As we all vent our anger in the wake of the ongoing electoral
imbroglio, the Electoral College has emerged as a favorite target
for our frustrations. For only the third time in American history,
but for the first time in over a century, the prospective winner
of the popular vote has lost the electoral vote. The voice of
the people has been filtered through that political squawk box
called the Electoral College and yielded an "undemocratic" verdict.
In a very real sense, that is what the founders intended.
The framers of the Constitution did not believe in straightforward
democracy, which they regard as a crude and shortsighted expression
of popular opinion, often at odds with the long-term public interest.
They did not want senators, Supreme Court justices or presidents
directly elected. They wanted these decisions to pass through
succeeding layers of deliberation. The original intent of the
framers was to establish not a democracy but a republic, in which
popular opinion had to battle its way through artfully contrived
chambers of refinement before reaching the promised land of political
power.
That said, the Electoral College was one of the Founders’
oddest improvisations. It was essentially a cumbersome compromise
forged in August and September of 1787 as the Constitutional Convention
was trying to conclude its business. The method of selecting the
president was caught up in several crisscrossing debates about
the relative power of the federal government and the states, the
power of the executive branch versus the Congress, and the sectional
division between North and South.
The debate also reflected the two recent but contradictory experiences
with executive power: the 1770s, when the grievances against George
III rendered any defense of a powerful chief executive fatally
monarchical in character; and the 1780s, when the absence of a
strong executive presence rendered the government of the Articles
of Confederation a recipe for gridlock.
The Electoral College was a messy alternative to selection of
the president by the Senate. Hardly a product of divine inspiration,
it represented a compromise between nationalists and states righters,
Northerners and Southerners, advocates of a strong and weak executive.
Most of the framers presumed that the Electoral College would
only winnow down the last of presidential candidates, not make
the final choice, which would be decided by the House of Representatives.
That is not how the Electoral College has actually functioned
over the subsequent two centuries. On only two occasions, in 1800
and 1824, has the selection of the president been thrown into
the House. Contrary to the expectations of the framers, the major
impact of the Electoral College has been to produce decisive electoral
conclusions even when the popular vote is evenly split and, most
especially, when third-party candidacies prevent any one person
from garnering a popular majority.
On three occasions in the twentieth century–1992, 1968,
and 1912–the winner of an electoral majority in the Electoral
College did not receive a popular majority. On at least seven
occasions in the nineteenth century–the most fateful being
Lincoln’s election in 1860–the Electoral College produced
a decisive verdict in the absence of a popular majority.
If we do wish to do away with the Electoral College in favor
of a popular plebiscite for the presidency, we will also need
to revise the Constitution in several other areas as well: making
the selection of the president require a mere plurality instead
of a firm majority of popular votes; or arranging for an electoral
run-off between the two finalists after the general election;
or revising the current constitutional provisions for a vote in
the House, which requires a one-state, one-vote format, thereby
giving Wyoming equal status with California, hardly the democratic
result desired.
The prospect of the current Congress managing its way through
this political minefield is difficult to imagine. The prospect
of a constitutional amendment making its way through two-thirds
of the state legislatures is equally difficult to conjure up.
Two venerable propositions come to mind: Don’t mess with
the Constitution lightly; and difficult cases make for bad law.
The Electoral College, true enough, is a constitutional dinosaur,
a weirdly shaped political contraption designed for a pre-democratic
age. The trouble is that all the alternative political solutions
are likely to generate more trouble. Once again, the founders
were wiser than they knew.
