Make Our Electoral College Great Again
Today is the big day when the electors of our Electoral College formally make Donald Trump our next president (be still my beating heart). That’s how it’s set up. Now, how do we arrive at 535 Electors? Each state has allotment of Electors equal to the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for its Senators. Plus the District of Columbia is allotted three Electors. Bringing the total to 538. So you have to garner 270 Electors to be the winning candidate for the highest office in the land.
There has been an unusual amount of chatter about convincing a sufficient number of Electors to undo the voters’ choice -- not the popular vote, but the vote as calculated by the winner take all (in most states) system in which the candidate of each state who garners a majority of the votes (or a plurality) wins all the Electors.
Most notably, my nonprofit Socrates Cafe / Democracy Cafe’s own amazing advisory board member, Lawrence Lessig, a committed advocate for a truly open society if ever there was one, has been at the vanguard of the Electors Trust, aimed at getting a sufficient number of electors to vote their consciences and vote for a candidate other than Trump, who many feel is not of the right temperament, among other things, to be our president.
As admirable as this effort may be, it ain’t gonna work -- and it ain’t even the best way to go about it (as fascinating as many of the proffered arguments are for the efficacy and legitimacy of this approach). What we must do first is to unfreeze our republic.
And to do that, we need to undo Public Law 62-5 -- which a bit over a century ago, by majority vote in both chambers of Congress, froze our number of members in the House of Representatives at 435 -- as I wrote about here in my Huffington Post column a good deal back.
If we’d continued to gradually increasing the number of members of the House, as we’d done until 1911 when Public Law 62-5 was scandalously enacted in a Nativist-driven effort to keep the swelling immigrations in cities from having a political voice, we’d probably have about 2000 House members now, rather than the 435 we’ve been stuck with, each with constituencies (fiefdoms, really) on average of well over 700,000 (and each with about 22 unelected staffers to keep their fiefdom unassailable).
This was not how our republic was envisioned by our Framers, not how it was meant to be.
What would the outcome of our latest election have been if we had far more ‘representativeness’ than we do today? What would the outcome have been If we enjoyed today around the 2,000 members of the House we would have had, if the numbers kept increasing after each 10-year census? (And don’t forget, our Constitution gives us the right to have one House member for every 30,000 constituents -- yet right now, we’ve ‘settled’ for one for every 710,000 or so, making it impossible to have the kind of intimate representativeness our Framers had bequeathed to our vast republic).
For one thing, we wouldn’t have just two major parties vying to be the leader of the ‘free world’ -- we’d have a number of viable candidates, and viable parties (or maybe even no political parties, since their efficacy would be so greatly diminished (and our Framers never envisioned the advent of such parties in the first place)).
For another, this’d likely mean that a candidate for president would have won by a plurality rather than a majority, so there might be some horse trading to see to it that the one who was elected by Electors (there would have been at least 2,000 in this scenario). Likely a genuine statesman or -woman would have been the result - someone who authentically mirrored our higher democratic aspirations.
For yet another, it would greatly reduce the odds that a candidate would win based on his or her ability to raise gazillions of bucks primarily in corporate dollars, or to win if he or she were fabulously wealthy (and maybe a demagogue to boot) based on his or her own ability to contribute massive amounts of personal wealth towards financing the campaign.
By having a genuinely representative constitutional republic of the democratic variety, we’d have had at least some presidential candidates with their hats in the ring who would have put the interests of the country above all else -- and hence would have put the interests of open societies in general first and foremost, to make not only America but the promise of open societies for one and all great again.
Rather than what we have, candidates like the two major candidates, with extraordinarily kinds of flaws that lead to patterns of tragic misjudgment and contribute to precipitating pernicious forms of factionalism that over time bring down the democratic curtain of the country down with them.
So here’s what we have to do in order not just to unfreeze, but to rescue and revive our republic -- we have two years to cajole all candidates running for Congress in the 2018 election to sign a pledge promising irrevocably that the first thing they’ll do when they take office in Jan 2019 is pass a law that rescinds Public Law 62-5. Tell ‘em you’re not voting for them, not voting period, unless they sign the pledge.
All it takes is a mere majority vote -- perhaps a daunting feat, but not an impossible one required via a Constitutional amendment.
Join me in this effort. Write to me at [email protected] and tell me you’re in, and we’ll establish a grassroots movement in all precincts. If our representative democracy means enough to you, and I bet it does, I bet you’ll join me and help make our Electoral College great again.
