On the first Monday after the second Wednesday, this December, an elite group of 538 political insiders will gather and vote on who the next leader of the Free World will be. This is of course the quadrennial convergence of the Electoral College gathering to decide who the next President will be.
As per Article 1 Section 2 of the United States Constitution, it is up to this group of electors to decide who the president of the United States will. According to Federalist 68, penned by Alexander Hamilton, the Electoral College was originally meant to act as a failsafe to protect the United States Government from the direct election of an unqualified or rogue candidate by its own citizens. The Electoral College has never actually acted in this capacity, though. Rather, it has been more or less a formality in the electoral process, often being in line with the popular vote with just four exceptions (not including the 1824 election of John Quincy Adams), the most recent being the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
While four exceptions may sound almost imperceptible compared to the 57 elections the United States has held, when you break the numbers it is a failure rate in the democratic process of almost 7%. Seven percent of the time the winner of an election actually loses it. To put this in perspective, I’ll take a page from the Trump campaign to explain: If I had a bowl of Skittles and told you just 7% of them would kill you, would you take a handful? Probably not. Better yet, what if I told you that in 7% of all NFL Super Bowl games, the team with the most touchdowns would actually lose because of a 226-year-old technicality no one ever got around to changing; would you be willing to accept that? I think the answer from most people would be “probably not,” so why should we accept this failure of democracy when we wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen anywhere else?
The Electoral College has long been a flawed system from its inception. As most people learned in high school history, the founding fathers chose the Electoral College over direct election with good intentions; it was a way to balance the influence and interests of high-population and low-population states in presidential elections. But in a speech in July of 1787 (during the Constitutional Convention), Founding Father and “father of the Constitution” James Madison said that “Negroes” in the South presented a “difficulty … of a serious nature,” and in that same speech, proposed the electoral college prototype the United States currently uses today. Madison was, of course, a slave-owner in Virginia, which at the time was the most populous of the 13 states if the count included slaves, who made up about 40% of its population at the time.
During that key speech which changed the entire future of American democracy, Madison said that with a popular vote, the Southern states, “could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” At the time, the North outnumbered the South despite there being more than half a million slaves in the South who, even though they were the people who were the cornerstone of the Southern economy, couldn’t vote on account of their race.
With the Electoral College came the infamous “three-fifths compromise,” which stated that black people could be counted as three-fifths of a person, instead of a whole, which ultimately garnered Virginia twelve out of 91 electoral votes, accounting for more than a quarter of what a president needed to win. It was a combination of the three-fifths clause and the Electoral College which enabled Thomas Jefferson to beat out John Adams in 1800, who was vigorously opposed to slavery.
Even to this day, the Electoral College manages to misrepresent the actual voting populations of states, giving more power to small states and taking power away from states where more people actually live. For example, on average a state is awarded one electoral vote for every 565,166 people. But in Wyoming’s case, they have three electoral votes (each state no matter how small has a minimum of three electoral votes) and only 532,668 citizens (as of 2008 estimates). As a result, each of Wyoming's three electoral votes corresponds to 177,556 people. In simpler terms, these people have 3.18 times as much clout in the Electoral College as an average American, or 318% more power.
As another example, there are 11.5 million people in Ohio so to fairly represent them, it should get 20 electoral votes. But instead, it only gets 18. The two missing votes, instead of being given to Ohio, are sent to States like Rhode Island, who only have about 1.1 million people and would only get about two votes in the Electoral College if it weren’t for the mandatory minimum of three votes. After the small states get their automatic three votes, the votes from larger states are then peeled off and distributed to smaller states based on population, so Rhode Island now gets its other two votes that they’re entitled to from the population rule, from Ohio.
Because of this rule, there are a lot of states with a few people that should only have one or two votes in the Electoral College but instead get three or four. Because of this system, Georgians, Virginians, Michiganders & Jerseyites are each missing one vote; Pennsylvanians, North Carolinians, Ohioans & Hoosiers are missing two; Floridians are missing four, New Yorkers, five, Texans six; and Californians are ten short of what they should actually get. Because of this vote redistribution, the Electoral College essentially pretends that fewer people live where they do and more people live where they don't. In Electoral College math, one aforementioned Wyomingite’s vote is worth four Californians'.
The argument in favor of this screwy arithmetic is that if you give the smaller states more voting power, then presidential candidates will be forced to pay more attention to them. That was true at a time when there were only 13 states and 91 total electoral votes. But in modern America, with 538 total electoral votes and 50 states, those smaller state’s three votes are literal peanuts. When you look at the number of public appearances Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan held following the 2012 Democratic National Convention until Election Day, only 12 states had been visited and only 8 of those states had more than ten visits from the presidential or vice presidential candidate. Of those states, only three, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire, had 6 or fewer delegates in the Electoral College.
The situation doesn’t get much better when you look at ad spending either. President Obama spent $314.8 million on television advertising from April 11 to Election Day, and 99.6% of that money was spent targeting voters in just ten states, with once again the same three states being targeted. Governor Romney, on the other hand, spent $147.8 million on television advertising from April 11 to Election Day, with 99.9% of that money targeting voters in just ten states, and this time only two of those states, Iowa and Nevada, having six or fewer delegates.
This all goes without mentioning the flawed “winner take all system” imposed by the Electoral College in 48 states (Nebraska and Maine allocate their delegates like this: one delegate is awarded to the winner of the statewide popular vote, and the rest are awarded based on the winner of each congressional district). Due to the fact that in order to win a state you only need 50% + 1 of the votes, it is possible to win the electoral with just 22% of the popular vote. Start with Wyoming, the state where 0.18% of Americans live but who get 0.56% of the Electoral College votes for president. Because it’s a winner take all system, you don’t need all of them to vote for you, just half plus one or 0.09%. Next up is the District of Columbia where winning 0.1% of the population also gets you an additional 0.56% of the electoral college. Then add in wins in Vermont, and North Dakota, and Alaska, and keep going up from the states with the smallest populations to the largest until you get to New Jersey in which case the example candidate has achieved a majority in the Electoral College of 50.19%. By taking advantage of unfair rules and winning states opposed to people, this gives the candidate a majority in the Electoral College even though 78% of the population voted against them.
To put it simply, this isn’t democracy, this is an indefensible system that seemingly benefits no one except the political elite. Until we overturn it, we will never have a true democracy. How can the United States be the world purveyor of democracy when it doesn't even adhere to the most simple guidelines of it? Instead of allowing the people to choose who their next leader will be, we rely on a racist Pre-Civil War system of unelected electors to determine the next leader of the Free World, and that's not democracy. That's oligarchy.
