The Electoral College is Undemocratic

That may be what it is good about it.

First we can establish a few facts.   

1.  Donald Trump was elected president.  He has pluralities in states with enough electoral votes to get to 270.   The formal election will take place in December when the electors vote, but Trump won under current rules.

2.  Hillary will win the popular vote, probably by something over 1% of the votes cast, about 2,000,000 votes.  The counting is still underway so the exact numbers are unsure.  But she won the popular vote by a lot.

3.  Forty eight of the fifty states are winner-take-all.  When Trump carried Michigan he got all of Michigan's votes.

4.  Trump carried almost all the states considered "battleground" except Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada.    Some he won by very narrow margins, 1% or less in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and this was the margin of victory.   Hillary won NH by 1% and Nevada by 2% but they were not enough.

5.  Trump could win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote because he won with narrow margins in enough states while losing by big margins in some states.

6.  The writers of the Constitution did the electoral college weighting on purpose as part of a political compromise in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.  They needed to weight large states like Virginia and New York with more representation than than Delaware and Rhode Island, yet they wanted the small states to have buy-in.   So they weighted the electoral votes by giving every state the sum of their senators and representatives.   Today this means that Wyoming and Alaska and Montana get about 3 times the electoral power per resident as do Californians (California has 55 electoral votes, those small states have 3.  If it were done with democratic proportion, California would get 53 and they get one each.)

7. The founders made multiple decisions which have created grave problems Americans have needed to change.  The founders were good but they were not perfect.  They erred.  They realized it quickly and future generations learned it over time.  We don't need to make their work sacred and un-changable.  They provided for change.

  **The original method of voting for two people, with the president being the one with the most votes and the vice president being the one with the second most votes meant that it was likely--and soon proved to be the case--that the president and vice president would be rivals, creating the winner and his chief opponent in the two offices.   (Adams and Jefferson.)

  **The original method of voting did not distinguish between the president and vice president which meant that the person intended to be VP got as many votes as the person intended to be president, which caused a crisis. (Jefferson and Burr.)

  **There was no provision for term limits.  (FDR.)

  **There was no provision to stop faithless electors. (Ongoing vulnerability.)

  **And, in contemplation of the assertion by some that the Philadelphia convention decisions should not be considered perfect and unalterable and sacred, the following additional problems.  Most Americans would be very happy that later thinking overturned the original document.

  **There was no provision for a Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, of religious practice, of assembly, the press, nor the right to bear arms, nor the right against unreasonable searches, nor trial by jury, nor the taking of property without compensation.  There was also no provision for voting by women, nor by blacks.  They counted enslaved black residents as 3/5 of a vote and voted to perpetuate slavery.

The 2016 Upshot.      The result of all this was an election whose campaigns took place largely in the "battleground states.".   Alabama and Oklahoma and other states presumably securely Republican were largely ignored, as were California and New York, considered reliably Democratic.  Those battleground voters decided the election.   Then, further increasing the leverage, a very few tipping point voters in those few states, voters which caused Michigan to be won by some 15,000 votes, tipped the election to Trump, not Clinton.  

A proposed solution:  a popular vote for President.   A National Popular Vote bill has received the support of states representing 165 electoral votes so far.  Under state law in each state they pledged to cast their votes for the winner of the national popular vote.  If sufficient additional states join the agreement the country would effectively move to a popular vote system.   It would create a one-person-one-vote equality.   It would also end a practice that has happened twice in 16 years in which the clear winner of the popular vote lost the election.

Would this be good?  In some ways, yes.    The program has its advocates and there are some good things about it:  Click to visit the National Popular Vote Website

  **Equal seems fair.  Why should some people have three times the weight of others?

  **People can move freely from one state to another.  We are not bound to a state or region.  The president represents us all.  Therefore, the president should represent "the people" since we are equal citizens wherever we are.

  **Currently enormous attention is paid to a relatively few voters in the battlegrounds and the concerns and interests of people in states with a likely-settled decision are largely ignored.   There is enormous attention paid to the interests of a factory worker in Pennsylvania and much less to a fellow American factory worker in California, without clear public policy reason or value. Factories are factories.  It is unfair.

  **The mandate of the "will of the people" would be better established in a popular vote election, especially when there is a split between the popular and electoral vote.  In the event that a candidate were to pursue an "the election is rigged, the election should not be respected" post-defeat campaign, if that candidate were to have won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote then that candidate's position could have had great traction.  (America may have dodged this bullet in 2016.  The candidate asserting that position won.)

What is wrong with it?   Why not just do it?    Answer:  We have a big country and there regional interests.    American has distinct regions and differences between them--something that has been true since its founding.   We are a federation of states as well as a single country.   Although state lines seem somewhat arbitrary there are in fact significant  differences built around geography, sometimes between the states (Vermont vs NY) and sometimes within the state (rural Pennsylvania between Philadelphia and Pittsburg).   In this election rural areas voted very differently from urban areas.   In generations past the divide was based on slave vs. free.  And in an earlier time on coastal vs. inland.  A salient issue today is "rustbelt" vs. tech center; there is a lot of difference between Warren, Michigan and San Mateo, California.  

The country survives as a nation in part because people in Tulsa, Oklahoma do not have to live under all of the same rules as people in Portland, Oregon.   We have experience with nationalization of values put into law, and it pulls the country apart, when one group has change forced on it.   The changes are advanced as a good moral value by the majority, an expression of common sense and common decency.  The South--and subsequently the country as a whole-- was forced to end racial segregation; opponents of abortion were forced to accept a woman's right to one; urbanites are forced to allow individual gun rights.    

The electoral college protects minority interests.  It requires a candidate for president to assemble a coalition rather than a majority.   It means that one region or one point of view cannot run up the score against significant segments of the population.    A candidate Cruz or Trump could not run up a big vote in the Bible Belt advocating the establishment of Christian churches without endangering the crucial electoral votes in more secular Pennsylvania.   The electoral college dampens the power of majorities because for a candidate to win he or she must pull together a collection of states.   

To the chagrin of Hillary Clintons supporters, Trump did that, barely.  His coalition was bigger than her coalition.  It isn't exactly democratic but it is very possibly more stable and resilient than would be a fully nationalized election.   Large and diverse countries fracture.  Ours has fractured only once.   Democracies untempered by checks on majority rule are more likely to fracture.  A somewhat democratic government--but one that is not fully democratic--may be the price of nationhood.

                              #    #    #

A new post election podcast is up and running.  Thad Guyer and I talk about what happened.  Regular listeners remember that we have been warning that Hillary was much weaker than the regular mainstream polls showed.  Thad had said the models and data he looked at showed Hillary losing all along.   I thought it was a closer contest than that but in the end predicted a Trump win.  It is probably all the wisdom and insight a person can stand in one dose.

Click Here for the podcast