By Alex Murphy
With the inauguration of American president Joe Biden being a few months behind us now, the world has moved on from it’s life or death perspective of American democracy. This room to breath has led many American’s, and non-Americans, to ask themselves what exactly went wrong, and how did the ‘leaders of the free world’ get into such an undemocratic mess. Many aspects of the American democratic, and specifical electoral systems have come under scrutiny. One part of the election system that has been greatly criticized ended up being an important part of solidifying President Biden’s win. However, this has not made it any less controversial. This is the American Electoral College.
I know the words 'electoral college’ acts as a flashing neon sign to stop reading at risk of being bombarded by political jargon and useless minutia, and while there will be some political jargon I promise this may actually be interesting. The electoral college is one of the weirdest, most over complicated and truly undemocratic parts of an American presidential election. The college is an electing body not representative of the population, that is entirely beholden to one party, and can nullify the popular vote. Alright, now you can stop reading if you’d like. If not, this is how the electoral college works.
The electoral college was created at the founding of America as a compromise between letting citizens vote for the president and having the congress vote. Each state has an electoral college which gets a certain number of votes, roughly adjusted for population. Anyone can be an elector, as long as they aren’t already in the congress or senate, and as long as they have not engaged in insurrection. Sorry to the capital rioters. However, each political party proposes the electors, so while those are the only restrictions, most potential electors are long term and active party members. Ok, this is where it starts to get ridiculous. Despite what many think, American’s don't actually directly vote for their commander in chief. They vote for a proposed electoral college. Each party in a state puts together their pick for the college, and then whoever gets the most votes in the state gets to have their proposed group become the electors. Actually, this is true everywhere except Maine and Nebraska, which use a proportional distribution of electors from each party that is based on the state and district winners.
Now that this group of random people has been elected, they get to in turn do the electing. Except they don’t vote on election day, they vote on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December, because why not? When they do vote, they are directly voting for the president. The next crazy thing is that there is no federal law saying that the college needs to vote the same as the popular vote for their state. However, some states do have these laws, and in others a party won’t nominate an elector unless they pledge to vote for their candidate. The electoral votes then get counted, and whoever has the most across the country wins the election.
Now that you know how the electoral college works, let’s look at some of the criticisms of it. There are three main arguments against the college. First, it’s thought that having a team of electors can lead to corruption as a party could buy the votes of the electors. The second issue is that the college is thought to be inherently discriminatory. In the 68th Federalist paper, Alexander Hamilton argues on behalf of the elector college as it would put the vote in the hands of men smart enough to make the decision. The american population was not trusted to make a decision on their president, only those that the parties deemed fit. At the time this was exclusively well-off white men. It is also argued that this system has historically aided ‘slave states’ in elections as they have more college votes. This preference towards the South would not exist in a popular vote system. The final, and most widely agreed upon, issue with the electoral college is that it doesn’t work towards a fair democracy. Because the number of electors often cannot be exactly proportionate to the number of voters in a state, the current system leads to some votes literally counting less. It further goes against the popular vote of the people because who the electoral college votes for is not always the same as the popular vote. This famously happened in 2016. This happens because it doesn't matter by which margin a candidate won in a state, the electoral college in the state isn’t going to be representative of those votes (unless you’re in Maine or Nebraska). This leads to ‘wasted votes.’
All of this to say that the electoral college is more than a little messed up, and firmly against the ideas of an equal democracy. However, fear not! There are some other options for the presidential election that the US could use to decide on it’s leader. The most commonly suggested solution would be to abolish the electoral college all together and use a first-past-the-post system. This is where the person with the most votes wins the election. In other words, it’s the popular vote. This is how the majority of elections in the United States work, so it is an obvious and familiar option. It has also been suggested that the electoral college doesn't actually need to be completely scrapped, just reformed. This would mean that the rest of the states would operate the way that Maine and Nebraska do; the percent of electors from each party would be representative of the percent of votes for each party within a state. This approach is appealing because the electoral college is written into the constitution, so reforming it without abolishing it would mean that the constitution doesn’t need to be challenged. Whichever reform it is, the electoral college is in desperate need of a change.
The electoral college is a darkly hilarious relic of the american political system. It’s original purpose of taking away power from the average American citizen goes directly against the democratic values that the US loves to boast about. It is even more undemocratic in the way that stops the votes of every citizen from being equal, erasing the margins by which a candidate wins and even going directly against the country's popular vote. Whether it’s reforming the college or just flat out getting rid of it, the United States needs to move on from this outdated, undemocratic, and flat out weird system.