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The Electoral College isn't the Problem [1]
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Date: 2025-05-31
Background
I see people, over and over again, complaining that we need a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Electoral College. If we just elected the President through pure popular vote, then Democrats would always win, and all our problems would be solved.
The electoral college is not the problem.
Most of the problem with it is the way it’s been corrupted by the political parties.
The way it’s been diluted by massive population increases is also a problem.
But, by itself, it is not “the” problem.
Civics/History
If we elected the President by popular vote, then Trump would still have won in 2024. Or maybe we’d require a majority, which would have led to either a run-off election or something like Congress picking the winner. Would he have won that? No one can say, but the anger, hatred, and sheer stupidity weren’t going to get any better in the time it would have taken.
But still, in general, it seems like a ridiculous bunch of extra pointless hoops to jump through in a democracy. Just count all the votes and be done with it. After all, in the past 25 years, we’ve now seen both Bush and Trump win the Presidency after losing the popular vote. That only happened three times before:
1824: John Quincy Adams (who only got 31% of the popular vote)
1876: Rutherford B. Hayes (this one sounds even more broken than 2024 or even 2000)
1888: Benjamin Harrison
This is a deliberate feature, not a bug.
First of all, the USA was never meant to be a direct democracy. The Founding Fathers, for better or worse, were terrified of the idea that we could have one person and one vote to decide everything. Even when those votes were restricted to white men who owned land, they didn’t trust people to pay enough attention to the issues and the news to vote wisely on every little thing.
That’s why we have a republic and elect representatives to do most of the voting. Those elected representatives still can’t keep up with all the little details. That’s why federal agencies in the Executive Branch make
The USA is about the United States. It’s really a confederation of the individual states. They agreed to unite in order to be powerful together and to keep from going to war against each other. Big chunks of the Constitution were written as compromises to get those individual states to agree to join.
This is where the notorious 3/5 compromise came from: slave states wanted to count the enslaved people for purposes of representation in the House, but not for taxes. Free states wanted the opposite.
This is also why the legislative branch is broken up into the House and Senate. States with large populations wanted representation based on that population. States with small populations wanted to be sure that their interests weren’t overwhelmed by a few of the larger states.
It’s that same kind of compromise that led to the Electoral College. The Constitutional Convention spent months debating this. Some of them wanted to elect the President through direct majority vote. Others wanted Congress to pick them. The number of electors for each state match the number of representatives in Congress. Two for the Senators plus one for each member of the House (so the 3/5 compromise was also a factor here: it was another way the enslavers kept so much power for so long). Aside from their fears about direct democracy, they were also worried about political parties getting too much control over the process.
States would actually choose their electors. Originally, some states let the legislatures make those choices. Then the electors (who were presumably people who had the time and money to pay attention and take a trip to DC to cast their ballots) would actually do the voting.
It all fits with the idea that common voters can’t really be trusted. And that a group of people who aren’t really tied to any politician, and only get together for this single purpose would be very difficult to corrupt.
They figured there would be lots of candidates and that electors would vote every which way. So it would be rare for anyone to get a majority from those delegates. Which would leave the House to actually pick the President, with the representative groups from each state getting a single vote. The theory was that states would have enough representatives, and that their views would be diverse enough, that it would be difficult to corrupt them.
No one ever claimed that this system is perfect or the best one possible. It’s just the compromise they cobbled together that everyone could agree was the best they were going to get at the time. James Madison had several ideas about improving the process. But he never suggested any drastic changes.
If we switched to majority-only vote, then only the big population centers really matter. Win them over and candidates can ignore the voters in all the “unimportant” flyover states. People who want to switch to straight majority vote tend to argue that regional differences don’t matter. Especially for the office of President, who represents us all, we should be thinking in terms of the nation instead of a group of states. But voters in South Dakota have different priorities than voters in Texas or New York.
As it stands, candidates have to appeal to enough voters in enough different states to win.
Elections are like baseball is worth reading, even if you end up disagreeing.
What Went Wrong
Political parties ruined things. They didn’t exist in 1787. The founders were worried about “factions,” but they couldn’t have imagined just how bad their control over the system has gotten.
Once political parties exploded onto the scene, the number of actual candidates shrank drastically. There have only been 3 Presidents whose elections were decided when the Electoral College didn’t have a majority vote and fell back to the House:
1800: Thomas Jefferson
1824: John Quincy Adams
1876: Rutherford Hayes
And then those political parties have made things worse by getting most of the states to turn their electors into rubber stamps by swearing their delegates to all vote for whoever won the popular vote in their state.
And the gerrymandering has rigged things so that, if an election does fall back to the House, republicans are pretty much guaranteed to win.
Furthermore, the number of representatives in the House has not kept up with population growth.
According to the 1790 census, the US had around 3.9 million people (both free and enslaved). In 2020, that grew to 331.449,281. When you factor in the 3/5 compromise, I think it’s reasonable to call it about a 100x growth factor.
There were 105 members in the House after that census. If that had grown proportionally, we’d have around 10500 now instead of 435.
That means there really should be around 10603 delegates to the electoral college instead of 538 (Washington DC gets 3).
Gerrymandering aside, this reduction in representation waters down “our” representatives’ ability to actually represent us. Instead of each one representing around 37,000 people (on average), each one represents around 700,000. This is the largest ratio among the OECD nations. This doesn’t matter as much in terms of the Electoral College as it does in the House, but it definitely means that voters in some states have a little more influence than in others.
How to Fix It
While I was fact-checking this, I learned that there have been over 700 attempts to amend the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College. The first was written by Alexander Hamilton in 1802. This might be worth pushing forward, because it’s the right thing to do, but it may also be a complete waste of time.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a lot more likely to pass, but it seems as though it would at least require Congressional approval.
I don’t think we’re going to get 10,000 representatives. There just isn’t much support for growing the House, especially that much.
We also aren’t getting rid of gerrymandering without a Constitutional Amendment. I think that’s worth pursuing, but it seems like a really heavy lift.
But the winner-gets-all part seems like a sweet spot. This is the reason that only votes in swing states really matter. Apportion the electors based on how many votes they got in each state, and I think that a big chunk of the problems goes away. Now candidates also have to campaign in places like Texas, New York, and California because the margin of victory also matters.
Or maybe we could try going back to the original plan, where we elect representatives who we trust to pick a President instead of voting for the President directly. Federalist Paper #68 (which was also probably written by Hamilton...he wrote a lot of lies to get the Constitution ratified) makes the point that this is one of the only parts of the Constitution that wasn’t very controversial.
Are Direct Democratic Elections a Bad Idea?
After I wrote all that, I don’t really know what I think about all this. I’m very skeptical about the motives of most of the people who I see defending the Electoral College. I do believe that every adult citizen should get a vote. There shouldn’t be any need for registration, and it shouldn’t be considered a privilege that can be taken away for something like committing a felony.
At the same time, I’m also skeptical about the general public’s ability to pay attention and make rational choices. Especially after 40-50 years of fascist media convincing us that things like rape, fraud, insurrections, and espionage don’t matter as much as the price of eggs. Or, let’s be honest, the color of her skin.
People who defend it argue that it’s only been different than the popular vote 5 times in 60 elections. The fact that it’s benefited Republicans twice this century definitely makes it suspect, but its defenders will argue that it’s just working as designed.
Except that it obviously isn’t, since it was designed to protect us from people like Trump.
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