Of Presidential Electors… and Bigger Things

Like clockwork, we find ourselves facing a quadrennial assault on the Constitution. Every presidential election cycle, the debate over our electoral system of choosing the president is reinvented. And every time, I end up muttering to no one in particular about the one-sidedness of the portrayal of the debate. This was demonstrated perfectly by column I recently read in the Greensboro, North Carolina News & Record.

“If Americans could put partisanship aside for a moment, I suspect most of us would prefer to elect the president by direct vote of the people or by a proportional distribution of electoral votes.” Rosemary Roberts, October 6, 2004

Um, no, Ms. Roberts, I don’t think most of us would. And for many that do, I believe they either haven’t thought through the consequences, or haven’t been presented with the other side.
This isn’t a new debate, by the way. It dates back through several hundred proposals to scrap the electoral system to at least 1788. In that era, those arguing for the so-called electoral college were promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution. Those arguing against were in the camp opposed to ratification. I’ll let you draw your own inferences as to where today’s debaters’ philosophies lie.
One of the best arguments supporting the current system can be explained through a baseball analogy. Recently, my beleaguered Red Sox won the ALCS best-of-seven series against the arch-nemesis Yankees 4-3. However, the Sox were outscored in the seven games by a total of 45-41 runs, thanks in large measure to New York’s 19 runs in game 3. How can it be that Boston won the series? New York got the majority of the runs! Their runs must not count as much as Boston’s runs. Shouldn’t New Yorkers be up in arms (not that they can possess any), and demanding that every run count? Send this to the Supreme Court! But no, for all their disappointment at the results, Yankee fans are not claiming that the series outcome isn’t fair.
So why do the rules allow for this? Couldn’t Major League Baseball award the championship of League or World Series to the team that collected the most total runs? Or the team with the most runs in the regular season? Sure, but is the mark of a champion the ability to drub your opponent in one game while falling short in four others? I submit we prefer the team that can win more consistently. I submit we prefer the president who can do the same.
In reality, the issue of removing our electoral system from presidential elections is a non-starter. It is constitutionally mandated. (U.S. Const. Art. II, § 1) You will not see two-thirds of each house of congress and three-fourths of state legislatures (38!) agree to popular vote elections. Remember the origins of the phrase fly-over country. If you think it’s bad now, at least candidates have a reason to campaign in closely contested rural states when they need every last electoral vote, as we can see in recent visits to Iowa, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, to name a few. But in a popular vote election, sparse population areas become irrelevant, when a candidate can reach five or ten times as many people campaigning in urban settings. I think we can find 13 states willing to say no to this plan.
Proponents of popular voting see that writing on the wall, and have moved to another battlefront – proportional appointment of state electors based on the percentage of votes each candidate receives in that state. Helloooooooo Colorado. I won’t start on my criticism of this proposal, or this will take all day. But these and similar proposals are offered as a way to bring our country closer to a true democracy – one person, one vote, will of the people, yadda yadda… This is a good thing, right?
Wrong. And this question goes to the very heart of the Electoral College debate: what is our country’s form of government? Our country is not a direct democracy, for good reason. Sure, there are democratic principles, people do vote, and those votes do have meaning in the governance of the people. Direct democracies may work in New England town meetings. It struggled to maintain viability in ancient Athens when the city population exceeded 300 thousand. Governance of a nation nearing 300 million? That’d be some town meeting. No, democracy has been described, as attributed to Benjamin Franklin, as two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for lunch.
Our form of government is a republic. A constitutional federal democratic republic, to be precise. Working backwards through that description, we are a nation governed by elected representatives who hold authority granted by the people (republic), elected by majority vote (democratic), of sovereign states (federalism), within limits set forth in a constitution. Carrying the wolf/sheep analogy just a little bit farther than it was intended, our voting wolves are merely representatives, limited by their accountability to the rest of the wolves and sheep, who, by the way, are well armed as guaranteed by their constitution.
Sure, “we, the people” have the power to alter the laws of the federal government. But not directly. This happens either through elected representatives, or through the states, as units in our federal form of government (which, by the way, are also elected representatives at a more localized level.) And how does this answer relate to propriety of the electoral system? Because our form of government would not even exist but for the electoral system. It is part of the great compromise… the system that brought us a bicameral legislature. States are not allotted electors pro rata based on their population. They are allotted one elector for every congressman – both in the house and the senate. Just as the senate was a concession by the big states to induce the little ones to join the union, so too is the apportionment of electors. An even larger concession, look at what happens if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the electoral vote. If there is no majority, the House of Representatives chooses the president – not by majority vote of the total body, but by majority vote of each state’s delegation, with each state constituting one vote. Therein is the ultimate concession to the smaller states. It was highly conceivable to our founding fathers that with multiple candidates, no one might reach what is now the magical 270 elector target. Under those circumstances, the House would select the president. The House, where Wyoming’s one delegation vote is equal to California’s one delegation vote.
See, in every instance it is the states that select the president. The state legislatures set the manner of selecting electors. When no majority is obtained in an election, the state congressional delegations, acting in a single unit on behalf of their state, select the president. By scrapping the Electoral College and replacing it with a nationwide vote, our federal republic is further weakened. Our states become mere administrative boundaries for one federal government, rather than autonomous sovereigns delegating authority to a federal level of government. Goodbye United States of America. We will simply be the Nation of America. Then, for all intents, the great compromise is eviscerated. The urbanites, as a concentrated majority voting bloc, will be electing the wolves to govern the sheep. God help the moral, political, and economic fabric of our society should that happen.
Hyperbole? Perhaps. But I believe, Ms. Roberts, that if Americans truly understand their own form of government, the majority would embrace the integral Electoral College, and reject popular voting for president. Then again, looking at the 17th Amendment, I could still be wrong.
Christopher Hill
ConservativeBlogger.com
(A life-long conservative, Christopher Hill is one of the oldest and dearest friends of the ConBlogger. A lawyer by trade, he resides in Utah with his wife and children where he longs for the day BYU’s Cougars are college football’s top team and the BCS has been eliminated.)