The Electoral College Has to Go
Caroline Blake
August 31, 2024
Waking up on November 9th, 2016, I felt a sense of dread as I lugged my feet downstairs to breakfast. After growing increasingly anxious at CNN’s projection for the 45th president of the United States, I had told my mom to wake me if Hillary Clinton made a major comeback, but, unfortunately, that night I slept undisturbed.
As fourth-grade me tried to make sense of it all, various words kept getting thrown around by my parents, teachers, and more politically educated friends, but here were the ones I heard most often: “popular vote” and “Electoral College.” From my rudimentary understanding of American government, I believed that Hillary had simply been outvoted, a misconception my dad later corrected by explaining to me the system known as the Electoral College. My response: “That’s stupid.” While I might phrase it differently now, I maintain my fourth-grade stance, and here’s why.
Evolving since its founding in 1787, the Electoral College now consists of 538 electors. Electors are often state-elected officials, state party leaders, or political affiliates. To be elected President, a candidate must win a majority of 270 electoral votes. Each state is granted the same number of electors as members of its congressional delegation. For almost all of the states, the electoral votes are distributed on a “winner takes all” basis, meaning that whoever wins the state’s popular vote, no matter the margin, takes all of the state’s electoral votes. This winner-takes-all system reveals how a candidate can win the popular vote and still lose the election, a situation that has occurred on five separate occasions: the elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Before we dive into the way the Electoral College fails democracy, let’s start with its history.
Written into the Constitution by the founding fathers, the Electoral College began as a compromise between a presidential election by Congress and a presidential election by nationwide vote. Founders believed that voters would be ill-informed of the candidates running for president and therefore needed the Electoral College to serve as a voice of reason with the “information and discernment,” in Alexander Hamilton’s words, necessary to choose a president. Of course, in that era, a political “safety belt” may have made sense. However, nowadays, the development of political parties and campaigns, not to mention their social media presence and television coverage, teach voters much of what they need to know to make an educated and informed decision.
While the “safety belt” reasoning serves no real purpose anymore, it wasn’t the only motivation behind the institution of the Electoral College, and the other has left much more lasting and detrimental effects.
Before deciding how to choose a president, the founders had already made the three-fifths compromise, designating enslaved people as worth only three-fifths of a person. Thus, southern states were given electoral votes for three-fifths of their slave populations and by extension had a greater influence than northern ones on the electoral process. Consequently, even though the 1790 census lists Virginia and Pennsylvania as home to the same amount of free white male adults, the only eligible voters at that time, Virginia had 21 electoral votes to Pennsylvania’s 15. The only reason for their varying votes: Virginia had 292,627 enslaved residents to Pennsylvania’s 3,737.
In 1868, after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment withdrew the three-fifths clause. However, the 15th Amendment, supposedly meant to protect and legalize African Americans’ right to vote, actually intensified the Electoral College’s prejudice. Southern governments relished the House representation that their larger Black populations granted them but implemented discriminatory practices, like literacy tests and poll taxes, to prevent those very populations from voting.
Today, these decisions, made more than a century ago, harm Black voters, and by extension, our democracy. Many Black voters who live in reliably Republican states and thereby have electors who vote Republican don’t have as powerful an influence as the voters in more impactful states like those all-important “swing states.” While almost every voter who doesn’t live in a swing state possesses less power, according to a constitutional law scholar and professor at Brooklyn Law, Wilfred Codrington III, “[swing states are] not reflective of the country’s demographics” and “white voters are generally overrepresented.” In this way, white voters receive more power to make election-shifting decisions when voting.
This privilege extends beyond plain luck or coincidence of geography, as “One Difficulty…of a Serious Nature”: The Overlooked Racial Dynamics of the Electoral College, a qualitative analysis by William D. Blake, finds that “on average, as a state’s racial composition gets whiter, its electoral power increases.” Even more damning is the finding that “a state that is 10% whiter than the average state tends to have one extra electoral vote per million adult residents than the average state.”
In addition to its questionable history and disenfranchising racial biases, the Electoral College’s systemic process undermines democracy entirely. In the 21st century’s six elections so far, only once has the Republican candidate won the popular vote, yet we’ve had three Republican presidents in office. In other words, only once this century has a Republican president been elected by the majority of the people. In 2016, more Americans voted for Hilary Clinton than any other candidate who has ever lost the presidential election. The 2020 election was considered an extremely tight race, yet Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes and still almost lost. For a country that claims to be a champion of democracy for the rest of the world, the U.S. features an awful lot of minority rule.
The Electoral College creates a voting currency that differs from state to state. Vermont has voted blue in every presidential election for over 30 years, so voting in Vermont carries very little weight since its electoral votes will almost certainly go toward the Democrat. Meanwhile, voting in “swing” states, with more competitive elections, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, can prove extremely valuable. Such disproportionate levels of power in individual citizens’ votes do not represent a democracy.
The Electoral College’s defenders believe that without the system, candidates would focus only on densely populated areas like the East and West Coast, leaving less populated areas neglected. While I think that’s a legitimate concern, it seems a bit hypocritical since, as things stand, some states already receive far more attention than others based on their contested electoral status. Whether states are populated or not, their populations make up America, and it should be America’s majority that chooses the president—not the few historically entitled states that decide the election for all.
The Electoral College’s impact on the upcoming election has yet to be seen, but it’ll undoubtedly determine our next president, and with it, the direction of the next four years. We must all unite to mobilize the political will to eliminate the deeply flawed Electoral College and defend our democratic integrity.