For Americans living in forty of the fifty states, the coming 2024 presidential election will be little more than political theater. This includes the more than 113,000,000 Americans—a third of the entire country—living in the nation’s four most populous states, California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
The reason, of course, is the Electoral College, which has rendered eighty percent of presidential electoral units noncompetitive. Voters living in these areas will see little of either contestant after the primary season, unless it is to support a down-ballot candidate, and many may wonder if there is any point to going to the polls at all, since their vote cannot possibly impact the election.
For voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, however, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Virginia, North Carolina, Maine, and Nebraska, the stakes could not be higher. These ten states will almost certainly decide who is the next president, and two factors will determine who wins each.
The first is turnout. If either party cannot motivate its voters to aggressively support its candidate—a distinct possibility if it is a Biden-Trump rematch—the other will walk away with the prize. Still, with the hundreds of millions of dollars that both Democrats and Republicans will throw into the pot, only those living deep in caves will escape the slew of ads that will come as quickly as heartbeats and repeated visits by the candidates, each of whom will warn voters of the coming apocalypse if his (or perhaps her) opponent is chosen. Recent elections have, if nothing else, shown that fear of the other party has become a more powerful stimulus than support for one’s own. Turnout in these contested states, therefore, can be expected to be brisk on both sides.
That will leave the election to the most pivotal group in current American politics—Independents. Whichever party convinces the preponderance of these voters to support it, or more likely, to withhold support from the other, will likely occupy the White House in January 2025.
Although this group has expanded to include disaffected Democratic and especially Republican centrists who no longer feel there is a place for them in a political organization that only panders to the extremes, Independents in the six to ten states remain a tiny sliver of the electorate, likely less than ten percent of the total. And so, in a country of more than three-hundred-million people, fewer than one-half-of-one-percent of them will pick the person who will lead the nation in one of the most fraught periods in its history.
This, to borrow a phrase used about another industry, is no way to run an airline.
That the Electoral College is flawed is hardly a new idea, nor are the various theories of how and why it came about, most of which are heavy on political philosophy and short on practicalities.
The real reason the Founders chose such an unwieldy and, yes, unfair system of electing a chief executive is actually quite simple.
Desperation.
Nothing else worked. Even the use of electors had been repeatedly rejected, only to be resurrected in the closing days of the Constitutional Convention, when many of the delegates could not wait to run for the doors.
Madison himself confirmed this. He wrote, “The difficulty of finding an unexceptionable process for appointing the Executive Organ of a Government such as that of the U.S. was deeply felt by the Convention; and as the final arrangement of it took place in the latter stage of the Session, it was not exempt from a degree of the hurrying influence produced by fatigue and impatience in all such Bodies.”
Given the chief executive’s vital role in the functioning and even the perpetuation of sound government, “fatigue and impatience” are hardly the motivators about which Americans should rejoice.
Still, that result is not surprising. Designing the executive branch was a vexing problem. After fighting a long and destructive war to free themselves from the authority of the British crown, the delegates were loath to create a new system of government in which a similarly despotic figure might be enabled. The first president was certain to be George Washington, but his successors might prove far less trustworthy.
Various methods of selecting the chief executive were thus put forth but none had sufficient support to be accepted.
Appointment by the national legislature was the default option but was ultimately spurned since, as Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry contended, “The Legislature & the candidates wd. Bargain & play into one another’s hands, votes would be given by the former under promises or expectations from the latter, of recompensing them by services to members of the Legislature or to their friends.”
This did not, however, prevent the delegates from resurrecting the idea every time they were stuck on an alternative, which was often.
Some of the delegates favored empowering state legislatures to choose the president, but that would hand too much power to the states and was abandoned as well. Choosing the president by electors came up early in the proceedings and was also rejected, then was reintroduced when other schemes had failed, but was rejected then as well. In these cases, however, electors were to be chosen by either state or national legislators, so they were simply variations on other discarded ideas.
But what about the most obvious and fairest way to choose a leader in a democracy—letting the people do it?
Popular vote? Not a chance.
Slave states rejected the idea out of hand because popular vote would deprive them of the slave bonus they had won with the 3/5 clause. Of course, slaveholders did not put it that way. Virginia’s George Mason, the Convention’s largest slaveholder, “conceived it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people, as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.” Small states rebelled as well because they would lose the advantage of by-state voting that equal representation in the Senate had granted them.
These two factors are widely considered the reasons the Electoral College was created.
They are not.
Popular voting was dismissed because virtually every delegate, with the possible exception of Benjamin Franklin, did not want “the people” to have more than a minimal say in how the country was run, and certainly not in selecting the nation’s most important political leader.
In addition to Mason, a number of other delegates voiced antipathy to entrusting government to ordinary citizens. Elbridge Gerry grumbled, “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” and Connecticut’s Roger Sherman insisted, “The people immediately should have as little to do as may be [possible] about the Government.” When he presented the Virginia Plan, Edmund Randolph, a patrician from one of Virginia’s first families and a descendant of Pocahontas, exhorted the convention to save the United States from “democracy,” because he believed, correctly, that such a declaration would strike a sympathetic chord.
These sentiments would find their way into any number of mechanisms to limit participation in the political process by ordinary Americans—at least those lacking wealth or position—including the contrivance we have come to know as the Electoral College.
With popular vote off the table, then, the delegates were forced to scramble to find a suitable substitute. They were not successful. At one point, Madison muttered, “There are objections agst. every mode that has been, or perhaps can be proposed.”
Finally, after more than three months, as August turned to September, the weary delegates appointed a committee to try to resolve issues that had remained unresolvable, the most significant being the election of the president. “With their eyes wandering to the exits,” a scholar wrote, “the Framers never focused on the absurdity of their job assignment.”
But the committee surprised everyone and came up with a new formula, albeit one that contained many of the elements that the Convention had previously rejected.
The national legislature, which had again been the choice going in, was replaced by electors, “equal to the whole number of Senators, and Members of the House of representatives to which the State may be entitled in the legislature.” The states, however, were left to decide how the electors would be chosen.
No one was happy, including the members of the committee who had drafted the proposal, but it was going to be that or nothing and time was running out. There was a good deal of grousing and some minor changes but, when it came to a vote, the exhausted delegates assented and the Electoral College was born.
The flaws built into this last, desperate throw of the dice are well documented: the tendency to minority rule; lack of rules governing the appointment of electors; initial lack of differentiation between a vote for president and vice president; the ability of an unscrupulous candidate to corrupt the process; and the biggest of them of all, which allowed one man, Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley to effectively choose the president all by himself (talk about minority government).
The only real question is whether anything can be done.
It won’t be easy.
There are two potential roads to change and neither of them is feasible in the present environment. The first, a Constitutional amendment that changes the basic formula, would require approval by 3/4 of the states, and smaller states will be unwilling to give up the disproportionate power they now hold in the selection process.
Nor does the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact have much chance. States that sign on agree to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote, totally legal under the current rules. They also agree not to do so until member states total 270 electoral votes. States with a total of only 194 electoral votes have joined, all of them controlled by Democrats, so getting to 270 is a near impossibility
That leaves the group that the Founders refused to make a part of the process—the people. Only if we, as Americans, decide that a fair system will serve us better than this Jerry-built monstrosity and vote for candidates in national, state and local elections who will demand change to the system can a genuine effort at reform be undertaken.