The Electoral College
Our latest episode with Hannah and Nick of the Civics 101 podcast was as enlightening as it was fun to make. We talked about a range of subjects important to democracy, and at one point we were discussing the Electoral College. Hannah made two very interesting points: 1) the Electoral College is a holdover from slavery and 2) it favors only one-third of the American electorate.
Listen to ourinterview with them here!
How does theElectoral College Actually Work?
We talk about it in the episode which you can listen to above, but we thought it might be interesting (and helpful) to give a quick overview of exactly what the EC is, and how we got it in the first place. You can also check out Civics 101’s awesome episode on the EC here!
The EC is made up of 538electors, who come from each of the 50 states, as well as theDistrict of Columbia. According to law, each state is awarded one elector perUS Representative, and one elector per US Senator. And, thanks to the 23rdAmendment, DC gets 3 EC votes, even though they aren’t representedin the House or Senate.
Whichever presidential candidate wins a state receives the full amount of that state’s Electoral College votes, in a system called “Winner Take All.” The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which require their Electoral College representatives to vote for whichever candidate won the county they represent. The two EC delegates awarded for Senate seats go to the winner of the state overall.
The first presidential candidate to win 270 ElectoralCollege votes is named the next President of the United States. It is for thisreason our electoral system is called “Indirect Popular Voting.”
Why do we do it thisway?
The US Constitution was drafted in 1787, when America was acompletely different country. For starters, there were only 13 states, but moreimportantly, slavery was still in full effect. This meant that40% of the population of the Southern States was enslaved. Themajority of America’s eligible voters resided in the ‘free states’ of the North(although the North still totallyhad slaves). Many landowning Southerners looked at the possibilityof direct popular voting and realized that no matter what they did, the Northwould always have more voters (if not more people) and would thus monopolizeAmerican political debate.
One person who was especially worried about this was white, slave-owning Virginian James Madison, AKA ‘The Father of the Constitution’. During the drafting of the Constitution, he famously argued that slaves must be counted because:
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”
He then went on to propose what would become the Electoral College. Seriously, same speech.
Madison and his slave-owning friends had their way, which led to the infamous ‘three-fifths compromise,’ whereby each slave counted as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. The Electoral College was born. The 12th Amendment changed it to allow for separate election of President and Vice President, but the underlying idea remained the same.
Unsurprisingly, the Southern slant of the Electoral Collegebecame immediately clear. After ratification, the first President of the US wasa white,slave-owning Virginian. So was the third one.And the fourth one.And the fifth one.For 32 of the first 36 years of the Presidency, the president was a whiteslave-holder from Virginia.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Who does it helptoday?
The Electoral College is a legislative holdover from a timelong-passed, and it’s one of the most controversial parts of our government.The National Archives reports that there have been morethan 700 attempts to overturn or abolish the Electoral College sinceits inception. The problem is, it’s in the Constitution, so it’ll take anotheramendment to get it removed—and not everyone thinks it’s such a bad thing.
Supporters say it benefits small states, and keeps them relevant in national elections. This is both true and untrue. Yes, it gives states with smaller populations a better voter-to-electoral-college-vote ratio, but since they’re small states to begin with they’re only going to have three-to-five EC votes anyway. In 2016, the nine smallest states got exactly zero visits in the general election, according to The Week, and six ‘battleground states’ (Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan) got two thirds of all visits.
Additionally, a recent University of Texas study found that if the general election is within 1 point, there is a 45% chance the winner of the popular vote will lose the Electoral College—and it’s heavily in favor of Republicans. That’s because Democrats do well in large, urban states, whereas Republicans clean up with less populous, rural states. To back this up, look no further than 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 and 2016, which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 3 million.
It’s complicated, archaic, and sometimes results in the loser of the popular vote winning the White House—but it’s our system and it’s going to take some serious doing to get rid of it. For more from someone who’d like nothing more than to see it gone, check out our interview with Indivisible co-director Ezra Levin.
Also: check us out on YouTube!
Works Cited
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