Tyranny of the Minority: Graduating from the Electoral College

One was a former Senator and Secretary of State, even-tempered, highly-educated with a deep knowledge and appreciation of government, from a Presidential family.  Another fancied himself a tough guy, a voice for the common man, a self-made success who deserved to be President.  Bombastic, self-assured, and certainly racist.  On a December day, as the Constitution demands, electors met in their respective states to elect one the next president of the United States.

In 1824, John Quincy Adams, son of the second president, stood for office against Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, who had vaulted to national prominence from the backwoods of Tennessee (or maybe North Carolina).

When the popular vote was tallied, Jackson led Adams by about 40,000 votes out of 264,000 cast for the two.  In the Electoral College, Jackson again led Adams 99 to 84, well short of the 131 needed to win, meaning the House of Representatives would settle it, and the House elected Adams to his lone term.

Jackson, for his part, knew how to hold a grudge.  His supporters worked to bring more voters into the system and, in 1828, he would decisively beat Adams.  But four more times—in 1876, 1888, 2000, and now in 2016—the Electoral College would select the candidate with fewer popular votes. 

Arguments for the Electoral College are well-worn by this time: it assures that the smaller, less populous states get attention; it prevents democratic mob rule; electoral vote totals amplify the perceived mandate for the winner, making governance easier.

Only the second of these, fear of democracy, really seems to have mattered.  In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton argued that the selection of the President by Electors was better than allowing Congress or the people, democratically, to elect the executive.

“A small number of persons,” Hamilton wrote, “selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” 

The job could not be entrusted to the people, but to their betters who, being possessed of more knowledge and a broader outlook would make a wiser choice, while still reflecting, as Hamilton put it, “the sense of the people.”

James Madison was quite clear that democracy would favor the voter-rich northern states against the southern states with their large number of enslaved people and non-voting whites when in the Constitutional Convention he noted that “the right of suffrage was more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”  The Electoral College was a suitable compromise for slaveholding states. 

However, what the method of election chiefly did was allow the southern states to enjoy the disproportionate influence accorded them by their vast enslaved populations who, though they had no voice in government, counted towards the numbers of representatives and electors, albeit at the discount exacted by the Three-fifths Compromise.

Even in the early elections, before the admission of more slave states and a skyrocketing enslaved population, the advantage was perfectly clear.  Virginia had by far the most electoral votes in the 1792, presidential election, almost half again as many as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, though by free white population it should have been roughly equal to Pennsylvania, and one ahead of Massachusetts.  Combined, the Southern states had electoral clout based on their enslaved populations alone that more than outweighed Pennsylvania’s slate of electors. Small wonder, then, that seven of the first ten presidents were from, or at least born in, Virginia.

That the Electoral College is undemocratic should be no surprise; it was designed to be so.  Its real weakness, though, is that it has been, at least since the 1820s, a failure in its stated purpose.  Even when it has overturned the will of the voters, as it now appears poised to do yet again, it has done so on behalf of another group of voters and under the control of political parties. 

Today we have a different sort of imbalance.  Because each state has a minimum number of electors, regardless of population, a group of low-population states can balance, even overwhelm, the votes of states with much higher population.

Typically, of course, the Electoral College simply follows the popular vote, though with wider margins.  It doesn’t usually radically overturn the will of the voters—even the 3% margin Rutherford B. Hayes overcame in 1876 produced the difference of a single electoral vote.  Far from making decisions removed from the whims of the people, it has endorsed them at almost every turn.

Since it has in the main been an undemocratic institution functioning sort-of democratically, why not just get rid of it?

Simply because when it malfunctions, it does so in one direction.  Not necessarily, even if practically, in a partisan direction, but in the favor of the citizens of rural states, giving those states an outsized say in elections.  They have, then, no incentive to change and there are enough of these states to prevent a Constitutional amendment eliminating it.

Arguments about attention, mob rule, and perceived unity are a fig leaf to cover this fact, that as long as the Electoral College remains, such states will be a firewall for conservatives in close elections like this one. 

It is time, therefore, to recognize the Electoral College for what it is …a mechanism for allowing a minority of voters to thwart the will of a majority or plurality, an instrument for the naked exercise of power.

And we already have the Senate for that.