Flunk the Electoral College: Getting Rid of the Exploding Cigar of American Politics

By Michael Waldman, Brennan Center for Justice. Posted June 12, 2008.

It was the end of the long, sweltering summer at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Delegates were anxious to finish, but a big question remained: How would the new office of president be filled? One delegate wanted Congress to choose. Another wanted a popular election; that idea was overwhelmingly voted down. It would be "unnatural," warned one foe. Southern states had extra representation in Congress because slaves were counted in the population, under the grand compromise that allowed the Constitution to move forward; a popular vote would wipe out that advantage, since slaves don't vote.

The delegates referred the mess to the Committee of Detail, which wrote a draft of the Constitution with the Electoral College as a rather convoluted solution. The states would each choose electors, with one electoral vote per senator and House member. That way small states, especially slave states, would have extra clout. If no one got an electoral vote majority, the House of Representatives would decide. Anyway, everyone knew George Washington would be the first president. With a shrug, the founding fathers moved on to other matters.

The Electoral College is the exploding cigar of American politics. Four times, the candidate who won fewer votes nonetheless has become president. (Political scientists, with rare concision, call this the "wrong winner" problem.) In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the most total votes, but not enough states to win the Electoral College. The House of Representatives picked John Quincy Adams instead, after a bitterly alleged "corrupt bargain" with another candidate. Then, in 1876, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won more votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but not an Electoral College majority. The deadlocked election went to Congress. The deal: Republicans got the White House, but Democrats got federal troops pulled out of the South, ending Reconstruction and ushering in 90 years of repression against the former slaves and their descendants. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.

And in 2000, Al Gore got half a million votes more than George W. Bush, a wider popular vote margin than John F. Kennedy had to best Richard Nixon -- but with Florida, Bush won the Electoral College, 271-266.

Near misses are even more common. In 2004, Bush won the popular vote, but a switch of 60,000 in Ohio would have elected John Kerry. In 1976, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives with the shift of a few thousand votes in Delaware and Ohio. Any race could turn on such a fluke. And when the House chooses, each state gets one vote, giving empty Idaho the same say as crowded California. Massive pressure would push lawmakers to back the candidate of their party, not the voters. The resulting political fracas would dwarf anything seen in a century.

All that is true in a year when the system doesn't work -- when the runner-up gets the gold medal. But the truth is, the Electoral College warps competition and subverts political equality even when it does work.

Because most states are reliably "red" or "blue," candidates focus nearly all their efforts on a few "swing" states. As a result, many voters never see a campaign ad, receive more than a perfunctory candidate visit, or experience the mass mobilization and get-out-the-vote fervor of a real campaign. As late as 1976, 40 states were tightly contested, including all the big ones. More recently, though, only about 17 states were in play by November. As Business Week notes, "The corn farmer living in Iowa (one of the Sweet Seventeen) is coveted by both parties and showered with goodies such as ethanol subsidies. But just next door, the wheat grower in Republican South Dakota is insignificant to presidential candidates. Ditto the hog farmer in Nebraska, the potato grower in Idaho, and the rancher in Oklahoma."

Imagine, by contrast, a system in which every vote counted equally. Candidates would be forced to appeal to the broadest groups of voters, forced to campaign where people actually live, forced to focus on turnout.

The Electoral College is such an obvious affront to basic democracy that its backers have a hard time finding arguments to defend it. Political scientist Norman Ornstein argues, "three (or four) crises out of more than 50 presidential elections is remarkably small." Few of the assertions, even if true, are strong enough to overcome the fact that the winning candidate can lose. For example, defenders insist the system protects the power of states with lower populations. In a technical sense, this may be true. More accurately, though, the system protects swing states, not small states. Candidates do little or no campaigning in reliably Republican Idaho or Democratic Rhode Island. More, the focus on small versus large states risks confusing legal jurisdictions with actual people. States aren't living beings; people are. (As one website drolly puts it, "Dirt Don't Vote.") It is far more important that citizens have their voices heard than that states do. Gun owners or women or students or evangelical Christians live all over the country -- but only the ones in Ohio or Florida get wooed and get organized. Supporters also note that the Electoral College helps create consensus and confer legitimacy by making narrow victories seem wider than they are. True, except for when the system demolishes legitimacy by picking the wrong candidate.

