All of the Arguments for Keeping the Electoral College are Stupid.
Elizabeth Warren just announced her support for abolishing the Electoral College and, as a result, I’ve spent the last two days seeing her receive pushback, in the form of what appears to be sophisticated, historically-grounded erudition, but which in actuality in lazy nonsense. As someone for whom this has been a pet issue for a while, I’ve spent most of the day holding back my annoyance and, like most instances in which we suppress our emotions, they end up manifesting themselves later in bizarre ways. Like me writing a long article for Medium.
In this article, I’m gathering every dumb argument I have found for keeping the electoral college, in the hopes that by doing so I can help inoculate against them.
A Primer on the Electoral College
Before we begin looking at the arguments for keeping the electoral college, let’s briefly summarize what it is, why the founders created it, and the effect it has had on presidential politics since its creation.
There are two main reasons why the founders created the Electoral College system: 1) the perceived inability of the voting public, at the time, to make an informed decision for president, and 2) concerns over the allocation of power between the states and the newly proposed national government.
The first reason made a great deal of sense at the time, though it no longer plays any role in our present electoral college system. The founding fathers were deeply concerned that, though the democratic election of government representatives was an outcome valued by virtually all delegates, the masses were simply not yet competent to select their representatives. The severity of this concern depended on whether the election in question was local, state, or national, with the latter raising the clearest problems. In the late 18th century, as a citizen living in, say, Georgia, there’s a good chance you’d recognize the names of mayoral candidates, most of whom would have been powerful local figures you’d know by reputation, or perhaps even directly. If you didn’t know them, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find others in your area who did, and who could therefore help inform your vote. This is similarly true for governor, though perhaps less so. When voting for president, however, the candidates would be unlikely to come from your state, or even your region of the country. How would one acquire information about these candidates? Literacy rates were still very low, and communications technology frustrated the easy flow of information. To this problem, founders considered electors a promising solution. You might not know national-level candidates, but you would likely know local scholars, businessmen and politicians who did, and for whom you would have an existing measure of trust. Therefore, the people of each state would vote for these men, who in turn would make an informed decision on which of the candidates to support on their behalf. Of course, it has been nearly two centuries since citizens cast votes for named electors rather than party candidates, and today’s electors are not only not expected to make decisions on behalf of their state’s voters, but are sometimes even punished by state law for casting a vote as a “faithless elector”.
Therefore, if we are still looking to the founders for reasons why we should keep the EC system, it would have to do with the second reason, state apportionment. We should start by acknowledging that it is a common misunderstanding that the creation of the Constitution was motivated by philosophy rather than mere politics. When one references the founders to support one’s arguments, one is not just talking about the architects of the system, but attempting to borrow the near-religious reverence that we have offered them throughout American history. We assume that the Constitution reflects our founders’ sincere beliefs about the most moral possible arrangement of power and representation, but this is far, far from the case. Instead, the Constitution is best seen as the byproduct of a desperate attempt to replace the Articles of Confederation, an abominably unworkable mess of a first draft for our national government. The founders knew that failing to ratify a new Constitution would leave the already weak government vulnerable to outside attacks, internal dissent, and crushing economic instability. Therefore, their goal was not to pass the fairest Constitution, but rather the one that would actually get ratified by the thirteen states, or at least nine of them.
It is true that the electoral college was established, in part, as an effort by the founders to prevent citizens from a few large states from overpowering the will of those in weaker states. However, it is a mistake to think that this is because the founders considered this fair, or even moral. Instead, founders like James Madison, who came from Virginia, one of the largest population states at the time, knew that delegates from low population states like Delaware, Georgia, and several others would never agree to sign a document that all but dissolved their independent power as a state. Institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College, which grant power to states regardless of their population size, were designed to placate these concerns, and facilitate the ratification of the Constitution. While some founders truly did consider this the most ethical of all arrangements, many others simply assented as a matter of expediency.
Since its passage, the electoral college vote has differed from the popular vote four times, twice in the late 19th century, and twice in the past twenty years. I mention this simply as a reminder that the results do not generally differ greatly between the two systems, and as such, most elections would likely have turned out the way they did regardless of the system used. When it has made a difference, in each case, it has done so in the manner imagined by the founders — to advantage the candidate more aligned with voters in low-population states.
