MAGAs and their minions have myriad ways to undermine one person, one vote. The results of their efforts are scary, ugly, and inherently undemocratic – but not irreparable. With a sane president in the White House and enough progressives in our state legislatures and Congress, we could address the inequities, restore voting rights, reopen polling stations, and re-draw those gerrymandered lines.
Just one hitch with that first requirement, “a sane president in the White House.” Well, not with the requirement per se. The issue lies with another foundational idea behind a democratic election, to wit: majority rules.
Majority rules is the obvious, indispensable follow-up to one person, one vote. A match made in judicial heaven, a perfect pairing. Without each other, they don’t make sense. Together, they make so much sense, it’s one of the first abstract ideas kids grasp. Little kids. Preschoolers. The concept of majority rules is ingrained in our psyches by kindergarten. Schoolyard dispute about which game to play? Family at odds about whether it’s Italian or Mexican tonight? Take a vote, count the hands. Footie or baseball, pizza or tacos – whichever gets the most votes wins. It’s the fairest way to make decisions when you don’t have the time or inclination to reach consensus.
The power of majority rules extends far beyond family dinners and playground spats. Among other things, it’s how democratic elections are decided. Everybody gets a vote. Or maybe everybody doesn’t, maybe some that should, don’t. Still, at the end of the day, lots of ballots have been cast. The votes are counted. Measures that receive more YES votes than NO votes pass. The candidates with the most votes win.
Except in a presidential election.
I had to take a long pause after writing that last sentence. The idiocy of it fries my brain. Even if one person, one vote was a hard-and-fast reality in this country, even if 100% of legally registered voters could freely vote and 100% of legally cast ballots were fairly counted, when it comes to a presidential race, the person who wins the most votes doesn’t necessarily win election.
Five times in our history, including twice this century, the candidate who lost the popular vote won the White House. Four out of five of those Loser-Take-All races were close. In the fifth, 2016, Hillary Clinton received 2,868,519 more votes than Ding-Dong Donald. Yet, Ding-Don became America’s #45 – because he didn’t have to win the election to win the race. He had to win the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is a group of intermediaries designated by the Constitution to select the president and vice-president of the United States. Alexander Hamilton, whose personal view was that presidents should be chosen by a small group of elite men who were free to vote their own conscience (none of this silly “will of the people” stuff for him, thanks), said of the EC, “… if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.”
Is it, though?
The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to appoint intermediaries – electors – to a body the framers dubbed “the Electoral College.” This body is active only in presidential years, and appointments valid only for the year in which they are made. Every state gets the same number of electors as it has representatives and senators in Congress, plus the District of Columbia gets three. The Electoral College currently has 538 members.
So, right away, this isn’t excellent. Due to circumstances I can’t wait to get into next time, some states enjoy Congressional representation disproportionate to their population numbers. To then award those states electors equal in number to the undeservedly large number of seats they hold in the House (plus 2 for their 2 senators) perpetuates a serious bias in the balance of political power.
When state legislatures were first given the privilege and obligation of appointing electors, that’s what they did, straight-up. Nowadays, legislatures wait their turn, while the state’s political parties nominate their own slates of electors-in-waiting. After the national presidential election is held and the ballots are counted, the result of each state’s election – the state’s popular vote – determines which party’s slate the legislature promotes to electors-for-reals.
Electors convene in their respective states the Monday after the second Wednesday in December after Election Day (I’m not making this up) and vote. Then, on 6 January, a joint session of Congress (House and Senate) meets at the Capitol to count the electoral votes and declare the outcome of the election.
Which we already know. Since we can see how the states are voting on Election Night, we can foresee the Electoral College result. Forty-eight states and D.C. use a Winner-Take-All system: the candidate that wins the state’s popular vote gets all of the state’s electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska give 1 electoral vote to the winner of each of their Congressional districts and their remaining 2 votes to the statewide winner. The media break it down, add it up, paint the states BLUE or RED on their maps, and call the race. Most years, we know who our next president will be before Election Night is over.
What most of us don’t realize, and the rest of us can’t wrap our heads around, is that when we cast our votes for a presidential candidate, we’re not voting for a person. We’re voting for a partisan slate of electors. After our votes are counted, our state legislatures should – but, arguably, don’t have to – appoint the slate nominated by the winning ticket’s party to the Electoral College, where those electors are honor-bound – but not legally bound – to cast their votes for those two candidates.
Remember that stunt #45 and his cronies tried to pull in 2020? When they thought they could hold onto the White House if key Republican-run state legislatures ignored the Biden-Wins! results of their elections and sent all-new, MAGA-mad slates to the Electoral College? Someone on the team (you know it wasn’t Donaldo) figured out that the Constitution gives state legislatures the power to choose electors. After the January 6th insurrection, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act (ECA) to prevent legislatures swapping slates after Election Day and clarify that the VP’s role is to certify the Electoral College vote, not override it. Before Jan 6th, Don de Mentia was confident he could beat any swap-related legal raps, because the Originalist judges he’d installed on the Supreme Court would gladly interpret that part of the Constitution exactly as the misogynistic racists who wrote it intended.
