By Peter Oliver
Twice now within 16 years the presidential candidate receiving the most votes has been denied election. This, of course, is thanks to the enigma known as the Electoral College.
Inevitably, the call for presidential elections by popular vote appears as a sour-grapes outcry from supporters of the popular-vote-winning, Electoral-College-losing candidate. And those supporting the Electoral College winner inevitably jump on a sanctimonious constitutional horse, declaring that the U.S. is a republic of states, not a national democracy.
Regardless, as the national political map now stands, state-by-state balkanization carries overwhelming weight over national consensus. For starters, all states have their own discrete governing structures with governors and legislatures. The two-senator-per-state Senate makes a further (and especially undemocratic) tilt toward Republicanism. (According to the 2016 election results, Vermonters are represented by one senator per 150,000 voters; Californians are represented by one senator per 5.3 million voters.)
In addition, the House, which the founders envisioned as the people’s legislative body in the federal government, has increasingly become a state-controlled entity. Republican legislatures in recent years have been craftily manipulating the congressional districting process – gerrymandering (albeit legal) by another name.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans won the combined congressional vote by just 6 percent, yet ended up with 13 of 18 House seats. If the House truly represented the will of the people, the Pennsylvania House seat ratio would be closer to 10-to-8.
The U.S. is indeed a republic of states, but it is also a nation, yet with no one in the national government elected nationally. And in a country of united states that seems a strange shortcoming. Constitutional conservatives might harrumph about the inviolability of the Electoral College and any hint of meddling with the original intent of the Founding Fathers. But when the founders were hammering out the details of the Constitution, the Electoral College concept was hardly a slam dunk. James Madison, for example, preferred a popular vote for president; Alexander Hamilton was a principal proponent of an Electoral College system.
The founders, of course, were dealing with a vastly different electorate back then, when, for the most part, only property-owning white men were considered worthy voters. The rationale for the Electoral College was not, as some revisionists suggest today, intended to protect the politically neglected small-state voter from the tyranny of the urban majority; this was southern plantation interests grappling with northern trading elites.
The effect today has been that the Electoral College values votes differently – a vote in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, capable of swinging a tightly contested state’s electoral vote one way or another, becomes worth more than a vote in an uncontested state. And in uncontested states, voter turnout is discouraged. In Vermont, for example, why bother voting, other than out of civic duty, when you know that Clinton is going to be a shoo-in with more than 60 percent of the vote?
It could be argued, of course, that if the presidential election were determined by popular vote, the candidates would simply campaign where the people are – the large population centers. Who wants to trudge across the hills and dales of Vermont for a smattering of votes when, in Mad-River-Valley-size Manhattan, you can reach a population of more than a million and a half?
Maybe so, but in a close election like 2016, with a popular-vote margin (for Clinton) of about 1 percent, any candidate who blows off any single vote does so at his or her peril. As a result, Democrats would more likely spend at least some time in the plains of conservative Oklahoma and Republicans in the liberal niches of western Oregon. Any vote anywhere matters. It would stir together the political mix of ideas rather than amplify the singular ideologies that have become entrenched in state-by-state voting.
The national electoral structure has changed repeatedly, constitutionally and otherwise. Senators, now elected by popular vote, were originally chosen by state legislatures. Women and former slaves earned the right to vote. In recent years, Maine and Nebraska have chosen to allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by the statewide winner-take-all method used elsewhere. Congressional redistricting is an ongoing process. And so on. The system can be and has been changed.
A popular election of the president (and vice president) is overdue. Concern about the “tyranny of the majority” that conservatives often raise to justify the Electoral College lacks logic and consistency; if a majority can be tyrannical at a national level, why wouldn’t it be in a local or state election? The U.S. as a republic of states is already well served in the electoral process. The U.S. as a united nation deserves a place, too.