The practical effect of the Electoral College is to weigh small state voters more heavily than large state voters. The standard example given is to compare California’s 55 electoral votes to Wyoming’s 3. Their populations are about 40 million and 600,000, respectively. If you do the math, that means the average Wyoming resident’s vote is worth a little more than three times as much as the average Californian’s vote. If you support the Electoral College, you are saying that is morally acceptable: people in Wyoming should matter more than people in California.
Arguments Against the Electoral College
While I could present a full-throated case for eliminating the electoral college system here, I choose not to, primarily because I think the burden of proof is on the other side. The natural, first principle of voting is that whichever candidate or outcome receives the most votes should be declared the winner. “One person, one vote” is such an obvious starting point for ethical voting that, I argue, any violation of this principle should require a very strong argument to the contrary. Let’s examine these arguments in turn, and see if they amount to anything.
Argument #1: Why Would Small State Voters Even Bother to Vote?
The most common, and naive, argument I have seen for maintaining the current EC system is that a voter living in, say, Montana would have no reason to even bother voting if their vote is simply going to be wiped out by an avalanche of voters in a few big cities.
First, this argument appears to assume that rural/small-state voters are far, far less plentiful than urban/large-state voters, and almost by definition of our electoral history, this is simply not true. As shown in the figure above, the electoral college system has impacted only 4 presidential elections, or about 6% of them since 1789. Two of these were in the past twenty years. It is bizarre imagining that an Idahoan in 1996 only feels comfortable voting because of a system that had only altered American politics insofar as delivering us Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, two presidents the average American is unlikely to even recall. The other 56 presidential elections stand as a testament to the fact that small state voters are not, in practice, wiped out by major population centers. If the electoral college were truly performing massive damage control on behalf of rural areas, then we’d see far greater than 6% of elections showing a difference between the two outcomes. The electoral college tilts the balance more in their favor, but they are already, combined together, a sizable juggernaut.
To get a sense for the juggernaut smaller states are, check out the above figure. It shows 2016 vote patterns, with blue representing areas won by Clinton, red by Trump, and the size of each area re-weighted by population. That enormous blue splotch in the lower left corner, for instance, is the combined Los Angeles — San Francisco statistical areas. What you notice, is that these areas, even taken together with the Northeast Corridor and other major cities throughout the United States, do not obviously outweigh the massive, webby patches of red that make up most of the rest of the country. Futhermore, the above map actually overstates how far to the left dense urban areas are. The below figure recodes all areas with shades of purple, reflecting areas where opinion is mixed:
Now, it no longer looks like everything is so blue and red. Yes, California and New York are very left-leaning, but outside of major city centers, it’s a lot more varied than people imagine it to be. The simple reality is that the voter in Montana isn’t going to get wiped out by California and New York in a popular vote scenario, because those states aren’t as blue as they think they are, and Montana isn’t alone. It’s not Montana vs. CA & NY. It’s Montana & Idaho & Nebraska & Wyoming & Utah & North Dakota & South Dakota &….you get the picture. One David might get beaten by three or four Goliaths, but there are 46 Davids. It’s a plenty fair fight without providing each David an extra slingshot and a fifteen second head start.
Second, it is curious to argue from the perspective of trying to stimulate voters’ senses that their vote matters, as it is in fact voters in safe large population states, if at all, whose behavior is negatively affected by the electoral college. If you are a Republican in New York or Los Angeles, and you care only about the presidential race, then you very well may decide to sit out, knowing that your state is with virtually total certainty going to deliver its votes to the Democratic candidate. The same is true, for what it’s worth, for democratic voters in Texas. Their vote truly is wasted, given the winner-takes-all system used in nearly all states. If we were to abolish the electoral college, then a voter from Montana would still have the exact same incentive to vote as every other human being in the United States: by voting, support for their candidate will increment upwards by a single vote.
