Electoral College

 

Sophisticated Lady

Educated lady with your college degree
Amazes me why you just can't see
Learned everything from your books on the shelf
But no one ever taught you how to think for yourself

But does that Sophisticated Lady have an Electoral College degree?

The winner of the Electoral College has not been the winner of the popular vote in many recent Presidential elections. This has prompted calls for the elimination of the Electoral College. But before calling for the elimination of the Electoral College, isn’t it worth examining why there is an Electoral College in the first place. The Electoral College was instituted because the President was supposed to have broad representation from the People of ALL of the states, and not merely the popular vote winner. Otherwise the popular vote winner might be decided only by those states with the largest populations. The Electoral College was intended to ensure that the President have broad support across all of the states, large and small.

However the framers did not foresee the formation of Political Parties. It was originally proposed that the leading vote getter in the Electoral College would be President and the second leading vote getter would be Vice President. This resulted in the election of 1796 where the President, John Adams, was from one party while his Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, was from a different political party. It also resulted in the Electoral Crisis of 1800 when Thomas Jefferson (the nominee of the Democratic-Republican Party for President)  and Aaron Burr (his party’s proposed Vice President) got the same number of votes (and if you don’t know who Aaron Burr is then watch Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. He was “the damn fool that shot him” and the man who “stood for nothing”). This led to the 12^th Amendment which required separate Electoral College votes for President and Vice President. The formation of political parties also changed the way that the Electoral College worked. The winner of the popular vote might no longer have desired broad support of the states. Under a two party system, the winner of the popular vote and the electoral vote should still be the person who received more than 50%. However in the event of more than two parties, the Electoral College votes are mostly awarded to the person who received the plurality of the votes in a state, but that person may not have received a majority of the votes in that state.

Of the 59 presidential elections, the winner of a majority of the popular vote also won a majority of the electoral vote in 37 of those elections. A third party participated in 13 of the 29 elections where no candidate won a popular majority.  In two of those third-party elections, (Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Ronald Reagan in 1980), the difference between the percentage of the Electoral College and popular votes exceeded 40%, falsely giving the impression of a mandate to the winner. In the 9 elections where there was no major third party (i.e. the victor might not receive a majority of the popular vote), that ranges from a low of 46.09% of the popular vote and 56.50% of the Electoral College vote for Donald Trump in 2016 to a high of 49.72% of the popular vote and 56.42% of the Electoral College vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

I do not have the state-by-state votes to see how this would impact the elections, but based on these results, I would propose that Electoral College votes NOT be awarded unless a candidate receives a majority (NOT A SIMPLE PLURALITY) of the state votes in a Presidential election. The Electoral College would still meet, but would not consist of a pre-specified number of votes (so Nate Silver’s famous 538 would be no more). It is suggested that this might ensure that the winner of the popular vote more closely tracks with the winner of the Electoral College vote, even in the presence of third‑party candidates. This is intended that a Presidential winner have not only the most votes, but a broad representation of the state's votes.  This might not change the results of the election of 2016, but it would more closely heed the Spirit of the Law.

I realize that some states (i.e. Maine and Nebraska) award Electoral College votes on the basis of the votes in Congressional districts, but awarding Presidential Electoral College votes on the basis of votes for President in Congressional districts makes the fight over the mapping of those Congressional districts even more contentious. The proposed modification to the Electoral College does not deal with the number of Congressional seats or the mapping of districts. (Although I personally prefer the adoption of the Wyoming rule for the number of Congressional seats,
 https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2021/05/apportionment-ii.html, and I do not think that a political party which has an interest in the mapping of Congressional districts can be unbiased in developing such a mapping, i.e. I am anti-Gerrymandering. But one battle at a time.)