Why The Electoral College is Important and Needs to Stick Around
After Trump was elected president and Clinton (most-likely) won the popular vote, I have seen far too many posts going on and on about how we should eradicate the electoral college, so I thought I’d make a post explaining why it is such an important component of our election system.
About a month ago, I would have told you that I agreed with you. I too thought that the most popular candidate should win the election, but after talking to my dad about it, he challenged me to do some research for myself.
I spend several hours watching videos on both sides and reading article after article explaining how/why it works the way it does; I quickly discovered that I was wrong. It is important. It is necessary. It needs to stay.
Let’s start by breaking down what how it works.
We are not a democracy. We are a Republic meaning we are “a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.” In simple terms, we vote for people who we want to make the laws and finally voting for us instead of going to the polls every time a small tweak to a vote needs to be passed. More specifically we are a Constitutional Republic, meaning the government has its power limited by an existing constitution that limits the government’s power over citizens.
The electoral college is made up of 538 electors and a presidential candidate must get half plus one, 270, in order to clinch the victory. 51 districts make up the college, the 50 states plus the DC. Each state gets at the same number of electors as it has members in congress and District of Columbia gets 3.
The number of electors/congressmen each state is allowed is based completely on population size. The states with the minimum number of electors– 3– include both Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana while California holds the most with 55. These numbers can vary from year to year, but they generally don’t change by a lot.
The vast majority of states are winner-take-all, but Maine and Nebraska work slightly differently. These two states award the popular vote winner 2 electoral votes by default and then the rest of the votes are based on the popular vote winners of each congressional district (2 in Maine and 3 in Nebraska).
Like I mentioned earlier, in order to win the presidency overall, a candidate must win 270 electoral votes at the minimum. If no candidate reaches 270 votes, the election gets passed on to the House and the Senate. This part gets really complicated so I’m going to quote a blog post about the topic because I like the way they worded it:
In the House, each state delegation gets one vote in the presidential contingent election. Currently, the Republicans have the clear majority in 33 state delegations out of 50 in the House, before Election Day. Each member of the Senate gets one vote in a contingent election. That could allow for the unlikely pairing of a President and Vice President from different political parties – which hasn’t happened since 1796.
So that is how it works. Let’s talk about what is threatening it.
The only way to change this nationally is for the congress to amend the Constitution. This is very challenging and unlikely because even if it passed the Senate, it would also have to be approved by three-fourths of the states.
There is a group called NPVIC, or National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, that is trying to work around the Constitution by getting states to agree to make their electorate votes go to the national popular vote winner instead of the state popular vote winner. At this point in time, it has been adopted by ten states and the District of Columbia, whose 165 combined electoral votes, that’s 30.7% of the total Electoral College vote. They would only need a combination of states that add up to 270 electoral votes, this can be done in as few as 14 states, that is only 4 more than they have right now. Here is a map of the states that currently agree with NPVIC:
The green states above have already enacted this into law and the yellow states are pending in the legislation session. If all the states marked above agreed, that would bring up the total to 201, about 37% of the total electoral votes.
There is the question of legality and if NPVIC could legally do this. Many people that support this believe it is covered by Article II of the U.S. Constitution which states: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…" meaning that the states have the power to chose electors how they see fit instead of a federal ruling.
Congress still could stop this from happening because of another section of the Constitution, Article I Section 10: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power.“ Congress would more than likely need to approve this before it went into law. This has been questioned by supporters of NPVIC because the Supreme Court ruled in 1893 during the Virgina V. Tenessee case that such consent is not always necessary except in cases where a compact could overrule federal supremacy. It’s questionable whether or not this would apply here, but it would definitely be debated if NPVIC got the amount of electoral votes needed to completely influence the elections.
Okay, why should we keep it in place?
1. It stops the cities from controlling how the results pan out. This is incredibly important. I’ve have seen argument after argument asking “why would it be bad if cities chose the president” or saying “cities wouldn’t have that much power.” They go hand in hand.
It is estimated that about 62.7% of the US population lives in urban areas. Making it very easy for them to be the deciding factor on who wins the presidency: leaving 37.3% of the US population with no say in how their country would run. The reason this would be so horrible is that the city populations may want a president for because it would help them the most, while the small towns or farms may want the other candidate because they would help them the most. Shouldn’t the people in the small towns have a say too?