Third, the argument made here is primarily reliant on one silly mental trick. Consider someone who lives in Placer County, just outside of Sacramento. This tiny county voted for Trump over Clinton in 2016 by 12 points, while massive Sacramento preferred Clinton to Trump by 25 points. Our Placer resident could easily make the same argument as the Montana resident: what’s the point of us Placer folks voting when much larger Sacramento is just going to wipe us out? Perhaps California should institute its own Electoral College system, in which each county is given additional votes regardless of population. But wait! Within Placer County is Auburn, a city of about 10,000 residents, which is nothing compared to nearby Roseville, with 130,000 residents. Perhaps Placer County should have its own Electoral College system, in which each city is given a vote regardless of population. But wait! Within Auburn is…
…you can see where this is going. There is really no endpoint to this logic. You can always find inequalities of population within smaller subsets of population, funneling down endlessly. At a certain point, if you live in a relatively small population area, you need to simply make your peace with the fact that your combined vote is going to matter less than some other, much larger area…and that’s because there’s just a lot less of you. You aren’t voting as a Dakotan against a much larger foe. You’re just one American, worth the value of precisely one American, voting alongside other Americans who are equally as valuable as you are. That you think that you should penalize them for living more closely together is…weird.
Argument #2: States Are Special, and Need Protection
The most likely rebuttal to the argument I just made is that cities and counties aren’t states, and that states, specifically, are an entity that is worthy of institutional special privileges. The Constitution was a compact of States, and the federal government recognizes the right of states, and not counties or cities, to govern themselves differently from one another as they see fit. Therefore, the EC is valuable because it protects these beautiful, majestic creatures.
My strong objection is this — I see no reason to think of states, philosophically, as deserving of this special status. Ultimately, what undergirds the desire to protect small states is a general concern about whether population subsets in a majority-based democracy are going to lack the power in society to protect themselves against a tyranny of the majority. Back in 1789, states would have been the obvious demographic unit over which the founders would have worried about power distribution across its members. Up to the point, and including during the Articles of Confederation, individual states had a degree of power not far removed from actual countries, and so those who had accumulated power within the smaller states were not about to give it up without a fight. Furthermore, as the colonies had existed in some form for at least decades, and often well over a century, each state had built up its own individual culture and customs, so there was something perhaps unique to be protected.
Today, now that we do not have a Constitution to pass, lest we descend into internal rebellion or get attacked by Britain again, there is little reason that we should let small states hold us hostage, save for the advantages they have been granted in the Constitution. Even culture, outside of some colorful exceptions, is much more a regional phenomenon, and within states, even small ones, people differ greatly between urban and rural locales. It is bizarre to think of small states, specifically, as a mythical entity that should be defended at all costs.
If one wants to argue that it’s hard to imagine why small states would choose to give up their constitutionally-granted advantage, well, I agree. But that’s not really the argument that people are making. Rather, they are saying that it is the morally correct thing for us to continue protecting these states, and that is where the argument fails.
Furthermore, I’d argue that if we want to apply the logic of protecting political subsets to those who have the greatest case for actually receiving said political protection, there are many candidates much more worthy than the State. As a fun little thought experiment, let’s consider race as a subset that needs protection. People of color have been uniformly outnumbered by whites throughout American history, to their profound and prolonged detriment. The evidence that whites, as a group, have repeatedly and maliciously conspired to politically and economically disadvantage non-whites, is unassailable.
So, in order to protect people of color, I have a proposal that I’m certain defenders of the electoral college will support: let’s weigh the votes of people of color more heavily than the votes of white people. In fact, we should have two chambers of Congress, one of which will give each race the same number of votes, regardless of their size in the population. And if anyone suggests that this is unfair, we can simply remind them that black, asian and latino voters have no reason to go to the polls if they’re just going to get wiped out by an avalanche of white voters!
Obviously, I am not seriously proposing this, as it would be impossible to implement and supported by only a fraction of the population. But it is quite literally more morally justifiable than the notion that small states, specifically, are the only demographic subset deserving of special apportionment protection. One could imagine any number of other subsets — religion, class, education, etc. — that have a much longer, clearer history of actual discrimination and inequality than collections of land bounded by imaginary lines.
Argument #3: The Electoral College Prevents Third Parties From Gaining Power
It takes everything in my power to not just write “then getting rid of it helps third parties, good”, and move on to the next claim, but people are seriously making this argument, so it needs to be dealt with. In the linked article, Wyler argues that, without an electoral college, presidential elections could allow the 40% of Americans who identify as “independent” to throw their support behind third-party presidential candidates, who have in the past won millions of votes but usually fail to garner any actual electoral college votes.