Ask me, despite the new law, they still would.
Can’t-Win-For-Losing Donald’s other pipe-dream was that faithless electors would skew the vote in his favor. Electors pledge to vote for the winner of their state’s popular vote, but there ain’t nothing in the Constitution says they have to. Several states have laws designed to make electors honor their pledges, but only 14 have legal means to remove faithless electors or cancel their votes, only 5 impose a penalty on electors who vote faithlessly, and all the states seem more interested in punishing errant electors than in rectifying the vote. So far, the 90 faithless votes cast out of 23,000+ votes across all elections haven’t changed any outcomes – but 2016’s record-breaking 7 faithless electors (3 of whom voted for Colin Powell, who wasn’t even running) isn’t an encouraging sign.
Hamilton’s giving me a bad time here, reminding me that he distinctly said the system wasn’t perfect. He wants me to admit the electors’ votes represent the choice made by the majority of their state’s voters, and that the Electoral College vote itself is decided by majority rules.
Oh, Alex, bless your heart – I don’t have to admit anything of the kind. As I distinctly said, majority rules doesn’t mean diddley without one person, one vote.
Most of our elected federal, state, and local officials win or lose their jobs by popular vote in a General Election. General Elections use a direct voting system; voters choose directly among candidates for office, the votes are counted, whoever gets the most votes wins. One Person, One Vote – Majority Rules.
Presidents and vice-presidents win or lose by popular vote in an indirect election. In indirect elections, voters don’t choose among the candidates or parties. They choose the people who do the choosing.
Fair enough. In fact, America is an indirect democracy. All registered voters get a chance to vote directly for state and local measures and for the people we want to represent us in the government. Those we elect then take their seats in Congress or the State Senate or wherever, then they vote for or against the proposed laws of the land. It’s an ancient, widely-used, tried-and-true system, and it works pretty darn well. Most of the time.
But does the Electoral College vote qualify as an “indirect election” if We the People don’t choose the electors directly or even indirectly through the votes of our elected representatives? Electors are chosen by the states’ political parties. A political party isn’t an elective body. It’s just like-minded folks who got together and filed the appropriate paperwork. Yet, it’s the parties that compile the slates of electors, at their state conventions usually, where the convention attendees – and only the convention attendees – vote to approve them. In some states, the choice of electors is left to the party’s central committee. A tiny electorate, either way. Voters who can’t or don’t care to go to conventions or run political parties have no vote/no voice/no choice.
So, a bunch of people we probably don’t know and know nothing about vote for president in our steads. If our preferred candidate wins our state, I think we’re justified in trusting that our candidate’s party has done its best to select faithful electors. Still, in a nation of 337.7+ million people and more than 161.42 million registered voters, can winning the majority of a mere 538 electoral votes accurately reflect the national results of a presidential election?
No. It can’t. It was never meant to. As the District of Columbia and Wyoming will now demonstrate.
D.C.’s population is larger than some states, but D.C. isn’t a state. It’s a district. Its sole representative in Congress is a marginalized House “delegate” with limited voting privileges. As it has no Representatives or Senators, for the longest time, D.C. didn’t qualify for any electors. With no electors, American citizens living in D.C. were effectively denied the right to vote in presidential elections.
Since most of those citizens are and have always been Black and vote Democratic, Congress took its sweet time in addressing this injustice. Finally, in 1961, the ratification of the 23rd Amendment allowed the District of Columbia the same number of electors as the states – but “in no event more (electors) than the least populous state.”
That least-populous state would be Wyoming. Wyoming’s citizens are mostly White and mostly vote Republican. Wyoming gets 3 electors, so that’s what D.C. gets, too.
In the 2016 presidential election, here’s how it panned out in D.C. and WY.
| DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA | ||
| Clinton | 260,223 votes | 92.8% of the vote |
| Trump | 11,553 votes | 4.1% of the vote |
| WYOMING | ||
| Trump | 174,248 votes | 70% of the vote |
| Clinton | 55,949 votes | 22.5% of the vote |
To be fair, there are about 100,500 more people in the District of Columbia than in Wyoming, but the disparity in the splits and percents is notable all the same. Even if we combine D.C.’s and WY’s Drumpf votes and subtract that from Hillary’s D.C. total, she still beats Agent Orange in D.C. by 74,432 votes. Combining the percentages, T-Rump got 74.1% of the vote, and Hillary a whopping 115.3% … which isn’t how percentages work.
Maths are not my forte, but I do understand how these numbers translated to the Electoral College. Hillary’s near-unanimous win and sky-high numbers in D.C. gave her all 3 of its electoral votes. Her opponent’s less-impressive showing in Wyoming likewise gave him all 3 of WY’s electoral votes. In the EC, D.C. and WY cancelled each other out.
