One person, one vote: The evolution of the Electoral College

With Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over President-elect Donald Trump surpassing 2 million votes, the quadrennial debate over the electoral college has once more come to a head. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has introduced a bill in the Senate proposing a constitutional amendment that would abolish the Electoral College, but since Boxer is retiring at the end of her term in January, it is highly unlikely that the bill will get off the ground in the lame duck, Republican-led Congress. Even so, her Hail Mary bill gives a legitimized voice to those upset by the results of this election.

“The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately,” Boxer said in a statement. “Every American should be guaranteed that their vote counts.”

Her sentiment is mirrored by more than half of the American people according to a recent Gallup poll, yet the intricacies of the Electoral College are an enigma to most people. On or around Election Day, news outlets ranging from USA Today to Vox to People Magazine ran articles attempting to explain the Electoral College and its oddities. While it may seem backwards to voters today, there is a history to how we got to where we are today.

The arguments against the Electoral College are as complicated as they are diverse. They largely stem from the sheer age of the Constitution and the political climate that existed in 1787. For one, the framers predicted that no candidate would be well-known enough across the then 13 states to garner a majority of the vote. The Electoral College allowed for the people to choose trusted representatives who shared their beliefs to choose from candidates who they were actually familiar with. In his Federalist Paper No. 68, Alexander Hamilton argued, “A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”

While the popular interpretation of this has come to be that the farmers did not think the general public was smart enough to choose a president, a more reasonable approach is simply that information was not as easily dispersed in the 1800s as it is today, so a well-informed electorate would be hard to come by. It was, however, far more reasonable for citizens to choose electors who would represent their views on a state by state basis, just as they chose Congressional representatives.

The representative nature of this system was severely compromised with the introduction of the winner-take-all system that all but two states now use. Nebraska and Maine have a combination of statewide and district-level allocation. The Constitution leaves the manner of choosing electors up to the states, as well as how they are required to vote. The winner-take-all method started with Virginia in 1800, as state leaders aimed to maximize their electoral power and lift Virginian Thomas Jefferson to victory, setting off a chain reaction in other states. The decision was not without criticism, even then. Of the method, Jefferson himself wrote, “All agree that an election by districts would be best, if it could be general; but while 10 states choose either by their legislatures or by a general ticket, it is folly and worse than folly for the other 6 not to do it.” States like Massachusetts then felt the pressure to make the switch to maintain their electoral power.

The establishment of a solid two-party system by 1820 all but ensured that electors were no longer truly independent and would likely vote along party lines. In 1820, James Madison argued in favor of a Constitutional amendment requiring district voting, saying, “The district mode was mostly, if not exclusively, in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted, and was exchanged for the general ticket and the legislative election, as the only expedient for baffling the policy of the particular States which had set the example." According to Madison—the so-called Father of the Constitution—the framers had envisioned electoral votes to be allocated at a district level and statewide voting was merely a political ploy. By 1872, all states had adopted the winner-take-all system, and the Electoral College was born. Critics of the Electoral College have largely based their argument on the notion of “one person, one vote,” a defining adage of democracy. The Electoral College is not a strictly proportional system because it is based on congressional representation: every state has two senators, regardless of size, and at least one representative even if its population is not technically large enough to have one. This throws off the proportion of electoral votes to popular votes in each state, granting some states more power than others. For example, a vote in Wyoming is worth 3.6 times more electoral votes than in California, and swing vote in Ohio is worth 1.1 times as many; and that’s only mathematically—swing state votes are more highly courted than solidly blue or red state votes, so their needs are also more highly valued.

Supporters of the college say that this allows smaller states to remain players in a country that would otherwise forget them, which is why the Senate exists, but it is also important to remember that allocation in the House of Representatives was also not meant to be truly representative. When the Constitution was drafted, representatives from southern states feared being overpowered by the more densely populated, urban northern states, resulting in the Three-fifths Compromise which says, “Representatives... shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

Southern elites wanted representative credit for the slaves and poor whites. Only landowners could vote in their states without actually allowing them the right to vote or hold office. Even after the end of slavery, continual efforts to suppress the vote of non-whites have made sure that southern and rural whites have always had a disproportionate say in legislative and electoral affairs.

