The Dangers of the Electoral College

At Politico, Matthew Olsen and Benjamin Haas published an essay titled “The Electoral College Is a National Security Threat”:

In Federalist No. 68, his pseudonymous essay on “The Mode of Electing the President,” Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College could shield the United States “from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” Because of the “transient existence” and dispersed makeup of the electors, he argued, hostile countries would find it too expensive and time-consuming to inject “sinister bias” into the process of choosing a president. . . .

In Hamilton’s day, as he argued, it would have been nearly impossible for a hostile power to co-opt dozens of briefly chosen electors flung across 13 states with primitive roads. But in the social media age, the Electoral College system provides ripe microtargeting grounds for foreign actors who intend to sabotage presidential elections via information and disinformation campaigns, as well as by hacking our voting infrastructure. One reason is that citizens in certain states simply have more voting power than citizens in other states, such as Texas and California. This makes it easier for malign outside forces to direct their efforts.

But what if the national popular vote determined the president instead of the Electoral College? No voter would be more electorally powerful than another. It would be more difficult for a foreign entity to sway many millions of voters scattered across the country than concentrated groups of tens of thousands of voters in just a few states. And it would be more difficult to tamper with voting systems on a nationwide basis than to hack into a handful of databases in crucial swing districts, which could alter an election’s outcome. Yes, a foreign entity could disseminate messages to major cities across the entire country or try to carry out a broad-based cyberattack, but widespread actions of this sort would be not only more resource-intensive, but also more easily noticed, exposed and addressed.

As practical as those arguments are, I think there’s a clearer way that the Electoral College weakens the American republic. Our democratic system is based on what the Declaration of Independence called “the consent of the governed.” That requires every person’s vote to be of equal weight and the aggregate votes to determine the winner.

Out of all the elections in America, only one is set up so that the person who has demonstrably less popular support than an opponent can take office. While that outcome is relatively rare, when it happens the government lacks the consent of the governed and thus the strength of democracy. Faith in the political system weakens, especially if the system offers no way to fix the problem.

Hamilton and his fellow Federalists also argued that the Constitution’s impeachment clause was an important protection for the republic. In Democracy, law professor Sanford Levinson recently discussed problems with how that’s worked out and proposed another approach:

What the United States Constitution needs, and unfortunately does not have, is a provision that allows Congress, by a two-thirds vote, to register their “no-confidence” in an incumbent President that would serve to fire him immediately, without needing a crime or an incapacity as justification. It would be enough to say basically that Congress, no doubt representing their constituents, had become terrified of the lack of judgment displayed by the President.

He or she would most likely be replaced by the Vice President. Even better would be the selection of the new President by the congressional caucus of the President’s own party, followed, perhaps, by a new presidential election the next time we elect members of the House and Senate. This would assure that an opposition party could take over the White House only by winning an election.

That’s a limited form of parliamentary government which would go some way toward making Congress the top branch of the U.S. government again, as the Framers imagined.