If the purpose of the Electoral College was to compare the number of states that went Red to the number of states that went Blue, then no harm done. But Wyoming’s 3 electoral votes didn’t just cancel out D.C.’s 3. WY’s electoral votes — representing 174,248 direct votes for Mr. T — cancelled out D.C.’s electoral votes — representing 174,248 direct votes plus another 85,975 direct votes for Ms. H. As intended. The real purpose of the Electoral College is to allow a minority to override the will of the majority. And yes, I said “purpose,” not “byproduct” — but I’ll save that for another post.
Final note on this one, WY and D.C. don’t even matter. Nor does New York or Oklahoma, California or Montana. States that reliably vote Red or Blue don’t get much love from presidential campaigns. Why spend money to win over voters if you don’t need their votes? When a state’s popular vote winner is a foregone conclusion, voter turn-out is moot. No matter how few ballots are cast, those states still get their allotted number of electors, and the electors still cast their preordained, indirect, partisan votes.
The only states that matter are the swing states, the battleground states. States where the polls don’t show a clear color preference, states that mix and muddle their hues. States that sometimes go Red, sometimes Blue. States where the persuadable voter is electoral gold – those are states the candidates mine. Which way the swing-states swing can render a sweeping popular victory into a stunning electoral defeat. A few states, a few voters decide the election. The rest of us are just bystanders.
That’s why this is a tight race. Why the felonious ex-game show host’s strategy of playing on the frustrations and fears of those who live in America’s less-populous heartland and pumping migrant-monster myths into the ears of those who live near our borders is a damn good one. Harris surged in national polls, but her cognitively-impaired, blubbering bombast opponent has the swing-state edge. Unless and until Congress blushes Blue again and makes tagging an Electoral College Amendment onto the Constitution a high priority, we’re stuck with presidential elections where one person, one vote doesn’t exist and, all too often, minority rules.
Double jeopardy.
I have much I could say, but I can’t bring myself to do so at this time. The whole issue kicks my anxiety level to an intolerable level. I’m hoping that in eight weeks, that will no longer be the case, but for now, it is.
Oh, I hear you. Until The swap at the top of the Dem ticket presented us this tiny sliver of November hope, I couldn’t bear to look at, let alone drink from, my political-blog-rant well. Here’s hoping….
It’s a painful read. Not your prose, obviously, but the content and its implication. It’s bonkers, let’s be honest.
Bonkers! Exactly!! In fact, I said, “Thanks to this bonkers system…” at some point — but that paragraph was cut along with about a dozen others when I realized I was writing a PhD dissertation on the Electoral College instead of a blog. (Yes, this post is the short version. Couldn’t you tell?) ;)
Thing about the Electoral College is: that was the DEAL when the Constitution was ratified. It was by no means certain it WOULD be ratified. The 13 colonies were in many ways like different countries. The smaller colonies (Delaware, RI, VT, NH, Maine) feared being outvoted by populous NY, VA et al. Plus the slave states insisted the slaves be counted for electoral purposes, even though they were obviously not going to be allowed to vote . The compromise turned out to be a vote credit of only 66 percent per slave. America was MUCH less unified than we think. Massachusetts and Virginia felt like foreign countries to each other. That essential compromise to give the small states some extra weight is our birthright: no other country has anything quite like it
Excellent explanation for those who live in a country where it’s one person, one vote for the General Elections. We don’t vote separately for the Prime Minister, they will have been picked by their own party, and in turn, are just names on a ballot paper if they happen to be in one’s electorate.
So much easier
I watched most of the debate. I cannot figure out why a person (who’s face colour was a match to his opponent today) can get any votes, let alone EC votes But then, I would never have believed that a Supreme Court would willfully play with the law and delay sentencing so the President could potentially get off his crimes!
I’m glad I live in New Zealand
Omigosh, Fionna — that’s how an indirect election works when it’s working properly! Oh, and bad news, the Supreme Court didn’t just delay sentencing. They have actually ruled that the president is above the law, but maybe not always, so they’ll be the ones to decide if POTUS is above or below it in each individual case. (There’s justice for ya.)
Much as I hate that we’re so far away, I’m glad you live in New Zealand, too. Must be nice to reside in a sanely-run parliamentary democracy …
Best explanation of how and why America is actually (at least) THREE separate countries is:
“Albion’s Seed” by David Fischer. Nothing less than a social and cultural examination of Colonial America. It’s a doorstop of a book, but essential reading. Every page is an eye-opener.
Thanks so much for your comments, Michael. The EC Origin Story is def my next post; fascinating, eye-opening stuff. Doubling down on your point that early America was less unified than we think, I’ll add that in the late 18th century, the word “state” referred to a sovereign entity — a nation-state typically born from the consolidation of monarchical power. To establish a nation of united states, it was critical the federal government guarantee enormous respect for each state’s sovereignty. Fair to say, the “United States” didn’t mean to the colonists what it means to us now.
You’re right! In fact, I recall reading that before 1865(?) Americans used to say “The United States ARE. ” Only after the Civil War did people start saying ‘the United States IS.”
Omigosh! That makes soooo much sense!