The evolution of the electoral system, some argue, necessitates an equal evolution of our voting process. Since George Washington himself strongly warned against political parties, it is likely that the framers did not draft the Constitution with the partisan domination of American politics in mind. The question then becomes whether or not the Constitution is a living document. The ambiguity in much of its language leaves room for interpretation, but scholars and judges have debated for 240 years whether that interpretation should follow the letter of the document or the spirit of the document. The same questions are raised time and time again in trying to figure out what the founders intended: Does the Fourth Amendment really guarantee a right to privacy? What constitutes a “well-regulated militia”? Or a “natural-born citizen”? A similar question naturally follows which is whether or not the Electoral College is really integral to the security of our democracy.

The intent behind many of the line-items of the Constitution is not always clear, but the general structure is more or less agreed upon: government should be slow-moving to prevent tyranny and dangerous reactionary politics. The Electoral College is one of the strongest examples for the effectiveness of this: there have been four elections in which the candidate with the most popular votes did not win the electoral college: Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush infamously in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. As evidenced by the anger currently brewing over this electoral discrepancy, the uproar brought in the past was never sustainable enough to generate change, and therefore not considered truly the will of the people by the founders.

Though it might seem that the results of 2016 would prompt a change, experts are not so quick to agree. “It is very difficult to amend the Constitution so I do not think it will be changed through amendment,” says David Caputo, professor of political science and President Emeritus at the University. “It might be possible to change it if enough states adopt some of the proposals being discussed. I think that is also very unlikely.”

Abolishing the Electoral College would require an amendment to the Constitution, which requires passage through Congress with a two-thirds majority and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Though the founders did not necessarily have political parties in mind in creating this process, by today’s standards it is a huge bipartisan effort to reach these numbers. The recent gridlock in Congress over far less controversial measures should give insight into the unlikelihood of a change to the electoral process by amendment.

Since the Constitution grants the states the right to decide how to select and allocate their electors, many opponents of the college have turned to state-based measures for change. The National Popular Vote Compact has gained momentum since Election Day and has been adopted by 11 states, including New York, representing 165 electoral votes. The NPVC would guarantee that all of a state’s electoral votes would go to the candidate that received the majority of the popular vote. It is set to take effect if it is adopted by enough states to reach the 270 electoral majority. So far it has only been enacted by solidly blue states, but it has passed in one house of the state legislatures in Oklahoma and Arizona.

Measures like the NPVC would help correct the inequity of votes, as well as shake up the distribution of campaigning. In 2012, two-thirds of campaign events happened in just four states. So ar, it has passed in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa, and swing states tend to receive more federal funding than solidly blue or red states. Because swing votes are more highly courted, the argument stands that their needs are placed ahead of those of states like New York or Texas, whose votes are more guaranteed, despite making up a larger percentage of the population.

“Candidates of both major parties need only to campaign for crucial votes in what the mainstream media labels as 'battleground states' while ignoring the rest of us who live in states that they take for granted,” says Satish Kolluri, University professor of political communication. “Given the way the electoral college was set up to address checks and balances perhaps made sense to the Founding Fathers back then, but it doesn't hold any water now because of its inadequacy to represent every voter in equal measure… How can 10 to 12 battleground states determine the result of the election for all?”

Sen. Boxer echoed that sentiment in her speech on the floor of the Senate defending her bill. “We owe it to them [the American people] to make sure the vote of someone in my state is worth the same as someone in a swing state,” she said. “One person, one vote, that’s the cornerstone of Democracy. Why not do the simple thing and the right thing and the just thing and make sure that the winner of the popular vote is sworn in as our president?”

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