Why do we still have the electoral college? A majority of Americans support replacing the electoral college with a national popular vote. Indeed, this has been true for decades. Since the electoral college currently advantages Republicans, it is understandable, if opportunistic, for them to defend it. But there are also less partisan advocates of the electoral college. And it is worth considering some of their arguments to see if there are any strong, non-partisan grounds for maintaining the electoral college.
Tara Ross, a lawyer and political commentator, offers one such example, having written several books on the topic. I will focus on one particular essay in which she makes the case for the electoral college in clear and concise terms.
First off, Ross notes that the founders did not intend to create a direct democracy. This is generally true, though some founders, like Thomas Jefferson, did at times flirt with visions of local, direct democracy. It is also not relevant. Calls to replace the electoral college with a national popular vote are calls for instituting genuine representative democracy in national Presidential elections. They are not calls for national direct democracy, if that means citizens voting directly on legislation.
Ross draws on a number of passages from the Federalist Papers to demonstrate that many of the Founders were deeply concerned with the potential tyranny of the majority. True again. Indeed, many of the Constitution’s anti-majoritarian features were designed precisely with this concern in mind, i.e. how to prevent a democratic majority from forming and acting effectively in national politics. Although Ross quotes Madison expressing concern for the tyranny of the majority, she does not note that he was in later years a strong critic of the electoral college.
Likewise, Madison’s famous quote that democracies "have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths" is not very compelling. Ancient Athens lasted for almost two hundred years and other greek city states also experimented with democracy for long periods of time. It is not at all clear that they were, or current democracies are, any more turbulent than other systems of government. Similarly, Swiss cantons had already had centuries of experiments with local forms of democracy by the time of Madison’s writing. Similar quotes from other founders are equally non-empirical and misguided. It is important to remember as well that the past two centuries of quality scholarship has given us far more information and insight regarding ancient democracy than the founders had at their disposal. Their quick dismissals of Greek democracy, for instance, have not aged well.
I do agree with Ross that many of the founders were critical of direct democracy and yet wanted a government influenced by “the sense of the people.” It is difficult to talk of the Founders’ as if they all had one intention but examination of the Federalist Papers, words spoken at the constitutional convention, and correspondence among the Founders generally supports Ross’ characterization. They described both direct democracy and republican (or electoral) democracy as “popular” forms of government, hoping to carry the democratic legitimacy of ancient direct democracy over to modern representative government.
Ross thus calls the electoral college an “ingenious solution to many 18th century problems.” But it wasn’t. The problem with the electoral college is not that it is outdated; rather, it didn’t make sense to begin with. Historian Alexander Keyssar documents the almost instant efforts to reform or abolish the electoral college that occupied American politics from 1800 into the 1820s. Many founders, including Madison, came to explicitly oppose the electoral college; some advocated a direct popular vote for President in its place.
And as Keyssar has noted, the electoral college never functioned as a system in which wise electors carefully discussed the merits of the presidential candidates and then chose one. Rather, they simply became a proxy for the vote of the people, casting their votes for whichever candidate won their state.
This is perhaps why Federalist 68 is so uninteresting. The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, are a brilliant set of writings (85 essays in total) explaining the structure of the constitution and defending the principles that animate it. Federalist 68, on the electoral college, is not one of the great Federalist essays. Written by Hamilton, it briefly explains how the electoral college works and then offers a limited, fairly uninteresting defense, not least of which because the electoral college doesn’t work as Hamilton and other founders had hoped it would.
It’s not clear we can even speak of a unitary Founders’ “intention” here. The electoral college was relegated to the end of the constitutional convention, the committee on postponed parts, because no one could agree on how to select the President. The electoral college was a temporary least-bad solution that the constitution’s signatories could all accept in the short term, mainly because they could not yet agree on a better option. It was a rushed, ungainly compromise. As mentioned above, key figures like James Madison quickly came to criticize it, it never functioned as intended, and early American politics was defined in large part over battles to reform or abolish it.
The other set of arguments in defense of the electoral college tends to focus on the purported impact it has on Presidential campaigns. For instance, Ross claims that because of the electoral college “presidential candidates therefore tour the nation, campaigning in all states and seeking to build a national coalition that will enable them to win a majority of states’ electoral votes.”
This is exactly what the the electoral college does not do. Candidates spend most time and money in a tiny number of swing states, maybe around ten, to the neglect of other states, large and small, as documented in Jesse Wegman’s Let the People Pick the President. Hence the brilliance of the 2016 Trump campaign—it focused on winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and thus the electoral college. Contrary to persuading a national majority, the Trump campaign effectively focused on turning out and flipping tens of thousands of voters in a small region of the country. And it worked. Similarly, the 2020 Biden campaign focused heavily on trying to flip those three states back, which it did, thus winning the Presidency. One study of the 2000 election found that 25 of the largest media markets in America “did not see a single campaign ad,” presumably because they were located in safe states.
In keeping with this line of argument, Ross claims that if we eliminate the electoral college “small states would likely never receive as much attention as their larger neighbors.” But as Wegman and others have established, this already happens. No one campaigns in Vermont or Wyoming. There is another concern here, either implicit or explicit, found in the works of electoral college defenders like Ross and George Will. This concern is that if we get rid of the electoral college large states and large population centers will get more attention from Presidential candidates.
In so far as this is true why is this a problem? In a democracy, representative or direct, every one is supposed to get one vote. So areas with more voters will have more impact. This concern is thus incoherent from a democratic perspective. It is as if I complain that New York City has more impact on presidential elections than I do. Yes, that is how democracy works: a city with 8 million residents will have more impact than me. To be bothered by this is to be bothered by democracy and the counting of equal votes.
Furthermore, this concern appears to be empirically misguided. In campaigns for Governor, which cover an entire state, campaign resources and attention are usually spent roughly in proportion to the population of each area within the state. In other words, if a major metro area contains half of a state’s voters it will tend to get half of the campaign ads and events. From a democratic perspective this is both what we should predict and desire. Presumably something similar would happen nationally, giving all voters an equal weight in the power of their vote and thus their ability to draw media attention and campaign resources.
One does not have to believe in the value of direct forms of democracy, as I do, to see that the arguments in favor of maintaining the electoral college are not strong. The basic democratic principle is that whichever candidate or policy gets the most votes is the winner. This is the whole point of voting, to let the people decide. In the 21st century the electoral college functions more as a coin-toss than a popular election. It is time to retire the electoral college.