The Electoral College sucks
Half a century ago, the famed presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns voiced this warning about the Electoral College: “It’s a game of Russian roulette, and one of these days we are going to blow our brains out.”
We’ve since done that twice. Popular vote loser George W. Bush marched us into a disastrous war in Iraq, based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. But he was just the appetizer. The execrable entree was popular vote loser Donald Trump, who’s still wreaking havoc and plotting an authoritarian restoration.
I’m well aware it’s a waste of time to rail against the insipid way we pick our presidents – we’re obviously stuck with a process that was rightly denounced by the American Bar Association decades ago as “archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous” – but this is my quadrennial complaint. And it’s been stoked anew by all the reminders that the Harris-Trump contest will be decided by a mere seven of the 50 states.
If life was fair and democracy was real, all votes would be created equal. That’s how it works in most western nations, where the candidate with the most votes wins. What a simple concept.
Instead we have this ridiculous contrivance, a remnant of the racist powdered-wig era, which currently gives the voters of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina more clout than all other voters everywhere else.
At last check, 65 percent of Americans feel the way I do (according to the pollsters at Pew), and it’s easy to see why. The injustices are endless – more so than ever, thanks to our deep red/blue divide. If you’re a Democrat living in, say, Alabama or Texas or Oklahoma, your presidential vote is worthless. If you’re a Republicans living in, say, California or New York or Illinois, your presidential vote is worthless. A blue voter in red Indiana said it well this week in a tweet: “It’s pretty pathetic that I know ahead of Nov 5th my vote won’t count because of the Electoral College. Oh, I will definitely vote but the Electoral College will make me silent. I hate our system!”
The system was concocted by the founders. They had to cut a deal with the southerner slaveholders who feared domination by the more populous North. James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, later wrote that many of the founding fathers liked the popular-vote concept, but the slaveholding states did not – because they had fewer voters than the slave-free states. The deal, which gave us the Electoral College, ensured that smaller rural states would have disproportionate clout. They get the same number of U.S. senators (two apiece) as the big states, and that inflates their electoral votes.
Madison himself wasn’t happy with the Electoral College rules; he blamed “the hurrying influence produced by fatigue and impatience.” They left us massive disparities all over the map. One random example tells the tale: Wyoming, with 581,381 people, gets three electoral votes (two senators and one House member), while Pennsylvania, with 13 million people, gets 19 electoral votes (two senators and 17 House members). Do the math. In Wyoming that’s 193,000 people for each elector; in Pennsylvania that’s 684,210 people for each elector. These injustices, replicated nationwide, violate the principle that all votes should count the same.
It was outrageous in 2020 that Joe Biden defeated Trump by a decisive seven million votes – but still would’ve lost if only 44,000 votes in three swing states had swung the other way. It was outrageous in 2016 that Hillary Clinton outpaced Trump by three million votes – but lost only because 77,000 votes in 3 swing states went the other way. And this kind of injustice goes both ways: Lest we forget, way back in 2004, a switch of just 59,388 votes in Ohio would’ve handed the presidency to Democrat John Kerry – even though President Bush beat him in the national popular vote tally by 3.5 million.
Here in 2024, it’s the same old shell game. Conditioned as I am to our system’s absurdities, I assume that Kamala Harris could bury Trump in the national vote and still flunk the Electoral College. I assume that unless she wins by at least four percent nationwide, she’s toast.
The will of the people should determine who gets the nuclear codes. That’s fairer than the Electoral College, which was fervently denounced back in 2012 as “a disaster for democracy.”
That surfaced in a tweet. The guy who typed it was Donald Trump.
Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com
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