Picking a fight

Why do we commit ourselves to lost causes when winnable battles are within our grasp?  Every so often the notion of abolishing the Electoral College gains traction.  Disenchantment with the electoral process, especially when one doesn’t find favour with the results, can lead to teaing the system down and starting fresh, perhaps with the assumption that a new system would have provided a more agreeable result.

Five times in this country’s history did the result of the Electoral College contradict the popular vote.  The first was in 1824 when John Quincy Adams was elected by the House of Representatives after no candidate received the required number of electoral votes.  Next was in 1876 when Rutherford B Hayes seized an electoral victory from Samuel Tilden n a widely disputed election.  Next was in 1888 when Benjamin Harrison beat out the popular vote winner Grover Cleveland, who was running for a second term.  Though losing in 1888, Cleveland did succeed in winning a second term in 1892 becoming the only president to serve non-consecutive terms.  Who can forget the messy election of 2000 in which George Bush won the electoral vote after a series of recounts and lawsuits,  And now, again, in 2016 we have a mismatch between the electoral results and the popular vote.

If such things happen, why do we keep the Electoral College at all?  That is a frequently debated question.  The short answer is that the US is a republic, not a democracy, and we do not hold national elections. Rather, we leave it to the states to elect who represents us.  The Electoral College also gives individual states the flexibility to decide for themselves how their electors are chosen instead of it being mandated at the federal level.

If we wanted to run the presidential election in a democratic, rather than republican, way we could do that, yes?  Of course, but that would require a constitutional amendment.  Creating a  constitutional amendment is a two step process.  First, a new amendment needs to be introduced, debated, and approved by 2/3 of each house of Congress.   Once approved it goes to the States for ratification.  It requires 3/4 of the States to ratify the amendment before it is officially adopted and becomes a part of the Constitution.

So why don’t we just do that if so many people want it to happen?  Politics, plain and simple.  Electoral votes are allotted based on representation.  While each state gets a number of House seats proportional to their population (minimum of one), each state gets two Senators regardless of population.  Therefore, low population states like Wyoming that have only one legislative district get three electoral votes because of the Senate contribution.  The Senate contribution is reduced, however, in high population states like California whose two Senators contribute much less than their fifty-three legislative districts,  Therefore it’s not in the interest of the low population states to give up the Electoral College.  And since those states historically lean toward one party, it’s not in the interest of that party to change the process.  That makes the chances of Congress getting the 2/3 majority it needs exactly nil.

Would changing the system, relying on a popular vote instead of an electoral vote, have changed the outcome in any of the previously mentioned elections?  It’s impossible to know.  Campaigns are run assuming the electoral system.  Candidates spend time and money on specific electoral prizes.  States with a greater number of electoral votes are valuable, especially if they’re swing states: those who do not historically strongly favor one party over another.  Solidly partisan states are of less value to the opposition party.  But if the popular vote was counted instead of electoral votes, campaigns would be run very differently.  Candidates would be courting individual voters, not states, so siphoning a few hundred thousand votes in California, which wouldn’t change the outcome over who wins at the state level, could have an impact at the overall federal level.  Two vastly different systems, two vastly different types of campaigns, make it impossible to predict the outcome of the one that wasn’t used.

Why, then, make the effort to change the system?  We can speculate any number of reasons.  Perhaps people want to just do something to make them feel better.   Taking a stand makes people feel empowered.  Latest projections indicate that 60% of self-identified Democrats want to abolish the Electoral College.  This includes a number of celebrities, pundits, and at least one sitting Senator: Barbara Boxer (D) CA.  It’s an easy bandwagon to jump upon.  But is it the right bandwagon?  No.  It’s a fight that cannot be won.  It’s Don Quixote tilting at windmills.  It causes time, effort, and money to be spent on a cause already lost.  The votes do not exist.

Is there a better cause?  Many.  One would be voter rights and voter disenfranchisement.  Many states have Voter ID laws ostensibly to prevent voter fraud (which hasn’t been proven to even exist to the point it would ever effect an election).  What these laws actually do according to the courts who have assessed them, in surgically disenfranchise specific blocs of voters—those historically inclined to vote for Democrats.  Defeating such laws at the state level, through legislative action or through the courts, is a  much smaller fight with a disproportionately large outcome.  Three states, many of whose citizens were either directly denied their vote or simply discouraged from voting, would have changed the electoral outcome of the last election.  A total of 165,000 votes over three states.  And even if it wouldn’t have changed the outcome this time, ensuring that every citizen can vote is a cause worth winning.