Background:
I originally wrote this to address PragerU video claiming the Electoral College is essential. I'm not going to post a link to the video, it's propaganda and half-truths and isn't actually relevant other than it was what prompted me to finally write this down. The video is partially correct about the reasons the founders created the EC, but it doesn’t cover all the reasons, nor why none of them apply today, and can never apply in today’s society. It’s also grossly incorrect about how it would work under a popular vote. That's all I'll say about the video, everything below stands on it's own. If you're interested if watching it, it's on YouTube and published in 2014/2015.
History of the Electoral College:
First you have to consider the historical contexts. The public was not well educated. Many couldn’t read or write. There was no national media, no TV, radio, nor even telegraph. News and information travelled relatively slowly. There was no rapid transit, no planes, trains, etc. so candidates had no easy or quick way to reach the voters of every state to get their message out to voters and become well known. Most voters would be familiar only with candidates from their own state, and maybe neighboring states.
Therefore, the EC was created to address these concerns as follows (these are the explicitly stated reasons the founders actually discussed):
- To take the vote for President and VP out of the hands of relatively uninformed voters and give it to men presumed to be more familiar with political issues and the candidates, including candidates from all other states.
- To prevent an unqualified populist from ever holding the reigns of the most powerful office in the country.
- To remove the inherent advantage a candidate from a more populous state from having an overwhelming advantage solely due to name recognition.
Why the EC Isn't Useful Today:
We have universal public education, virtually everyone can read and write, and virtually all have access to nationwide news and information.
Changes in transportation and media technology have made the first and third irrelevant. Any candidate can get their message out via national media, the Internet, radio, TV, newspapers, etc. candidates can travel to all states quickly to speak directly to the voters in those states. The only states harder to physically reach are AK and HI.
The 2020 campaign season demonstrates that even physical travel to those locations is unnecessary now. It is still preferable, but clearly not necessary to reach voters.
Now let's address item #2 from above...2016 demonstrated that due to partisan influence in state laws on selection of electors, the EC is no longer capable of fulfilling its purpose of preventing an unqualified populist from reaching the office, and in fact, it’s the EC that put him there, not the popular vote. He lost the popular vote twice (as of Aug 2024) and looks like he's headed for a third loss in the popular vote in 2024.
Conclusions:
The EC is no longer useful for ANY of its intended purposes. Moreover, it greatly disenfranchises voters in populous states in their vote for the one official elected to represent ALL of the US. Everyone has an approximately equal vote in in electing their House Representative, and the a House represents the people. I’ll skip the Senate in this discussion because they were never supposed to directly represent the people, but the interests of the sovereign states (the state governments). The one person (two counting the VP) whose job it is to represent the best interests of all he people and all the states isn’t elected equally by the people, nor by “more qualified electors” directly representing the people in a state, but by partisans chosen by the parties.
BTW, the founders really disliked political parties and wanted to avoid partisan politics and would be appalled by the EC and the power of the parties today.
The EC is an anachronism that no longer serves any of the purposes it was designed for. It should be eliminated, or radically redesigned to address the concerns of partisan politics, equal representation, and preventing unqualified people from ever becoming President.
Final notes:
1. The oft repeated claim that under a popular vote candidates would just focus on large cities is nonsense that is stuck inside the all/nothing paradigm of the state electors. In a popular vote, every single vote counts equally. Candidates now spend most of their time in the “battleground states” and largely ignore the voters in other states, that’s a result of the EC that would disappear in a popular vote.
In a popular vote, candidates would campaign anywhere they believe they can pick up more votes. 500 votes in rural Kansas are just as valuable as 500 votes in NYC. Don’t take my word for it, look at election of Senators and how they run heir campaigns. A candidate must appeal to voters everywhere to win. Look at the fact that only 5x in US history has the EC vote been other than the winner of the popular vote.
2. You can accomplish materially the same things without eliminating the EC, but by restructuring it to be proportional allocation of electors based on the popular vote in each state. But as that would need to apply to all states, it would require a Constitutional Amendment or you are at the whim of any state legislature to change their allocation at any time (before the election, any change made after the election would be almost certainly considered invalid by Congress in counting the votes of the electors). Imagine a partisan state legislature changing their elector allocation during the campaign season as it becomes clear who is more likely to win overall in their state.