First, if Wyler had bothered to actually talk to a single American political scientist at any point in the past thirty years, he would discover that most Americans are not meaningfully independent: most Americans who identify as such, when asked whether they lean towards one party or another, indicate that they do about 80% of the time. Political scientists find that these leaners are virtually indistinguishable in their attitudes and voting behavior from actual partisan identifiers, meaning that only about 8–10% of Americans at any given time are truly independents. Furthermore, those who tend to be true independents are also those who are least likely to vote or pay attention to politics. The voter base for a third party run just doesn’t really exist.
Second, if Wyler had bothered to actually look at the vote totals, he’d discover that it isn’t the electoral college system that is keeping third-party candidates from winning — it’s that they don’t ever get anywhere close to enough votes to actually win. There’s not a single instance in American history in which a third-party candidate has won the popular vote but lost the electoral college, because there has never been a third-party candidate that has ever come close to winning the popular vote, period.
Third, I can’t seriously imagine that getting rid of the electoral college would help third parties, even in the long-run. While there are other voting reforms (i.e. Ranked Choice Voting) that legitimately would help third parties, abolishing the electoral college wouldn’t change the fact that a third party candidate would still somehow have to win more votes than either candidate in the two major parties…and if we live in a world in which that occurs, I’d argue that the two parties have probably done something so terrible as to deserve their loss.
Fourth, this is an incredibly bizarre argument to be making at a time when desire for a viable third party is at an all-time high:
So, yeah, it sure would be a shame if something came along that disrupted the existing political system, which, you know, everyone currently universally considers to be awesome.
Argument #4: The Electoral College Incentivises a “Mandate” Presidency
Another dumb argument used by Wyler is that, in a magical scenario in which four nearly equally strong candidates run for president, the winner would only get something like 30% of the vote. Is this something that our system would even tolerate?
Well, seeing as this is essentially what every advanced parliamentary democracy has to deal with when it has its elections, yeah, I think we’d be OK. In multiparty systems, one party usually wins well less than 50% of the vote, and has to cobble together a coalition with at least one other vote-getting party. Of course, in their system, the need to placate your partners in the coalition leads to moderation, while in our winner-take-all system, the 30% winner would have no incentive to collaborate with anyone else.
Except of course they would. That individual would never get anything passed in Congress without winning the support of at least one of those other strong coalitions, regardless of whether or not that’s formally baked into the system.
I’ll also note that we basically have this system right now, seeing as the two-party nature of our system forces those major parties to contain a diverse set of coalitions all vying for control of the party. Do you think, in a multi-party American system, libertarians and evangelicals would have any reason to house themselves within a single party, as they do with Republicans? Do you think the center-left business class would remain bedfellows with the youth-oriented, Bernie-led left? We already live in a world in which huge portions of Americans, even those who identify with the party of the candidate who won, are going to be moderately upset that it is not their specific coalition that is being represented.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, the electoral college system has absolutely nothing to do with the number of strongly performing candidates in a presidential race. It is entirely an invention of Wyler’s imagination that two other major parties would somehow instantly form the moment an electoral college veil is lifted. In fact, of the few examples we have of successful third party presidential runs, in two cases (1948 and 1968, the latter of which is shown below) the third party candidate actually picks up a number of electoral votes. This is because it’s generally much easier for a third party candidate to seize upon a regional trend (in both of these cases, we’re talking explicit, virulent racism in the form of support for segregation), or to campaign heavily in just a few states than it would be to mount a successful 50 state campaign. Again — the reason that Thurmond lost in ’48 and Wallace in ’68 is that they were simply not viable candidates. No third party candidate ever has been viable, but that’s not because of the electoral college, it’s because of our winner-take-all electoral system.
Argument #5: Democrats Just Want To Win Elections
Well, yeah, duh. The Democratic party is the party more likely to push for this because clearly they’d be advantaged by it, seeing as the Republicans haven’t won an open race for the presidency without the help of the electoral college since 1988. The entire history of political reform is almost always one in which one party is trying to gain an electoral advantage over the other. Weirdly, Donald Trump is perhaps the one exception to this, in that he still openly supports abolishing the Electoral College despite the fact it is the only reason he is currently the president.
