace adequately informed on all the issues that concern all the branches and bureaus within the United States government.
While operating under a true, pure democracy, the individual will likely come across what is known in political science as a collective action problem. This is a moral dilemma faced by a voter when he or she needs to decide whether to vote based on their personal needs or the needs of the many. There are equal incentives to be selfish and selfless respectively. This dilemma will be faced by each voter each time they step within the voting booth for every possible issue they will vote on.
Therefore, when someone says that the Electoral College is undemocratic, they are correct, but their implication of that being a bad thing is absolutely incorrect. The Electoral College is a system that, while complicated in its own right, protects the ways and means of the state itself from the foolish and uninformed masses that it subjugates and is composed of.
While it is true that smaller states have more power based on percentage, this too is not a bad thing and is simply a quality of the way the Electoral College operates. Under this system, based on population, in terms of counting towards individual electoral votes, votes in Wyoming count roughly four times more than a vote in California. This point is often brought up as something of a “gotcha,” but those who make this point fail to remember that when electoral votes are being tallied, California still has 55 votes to Wyoming’s three. If the popular vote was tallied instead of the electoral vote, the will of the people in larger states would trample over the voices of those in small states. In a pure democracy, candidates would essentially be campaigning exclusively in big cities and nowhere else.
Another common denunciation of the Electoral College is that in swing states are the only states focused on during campaigns. This is also a true fact, but it isn’t a bad thing. If New York is a traditionally liberal state, and it has been safely blue for years, it wouldn’t make much sense for a conservative to waste ever-precious campaign funds in states they’re not likely to win regardless. It is also true that, due to the nature of swing states, it is likely that a vast amount of the population of these states will not have their voices heard due to the winner-take-all approach adopted by almost all of the states, though I agree that this can be a bad thing. However, it is important to remember that the ideological identity of states can change over time. In fact it wasn’t too long ago that California, today seen as a haven for liberals, was a safely conservative state.
The winner-take-all approach used within the Electoral College is what I believe to be the more archaic and bizarre quirks that we could stand to do away with. The way this idea works is that whichever candidate wins more individual votes in a state gets all of the electoral votes assigned to that state. This is a system that is instituted in every state in the union with the exception of Maine and Nebraska. In lieu of this system, I believe an electoral system based simply on congressional districts would make much more sense for individuals living in certain areas within the states. It can be said without a doubt that New York residents living in the Adirondack mountains likely have different priorities and desires compared to those living in Brooklyn.
While it isn’t a perfect system by any measure, the Electoral College as an institution is the best way for the American people to select their presidents. It may not always produce the results that certain individuals want, but that doesn’t mean that a radical tearing down of the system to be replaced with a new one is a necessary measure.