For a long time, the Electoral College seemed like a quaint anachronism with little real impact, little more than a question on the citizenship test and a subject for political thriller novels. Then, of course, came the 2000 election. The aftermath of that contest has forced campaigns and ordinary voters to focus more on the system. Rather than taking it as a distorting given, though, we can do something about it.

Change the Constitution

Why not change the Constitution? That solution is obvious, elegant and very difficult. The greatest strides toward democracy often have come through amendments. In fact, five of the Constitutional amendments have changed who can vote and how. (Most recently, the voting age was lowered to 18.) But to change the charter, first the House and Senate must both pass the amendment by two-thirds votes, then three-fourths of the states must approve. The machinery of the Constitution is precisely calibrated to discourage a change like this.

We came close in recent memory. The 1968 election scared many from both parties, because racist independent candidate George Wallace came close to denying an Electoral College victory to the winner -- and could have bargained for the presidency with civil rights laws as a chip. In 1969, the House overwhelmingly voted to end the Electoral College system. Both Johnson and Nixon supported the move; only 70 lawmakers voted no. But the measure was filibustered to death in the Senate by senators from low-turnout, mostly Southern, states, who worried that their interests would be overwhelmed by urban voting blocs. Then a few years later, a similar plan was stymied by new opposition from blacks and Jews, concentrated in large states, who argued that the current system forces candidates to pay attention to them. Logically, it's hard for both arguments to be right. Even if Congress were to pass such a measure, it would then face hurdles in the states. States with small congressional delegations would lose power, even as more people gained clout, in a popular vote.

Since it's so hard to pass an amendment, people have searched for creative ways to fix things without changing the Constitution. As often is the case, such a meandering route to change can be hard.

A Better Idea: National Popular Vote

We can circumvent the Electoral College and create a popular vote without a constitutional amendment with an approach called National Popular Vote. It takes a little explaining. The Constitution gives states the power to decide how to allocate electors. Each state is asked to pass a law entering into a binding agreement to award all of its electors to the candidate who wins the national popular vote in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. This provision goes into effect only when enough states to total a majority of electoral votes -- currently, 270 electoral votes -- sign the compact. When that happens, whoever wins the popular vote will garner a majority of electoral votes. And while it is rather complex, it has the advantage of being fair, utterly nonpartisan and -- if it works -- rendering the Electoral College a charmingly archaic formality. Devised by a mathematician and two law professors, it is being pushed by the National Popular Vote campaign, the election reform organization FairVote, and a collection of former lawmakers of both parties.

The proposal is fair (it's nationwide), it helps neither party, and it could go into effect right away. It would seem tailor-made for a post-partisan leader such as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unfortunately, the California governor vetoed this measure in 2006. Maryland became the first state to sign the compact, and New Jersey the second; other states are expected to follow suit.

With National Popular Vote, the Electoral College may never need to be stricken from the Constitution. But for practical purposes, it would be rendered a formality, a charming relic of a time when lawmakers took snuff and democracy was the furthest thing from politicians' minds.

By reforming elections, we would likely alter the way campaigns are run and hence the way policies are formed. These changes do not embrace other, arguably more innovative and certainly more unorthodox systems for assessing the popular will, such as proportional representation or instant runoff voting, which lets voters indicate their second choice in elections. They do not pivot to direct democracy, such as the proposals for voter-driven initiatives and referenda that marked reform efforts decades ago, and which have had mixed results in states such as California. The changes (proposed here), instead, take as a given the basic mechanics of American democracy: representative government, with the candidate who gets the most votes winning, drawn from the major parties. If nothing else, it is politically easier to imagine public understanding of these changes. And if we get politics right, it would make a huge difference in forcing public officials to represent a much broader segment of the populace. Combined with reforms in the voting system, these changes could have a massive impact on American life.

This article is adapted from Michael Waldman's new book, "A Return to Common Sense: 7 Bold Ways to Revitalize Our Democracy."

See more stories tagged with: elections, democracy, constitution, election reform, national popular vote, voting rights, electoral college

Michael Waldman is the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a think tank and advocacy organization focusing on democracy. He was the chief speech writer for President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1999.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Rights and Liberties! Sign up now »