“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
The earliest Presidential election I remember following in the news was during the Bicentennial year of 1976. I collaborated with classmates on an elaborate political cartoon about the Democratic primaries in the unforgiving medium of the mimeograph.
I think that was also the year I learned about the odd workings of the Electoral College. We calculated how a candidate could win the Presidency by winning just the eleven biggest states, as I recall.
(Since then I’ve seen more sophisticated analysis than my fifth-grade crew could muster, pointing out that the way to win the Electoral College with the fewest votes isn’t to win the eleven biggest and therefore underrepresented states but the forty smallest ones by narrow margins.)
At the time, most people saw the Electoral College as a curious relic. It was something political reporters brought up in the last weeks of the campaign as they ran out of fresh topics. Not since 1888 had the front-runner in the popular vote been kept out of the White House because of the Electoral College, and that guy came back and won four years later.
As Election Day approached in 2000, those stories about the anomaly of the Electoral College resurfaced as usual. One of my college roommates passed on pundit speculation about Al Gore losing the popular vote but winning the Electors. I replied that that wouldn’t be a good outcome since the winner of a democratic election should have a popular mandate.
As we all know, that election went the other way: George W. Bush lost the popular vote but won through the Electors (and the Supreme Court’s decision to stop Florida’s recounts). For the first time in more than a century, the Electoral College was more than a curiosity.
That’s why I’ve felt confident in opposing that form of election distortion—I knew that I had opposed it even when it would hypothetically benefit my preferred candidate. I wrote about the problems of the Electoral College on this blog in 2006, and then again in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2019 (twice), and 2020 (multiple times).
America’s founding generation left us the power to reform the original electoral system. They also left us their example of doing so, with the Twelfth Amendment. And they left us a mandate to do so in the Declaration of Independence, which says:
I think that was also the year I learned about the odd workings of the Electoral College. We calculated how a candidate could win the Presidency by winning just the eleven biggest states, as I recall.
(Since then I’ve seen more sophisticated analysis than my fifth-grade crew could muster, pointing out that the way to win the Electoral College with the fewest votes isn’t to win the eleven biggest and therefore underrepresented states but the forty smallest ones by narrow margins.)
At the time, most people saw the Electoral College as a curious relic. It was something political reporters brought up in the last weeks of the campaign as they ran out of fresh topics. Not since 1888 had the front-runner in the popular vote been kept out of the White House because of the Electoral College, and that guy came back and won four years later.
As Election Day approached in 2000, those stories about the anomaly of the Electoral College resurfaced as usual. One of my college roommates passed on pundit speculation about Al Gore losing the popular vote but winning the Electors. I replied that that wouldn’t be a good outcome since the winner of a democratic election should have a popular mandate.
As we all know, that election went the other way: George W. Bush lost the popular vote but won through the Electors (and the Supreme Court’s decision to stop Florida’s recounts). For the first time in more than a century, the Electoral College was more than a curiosity.
That’s why I’ve felt confident in opposing that form of election distortion—I knew that I had opposed it even when it would hypothetically benefit my preferred candidate. I wrote about the problems of the Electoral College on this blog in 2006, and then again in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2019 (twice), and 2020 (multiple times).
America’s founding generation left us the power to reform the original electoral system. They also left us their example of doing so, with the Twelfth Amendment. And they left us a mandate to do so in the Declaration of Independence, which says:
—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,For decades, clear majorities of the American population have supported the idea of getting rid of the Electoral College and deciding the Presidential election by popular vote, the way we fill every other elected office. The “consent of the governed” should not be determined by inertia or the stubbornness of a minority insisting on keeping an unfair advantage.
—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
4 comments:
It's ironic & strange to me that someone so well-versed in Colonial history could or would be against the Electoral College. I consider it one of the most genius inventions of our founding fathers. In this instance, however, it matters not, as I type this Trump is winning the Popular Vote by more than 5 Million votes nationwide.
That comment is the equivalent of “Is so!” It offers no evidence, argument, or other support for its contention. You’re welcome to try again. Start by explaining why if the Electoral College was a “genius invention” of the Founders it produced such unforeseen poor results in 1796 and 1800 and had to be rewritten.
The only reason the Electoral College was created was because the Founders couldn't agree on whether or not the president should be elected by Congress, or by "qualified citizens" (i.e. land-owning white men). in 'Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America', George Edwards III maintains that our Founders hacked it together because they couldn't figure out anything else, and many of them didn't even like it. Not what I'd call a genius invention.
To further bolster my previous comment, there have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 proposals to either alter the Electoral College or eliminate it, according to the National Archives' website.
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