2. A state should get to give their electoral votes based on what that state decides, not what another state decides. This means that Texas should get to pick who Texas puts their votes towards instead of California deciding. Imagine if the majority vote ruled a Republican into office, but New York voted for the Democrat 99% to 1% but their votes still had to go towards the Republican. How is New York’s voice being heard if it just was just overruled by the overall vote?
Odds are if this was put in place, especially if it was done through NPVIC, there would be massive rioting. Imagine what is going on right now, but much much worse. People would feel like their vote doesn’t do anything.
3. Smaller, less populated states get a voice with an electoral college. As of right now, the least populated state, Wyoming, still has a say in they election. If it was a popularity vote, the entire state of Wyoming would have less than .2% say in the vote while a state like California would have 7% of a say. California would have 45 times the amount of control of the election than Wyoming. Now, California only has slightly over 18 the control of election than Wyoming.
Obviously, it makes sense that larger, more populated states should have more influence over the election than the smaller ones, but the small states still deserve a voice on federal leaders. With a popularity vote, their say would almost disappear.
4. Changing it to a popular vote would take power away from the states and give it to the Federal Government. With a national popular vote, there would most likely need to be more federal control of how voting in each state works. This would drastically change how elections work. Each state has different laws and ways they allow voting. Some states allow early voting while others don’t. Some states enforce voter ID laws, others don’t. Some states allow same-day registration, others don’t. The list goes on and on.
States have so many different ways of doing voting because it is best for their people. Voting laws that are good for people in Alaska are necessarily good for people in California.
Our founding fathers feared this. They believed that the bigger the Federal Government, the less free the people. State and local government can focus on laws that are necessary for the specific people of their state and tend to be more responsive to their citizen’s needs. It’s important to keep as much power in the states as possible for the sake of the people and the sake of the nation.
5. It’s possible that more people would dislike the President Elect than ever before. Imagine if a third party candidate were to actually get attention during the general election. (I know this is hypothetical but stay with me, because in 2012, a poll showed that 57% of Americans surveyed agreed “that there should be a third major political party in addition to the Democrats and Republicans.” People are fed up with both Democrats and Republicans, so why would it be too far out there to say this is possible?) Say the vote is split 3 ways: 31-35-34. The winner would be candidate B with only a 1% margin. Also, there would be 65% of the US population that didn’t like the winner. Sixty Five percent. Imagine the rioting then. It would be endless.
6. Yes, states still have say in the election even if they aren’t swing states. It is true that several states usually swing one way and (it seems like) only that way, but this year was very telling that even once solid blue states can swing red, or Vice Versa. Pennsylvania was blue for the previous 6 presidential elections but changed in this election cycle to vote red.
7. National recounts would take forever and be huge messes. In the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, there was a recount of the votes in Flordia. This occurred because the race in Flordia was extremely close and was a deciding state on whether or not Bush won the election or not. The recount took several weeks after election day and ended up going to both the Flordia Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States.
If it was a national popular vote, recounts would have to be done nationally which would take several weeks. Yes, we have technology that could recount ballots, but many times it is still done by hand. Even with the technology, it would take several days for verification and for all the states to send the results.
8. Voter Fraud would have a much larger effect on the results. As of now, it is very possible that voter fraud occurs in the election cycle. In fact, it did several times this election cycle. With the system that is currently in place, voter fraud has much less effect on how the actual election turns out. If it was a national popularity vote, however, voter fraud could be spread out across the entire country and affect the results.
For example, if voter fraud occurred with 500,000 fake votes nationwide across many states, with an electoral college in place there would be very little effect on the overall result because it would be absorbed state by state. If the same amount of fake votes was in a popular vote, it would not be absorbed or spread out over several states, it would directly be put in the actual results.
There are several other reasons that an electoral college should continue to be the way we choose our president, I think this hits the main points. There are also a few reasons that a popularity vote is beneficial, however, I think the cons outweigh the pros. Changing the system would be a massive mistake and would more than likely lead to a very rocky future for the United States.
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