The College Nobody Wants, or Needs
It’s another seemingly endless debate about a system put in place nearly 240 years ago, albeit with good intention. But today, there’s no intellectual argument that could favor the Electoral College, not if the person who gets the most votes doesn’t win. How it’s even possible that this could happen (and did in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016) in our bastion of democracy is quite ridiculous. Additionally, in fourteen other presidential elections, the winner received a plurality but not a majority of all votes cast. In the times long past, the College was intended to amplify the popular vote. Today it only contradicts it.
One flaw, potentially a fatal one, is something called ‘faithless electors’ … a small handful of people who will vote for anyone they want to be president regardless of popular vote. Thirty states require their electors to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote. You know, the democratic way. But there are twenty states that have no laws restricting electors, so people voting in one of these states could, and have, had their votes simply not count. That’s just one flaw.
But the notion of having a free and fair, democratically-run election is also punctured by the incredible disequilibrium of population. Wyoming has three electoral votes, but with a voter population of 570,000, that’s one for every 190,000 voters. California? Fifty-five electorals, but for 40 million people, that’s equivalent to one for every 700,000 voters. Some say the College reinforces the two-party system, that it requires candidates for the highest office to campaign and tell their story in all fifty states. And yet, theoretically, it’s possible for a candidate to win the entire election by winning as few as eleven states. It’s been a FUBAR system for many decades.
The obvious solution is to get rid of this now-archaic and deformed system, but that would take amending the Constitution, and that’s as likely as watching fish climb trees. Much easier would be to remove the winner-take-all system, now in place in 48 states. At least there the state’s popular vote would matter. Contested elections are part of our history, beginning in 1824 with the infamous ‘Corrupt Bargain’ outcome. And we can’t forget the tortuous hanging or dimpled chads and butterfly bullets from Florida in 2000. You may also remember that Al Gore won the popular vote by 544,000 counted ballots. Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than seven million, a truth still not believed by an extraordinary number of adults. The mind boggles.
Thankfully, Joe also won in the ‘College.’