The claims of those who try to make a case for keeping the Electoral College generally fall into two categories. The first is concern that switching to the popular vote will give major cities much greater say in the process at the expense of less populous states. The second category is based on the notion that the increased possibility of small groups of people swaying an election increases the inclusivity of our political system. Both kinds of arguments can, if skillfully presented, seem reasonable – but upon closer analysis, neither holds any water.
For starters, let us discuss the apologetics that are based on the fear of major cities having too much influence. A lot of people fear that if we switched from the Electoral College to the popular vote then large cities such as Los Angeles and New York would have disproportionately greater influence than less populous states. However, in reality, there would be nothing disproportionate of any greater influence that these major cities would have under the popular vote system – because the only reason why these cities would have greater influence would be because there would be more people voting in those cities.
Furthermore, it would not really be the major cities having more influence than less populous states as much as it would be large groups of voters (such as the voting populations of major cities) having more total votes than small groups of voters (such as the voting populations of less populous states). This is because switching to the popular vote system would not only do away with the disproportionate electoral size of less populous states, but would also do away with the winner-takes-all system that causes entire states or congressional districts to act as singular voting blocs rather than simply as bunches of voters who may not all vote the same way.
In short, concerns that the popular vote might give major cities disproportionate say at the expense of less populous states may on the surface sound reasonable – but when analyzed, it can not stand unless one accepts the notion that a person living in a less populous state is inherently entitled to a greater say in the process of electing the President and Vice President than someone who lives in a major city.
Of course, there will be some people who argue that even if we don’t accept the premise that a voting person of a less populous state has any inherent entitlement to a greater representation than a voting person of a major city, it is still important to give them that greater representation in order to prevent large majorities from steamrolling small minorities. Again, on the surface, this argument seems sensible. After all, nobody wants to be kicked around like a bean-bag just because they are outvoted by those who want to kick them around like a bean-bag.
However, in reality, when you have an electoral system that amplifies the influence of one group of voters, there is no way around the fact that doing so will come at the expense of other voters. For this reason, when one justifies doing such a thing on the basis of the need to protect minorities, it is important to make sure that the minorities that actually receive such protections are significantly more likely to have a genuine need for such protections than the other minorities at whose expense these protections would come.
However, if anything, the minority protections granted by the Electoral College tend to follow the opposite pattern from this. There does not exist any large group of voters with an irrational animus toward farmers. No significant group of people seeks legislation that would strive to deprive people who live in rural areas of rights that other people take for granted. Nobody seeks to be glibly dismissive of concerns that genuinely make life difficult for people in these categories.
The same can not be said with regard to all minorities. LGBT people genuinely do face such hostilities, as do certain ethnic and religious minorities. However, these minorities that are in genuine need for such protections, while having some members who do indeed live in the less populous states, tend to exist in greater concentration per-capita in the major cities. Often this is a result of them having moved there to escape deplorable treatment experienced in the very same less populous states that are now oh so afraid of sharing equal representation per-voter with the big cities that gave them a place to flee to. Giving such protections to minorities that have no need for them at all at the expense of other minorities who indeed very desperately need such protections is nothing short of perverse – and using the need to protect minorities from being steamrolled over to justify such a perversion only adds insult to injury.
But what about the potential of small minorities to tip the election? A lot of apologists (such as one who wrote a piece that recently appeared in the New York Times) claim that such possibilities force candidates to work for supermajorities rather than lazily settling for a bare bones majority. This claim might have some merit if any group of voters were equally likely to be that small group that tips the elections. However, once again, this is far from how things actually pan out. In reality, the small groups of voters who tip the scales live in certain states known as “swing states”, and it can be predicted with decent reliability which states will be in this elite group. Therefore, in reality, this dynamic does not compel candidates to work for supermajorities, but rather, causes the concerns of voters in these swing states to matter more to candidates than the concerns of voters in other states known as “fly-over states”.
Of course, the forementioned article defending this dynamic suggests that the division of states into swing states and fly-over states is not the fault of the electoral college, but the fault of the two parties themselves as a result of the strategy that they have embraced. The author specifically said that an electoral win without even a bare majority of votes is possible [sic] “only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our government’s ineffectiveness and gridlock”.
I am not so sure as to whether or not the author can properly back up the claim that this is really the only reason why it is possible to win the electoral majority without winning the popular majority – but for argument sake, I am prepared to grant the author the assumption that this assertion is true. But even if that assertion is true, that does not change things at all, because this strategic gridlock is not something that will just go away if the right people just wisened up a little bit as the author so stealthily implies. Rather, the fact that both parties embrace such strategy is an inevitable reality of American politics, at least under the current electoral system. This is because if one party were to abandon this strategy while the other party maintained this strategy, the party to abandon this strategy would put itself at a significant disadvantage.
In short, arguments claiming to justify the grotesque practice of the Electoral College have come up every time that the subject has made it into the national debate ever since the first time that that happened back in 1787 (the year that the United States Constitution was first drafted). However, now, as in all times in the past, while the reasons for having such an institution might on the surface sound sensible, upon closer examination they all fall flat.
