Electoral College democracy?

no so much

Someone asked me yesterday to explain why the Electoral College is democratic. I did not get back to her yesterday but she is a loyal subscriber so I will answer here:

The Electoral College is not nor was it ever meant to be democratic.

I deliberately use small d democratic as it was not to promote general participation. We are, after all, a Republic where power rests with you and me the public via our elected representatives. Ah.

The Founders were extremely leery of a couple of things. They did not like the idea of concentration of power in a single individual. A long, dogged strain of English political thought transferred to this country was that too much power in a single hand leads to dangerous control. We thought George III had too much power over us as monarch.

This is why we have checks and balances all over the place: 1. at the institutional level (three branches of government), 2. federalism versus local levels of decision-making (central governments make us nervous but localism is incredibly inefficient, ineffective, and messy), and 3. different terms of office (note the three branches actually entail four distinct terms for office-holders: the Senate is six years {with no two senators in a single state coming up for election the same year}, the White House is four years, the House of Representatives is two years, and the Supreme Court and appointed federal judgeships for life) for starters. We don’t want anyone with too much power because power corrupts, as that phrase goes.

Then there was their anxiety regarding mass radicalism which is why we have the Electoral College. Many in Philadelphia that summer feared that turning over the presidency to popular vote would be too destabilizing. Populists could offer ridiculous yet appealing platforms to seduce voters so the idea that Electors, deemed as men (sic) of great responsibility within each of the states, would avoid as they casted ballots on behalf of their states at a conclave several weeks following the popular voting would allow people to cool off, regardless of the outcome.

And that has worked, pretty consistently, for 246 years since George Washington won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote in 1788. The 1876 election provided an anomaly, most notably associated with Reconstruction. The popular vote in 1876 actually resulted in a majority for Samuel Tilden but Rutherford B. Hayes actually became president based on disputed votes within the Electoral College that left him a single Elector shy of winning the requisite majority within that body. The effect of the disputed votes, all in states undergoing Reconstruction following the Civil War only a decade earlier, left the country without a constitutionally-mandated outcome so the election controversy went to a deeply divided Congress. As a mechanism to end unpopular Reconstruction, whereby erstwhile Confederate states rejoined the Union while theoretically implementing the Fourteenth Amendment protections for African-Americans, ended in an arrangement awarding Hayes, a Republican, the presidency. At the same time, Democrats took control over southern governments, often returning the African Americans to a de facto lesser-than-equal status. It was rather a quid pro quo.

The Electoral College is an artifact of Founders struggling through multiple political objectives during the Constitutional Convention. The cross cutting issues between bigger states by population versus those with fewer voters (men who were not slaves, of course) of our emergent union led to the Connecticut Compromise which gave us the Senate where each and every state has two senators yet the House of Representatives membership is apportioned based on the population of each state. It’s a nifty compromise but hardly one that everyone would call democratic, with a small d.

We do not base our voting on proportional representation which is so common elsewhere in participatory systems because that system leads to fragile coalitions (see Italy or Israel through much of the past eighty years). PR systems are indeed more democratic but make governing bloody hard since coalitions shift and dissolve. Remember the half a dozen years under the Articles of Confederation had been messy, unimpressive ones for our new born country between ~1781 and 1787 which is what they were trying to address.

We do not put a single person in the White House for life, having amended our Constitution during FDR’s presidency to limit anyone to two elected terms. This again attempts to prevent concentration of power into someone who can become a king or a dictator; it was a deliberate step by the Founders.

Our system is sui generis as I know of no other state anywhere nearly as intricate in its governing structure. The fears the men had at the Constitutional Convention were wide-ranging and deeply held. These were men from different states, different backgrounds (although all were wealthy, of course), different political orientations. Perhaps the country was not as polarized as it appears today but it most definitely was struggling with how the move forward. Remember that the term “United States of America” really meant united STATES of America until roughly the Civil War because at least the southern states were the economic engines built on the autonomy of those states versus a federal system; that was how they continued slavery as the system became far more intolerable to many. The Civil War was about slavery but it was also about states’s rights. Additionally, Alexander Hamilton never became president because of a premature death but passionately advocated for a strong, central presidency that would have dwarfed the other branches had he implemented that. So we could have gone quite differently as a country had these men come to different outcomes.

