The constitutional case for doing away with the Electoral College
Political Director Joseph Magliocco wrote the following a couple of weeks before the 2016 election in his college application. GovSight is resurfacing it ahead of the Supreme Court case which probes whether or not states may pass laws punishing electors who refute their state’s presidential popular vote. Magliocco’s opinions are his own; they do not reflect the sentiment of GovSight: a nonpartisan, civic information platform.
In 1789, the Constitutional Convention ratified one of the most important documents in the history of mankind. The Constitution of the United States of America established precedents that would change history forever. However, there is one clause that has long outlived its usefulness but remains in the Constitution: Article 2, Section 1 — the Electoral College.
The Electoral College was implemented to address two specific concerns: to protect the integrity of electing a president and to prevent a small number of states from dominating the election. Neither of these concerns remains valid today. When the Constitution was ratified, the Founders understood the use of electors to be against the republican ideals they strove for. However, given that only 1% of citizens had a college education at the time, they felt it was necessary. Free public education was still decades away until Andrew Jackson’s initiatives took shape. Even though the Electoral College did create a political upper class, it was still ratified because, as Alexander Hamilton said in the Federalist Papers, “It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” However, times have changed since the 1790s. Today, 39% of Americans have a college degree and 88% have a high school degree or equivalent. Hamilton’s argument is no longer relevant.
The second rationale behind the Electoral College was that the population and political power were originally concentrated in two states. The delegates worried that Massachusetts and Virginia alone would be able to pick a president if their populace supported a particular candidate. At the time, the Founders felt that the Electoral College could prevent this. Unfortunately, today the Electoral College creates precisely the imbalance it was intended to protect against. The Electoral College has turned a few swing states — defined by the right demographics, such as Ohio, Virginia and Florida — into the “super states” that the Founders feared. It is almost impossible to win the presidency today without these states, given the current political alignment of the country, and every four years, they become the epicenter of the American political universe. The creation of super states, the very thing feared by the Founders, reveals how the Electoral College is a vestige of American government.
Our constitution is brilliantly conceived, as evidenced by its continued relevance after almost two-and-a-half centuries in which unimaginable changes have occurred. That such a document is still so applicable to our governing is remarkable, but the Founders understood certain aspects of their masterpiece might at one point no longer be relevant and provided a mechanism for amendment in such instances. For example, the three-fifths compromise and the disenfranchisement of women were clear errors from today’s sensibility. In hindsight, these fundamental errors, which Congress and the states corrected, remind us that the Constitution established a dynamic framework. The Founders intended for what they wrote to both apply in changing times and have the flexibility to adapt as needed. They did not make it easy to change for a reason, but in this instance, it is time to try.
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