The Electoral College

There's been a lot of chatter about the Electoral College. Elizabeth Warren has called for it to be done away with. Some states have formed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would award electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the overall popular vote.

For my non-American readers, the Electoral College is not a school of higher learning but instead how we elect our president. If you look at the map to the right, you'll see a number on each state. That is the total of congressmen and senators in each state. Representatives are awarded on the basis of population, which is why California has the highest number. When a presidential candidate wins that state, he/she receives all of the electoral votes (Maine and Nebraska are the only two stats that split the votes by congressional district). Those states in red are the states that Donald Trump won. The blue are the ones Hillary Clinton won. Trump had the most electoral votes, but Clinton had the most popular votes, by a surplus of three million. Trump won Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania by less than 35,000 votes. A forty-thousand vote swing, which is not that many in a country of 300 million, would have won Clinton the election. The same thing happened in 2000, when Al Gore had more votes, but George W. Bush won the electoral college, because of a handful of votes in Florida.

The Electoral College seems antiquated. It exists because the original thirteen states didn't want to be dominated by Virginia, which had the highest population (Virginia claimed four of the first five presidents anyway). Small states didn't want to be ignored. This is also the reason for a bicameral legislature, with the House represented by population, and the Senate by two people from each state. Thus Wyoming, with the smallest population, has any many senators as California.

Only four times has a candidate won the popular vote but lost the election: Clinton, Gore, Samuel Tilden, who lost to Rutherford B. Hayes om 1876 (if you want to read about something corrupt, read up on that election) and Andrew Jackson, who had the most votes but did not win a majority of the Electoral College in 1824. and thus the presidency was decided by the House of Representatives, who chose John Quincy Adams.

That it is has happened twice in five elections, and both times benefiting Republicans, is cause of concern in the progressive's heart. In terms of raw vote, Democrats have won six of the last seven elections, but the Electoral vote only four times. It's enough to make a Democrat mad.

Why do we continue to have it? Again, it's small states. Giving a state with hardly any people, like Alaska, three electoral votes keeps them interesting. Some think if the race was only about the popular vote then candidates would only be campaigning in areas of large population, namely, cities. The urban population is much higher than rural, and this means there are far more Democrats than Republicans. Therefore, Republicans will hang on the Electoral College with a death-grip. Without it, it would be difficult to beat a Democrat for president. Bush did in 2004, but just barely.

Democrats, true to their name, want a true democracy, where every vote counts. Yes, it's true, not every counts. If you are a Republican in Massachusetts or a Democrat in Utah, your vote is wasted. Liberal votes in New York count only until the one that puts the total past fifty percent. After that, it's just gravy. Most of the three million votes Clinton won by were in California, counted well after after election night. They were worthless.

But the United States is not a democracy, not technically. It's a republic, in which the voters elect representatives. A democracy, as Greece found out centuries ago, is unwieldy. As citizens we don't vote on everything--we send people to our state capitols or Washington to vote for us. If we don't like the way they vote, we vote them out (theoretically).

Dumping the Electoral College will never happen. It would require an amendment to the Constitution, which requires the state legislatures of three-fourths of the states to enact. The small states, especially those in Republican control, will never allow it to happen. It's something we Democrats have to live with. In retrospect, Clinton should have worked harder to win Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.