The Electoral College provided confounding to Democrats in 2000 and again in 2016. The same could occur this year where pre-election polling is razor thin. Many advocates long argued and continue advocating for jettisoning this arcane portion of our history, much as we moved towards popular vote for Senators under the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Popular vote is definitely more democratic, more participatory, and theoretically closer to what the voters desire. In theory, moving towards determining the presidency in a similar manner is quite appealing to millions, particularly Democrats who believe smaller populations such as in Indiana, Iowa, Wyoming, or Idaho amass too much power in the College.

The Constitution offers two remedies in Article V for amending the Constitution. The first is for an Amendment to appear following either a 2/3 vote in the Senate and in the House, or by each state holding a constitutional convention—the latter never occuring after 1787. Following the 2/3 vote to pass in each Congressional chamber, the proposed Amendment goes to the governors of each of the fifty states. Governors then send the amendment to state legislators for vote. Three-quarters of the states must approve the Amendment for its promulgation. It is elaborate to assure we deliberate long and hard. Imagine how many differing views this would elicit if we tried?

In such a divided country along so many partisan lines, the process described in the Constitution is daunting. In 246 years’s experience, only 27 amendments succeeded dispite many more discussed. This is not accidental as the Founders did not desire an easy process.

They weren’t just exhausted after their hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia: they understood how divisive some of the political views were. They also worried about consequences of altering this finely balanced system that included so many checks and balances.

I obviously speak for none of them but believe it absolutely clear the Framers sought a functioning system rather than a popular system. Perhaps they were such visionaries they knew that immigration would fundamentally alter this nation repeatedly. Perhaps, as slave owners which many were, they sought to retard the expansion of rights to women, African Americans freed from slavery, immigrants, Native Americans, and others. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

The one absolute caution I encourage everyone to remember regards that second avenue for revising the Constitution. It’s tempting to say that we could meet in state constitutional conventions, if they could be organized instantaneously (not going to happen but let me run with this for a moment), to revise this artifact of a republican age. Surely the Framers would have agreed, right?

The most radical thing we could do would be to convene a constitutional convention—that is how we got to where we are today. The Philadelphia conclave was intended to improve upon those portions of the Articles of Confederation in place as the governing document in 1787. Those rules did not work to anyone’s satisfaction. But at a constitutional convention, everything is fair game. The entire document could face massive revision that was not at all where many advocates sought to go because it is a truly dynamic process. As fractured as we are, I doubt anyone would come out satisfied but it could get far, far worse as a result.

Our Constitution is much less structured than many similar documents around the world. The seven Articles is each somewhat detailed but actually different from the other six. Articles I and II present different detail on constraints and privileges of the Legislative and Executive Branches, for example. Absolutely NOTHING about that is accidental. This was a compromise document over and over again. To assume it could be revised on something as seemingly old school as the Electoral College would have long implication for the nation. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it but the Framers sought to make it bloody hard to do.

Americans know little about history and shamefully little political literacy. The law of the land is the foundation where actions create consequences of magnitudes we rarely understand. I am not saying we shouldn’t but I am saying that what is democratic and participatory can be much more wide-ranging that it appears as we look at a single election or a political moment. The Constitution is not perfect nor should it be seen that way; the Founders knew it was a compromise document. While 70 people received appointments to participate, only 39 did. Those men struggled as they represented twelve states in Philadelphia to get a final product all would sign. Multiply that by four times in terms of the number of states and millions as we consider who the delegates would represent. It would not be a small task, to understate the obvious.

Thank you for reading Actions today. Please circulate this if you find it of value. I am not a political theorists so you may well be able to explain more than I have here so have at it! I welcome thoughts, further questions, observations, and rebuttals.

Thank you especially to subscribers such as the lady who asked this question. Subscribers keep me going with their financial support as this is a labour of love but definitely a labor with many resources as well.

We have yet another cloudy day in the Chesapeake as the autumn opens. How about where you are? The photo is a colonial street, leading to the nation’s temporary capital in Annapolis.

Be well and be safe. FIN

“Meet the Framers of the Constitution”, NationalArchives.org, retrieved at https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/founding-fathers

Office of the Federal Register, “Constitutional Amendment Process”, retrieved at https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution

Sarah Pruitt, “How the 1876 Election Tested the Constitution and Effectively Ended Reconstruction”, history.com, 18 August 2020, retrieved at https://www.history.com/news/reconstruction-1876-election-rutherford-hayes