But just because a party is motivated by less than purely objective concerns does not mean the reform they desire isn’t the morally correct one. Similarly, right now, Mitch McConnell vigorously opposes HR1, the bill that would regulate the campaign finance system and make election day a national holiday, because he knows that making it easier for voters to vote would inherently advantage the Democratic party. But maintaining a system in which voters who have full legal rights to vote find it difficult to exercise those rights, just to keep Democrats from beating you more often, is morally reprehensible.
All systems benefit someone. The question is not who, but rather whether the system itself is morally justifiable. As a left-leaner, it’s certainly easier for me to decide to support all these voting reforms because, in addition to being the morally right move, they also happen to help my side. But I certainly would like to think that were I to find myself on the right, I would support doing the right thing regardless of what it does to my coalition.
Argument #6: Candidates Would Skip Small States
Another argument against abolishing the electoral college is that without it, knowing the massive populations located in dense urban areas, presidential candidates would no longer have the incentive to visit the heartlands and make appeals to rural voters, or voters in flyover states. The idea is that winning their votes requires making them policy concessions that they will then later deliver on, so the electoral college system actually helps guarantee that small population states won’t be hit by a bunch of policies that are great for urban voters, and bad for everyone else.
While this chain of logic strikes me as relatively plausible, it once again reflects a manner of thinking that bizarrely privileges rural voters over urban voters. The flipside of this argument is an acknowledgement that politicians would redirect some of their support and energy towards city voters, where more people actually live, without the incentive of electoral college votes in small states. Well…if there are proportionately more people in those areas, then perhaps the people living in those areas deserve a proportionately higher level of responsiveness to their political concerns?
As it is, right now, neither candidate in a presidential race will ever have any reason to spend any great deal of time in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, or any of the other major population centers in states that will obviously give their votes to one party or the other. But how is this a good thing? As people increasingly move away from outlying areas and into or near dense urban centers, politicians should devote more of their efforts to figuring out how to help cities solve the kinds of problems that arise there.
This is, of course, not to say that small states voters don’t deserve policy concessions — they do! But not disproportionately more than urban voters. Any candidate who decided to try to put together a winning coalition by only visiting major cities would probably discover that they’re fighting an uphill battle. It is, of course, much easier to put together such a coalition by visiting a wide combination of urban, suburban, ex-urban and rural locations all around the country. Not only is this the smart mathematical strategy, it is also what most American voters have come to expect from their candidates — a person who can offer a broad appeal to all Americans. While most candidates fall short of this lofty goal, any candidate who didn’t even try, even one overly reliant on city dwellers, would find themself on the wrong end of a thousand think pieces on how they are treating large portions of the country with disrespect.
Unless of course they neglect major cities, as they frequently do given their current incentives. As I’ve noted already, the American pundit class seems perfectly happy treating urban voters like they are less than deserving of attention than those in the heartland.
Conclusion
I write this not merely to advocate for the abolition of the electoral college, but to point out that the arguments for keeping it typically all have a frustrating set of similarities: an appeal to the founding fathers, the over-romanticization of the rural voter and their need for protection, an assumed condescension towards urban voters and their needs and, typically, a profound lack of understanding of the actual way in which our political system works.
Abolishing the electoral college is an uphill battle, to say the absolute least. Doing so formally will require a constitutional amendment, itself requiring ⅔ of both chambers, and the support of ¾ of all states. Given that well over a quarter of states mathematically benefit from this system, and that one of the two parties clearly benefits from it, this avenue is closed off as a realistic way forward. More likely is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which involves individual states pledging to grant their electoral votes to the eventual winner of the popular vote, a condition that triggers only when enough states have signed on so as to actually elect the popular vote winner. Of course, the odds here aren’t much better; the states most likely to do this are those states that typically vote for the Democratic candidate, so this does nothing to escape the problem. Arguably, a state like Colorado, which recently signed the compact, is purple enough that this could possibly make a difference, in the instance in which Colorado’s voters vote for the Republican candidate, but the Democratic candidate wins the national popular vote.
Regardless of its likelihood of actually coming to fruition, restoring the principle of “one person, one vote” is the right thing to do. The arguments for the alternative do not pass muster.
