Peter J. Kaplan
4 min readNov 29, 2020

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE…TIME TO GO???

The United States Electoral College is the Constitution-mandated group of professional electors formed every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president.

Each state appoints electors according to its legislature, equal in number to its congressional delegation.

The congressional delegation of a state is represented by the sum of its two senators plus all of its representatives, and by law, federal office holders cannot be electors.

Of the current 538 electors, an absolute majority of 270 or more electoral votes is required to elect the president and vice president.

If no candidate achieves an absolute majority, a contingent election is held by the U.S. House of Representatives to elect the president, and by the U.S. Senate to elect the vice president.

The number of electoral votes allocated to each state and the District of Columbia, based on congressional representation, for presidential elections held in 2012, 2016 and 2020, depended on population data from the 2010 U.S. Census.

Every jurisdiction is entitled to at least 3.

All jurisdictions use a “winner-take-all” method to choose their electors — meaning that the candidate who wins in a state is awarded all of that state’s Electoral College votes — except for Maine and Nebraska. They choose one elector per district and two electors for the ticket with the highest statewide vote.

Following an election, the electors vote for the presidential candidate guided by the winning popular vote across their state.

After Election Day, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December — December 14, 2020 — these electors assemble in their state capitals, cast their ballots and officially select the next President of the United States.

The votes of the electors are then sent to Congress where the Senate President — the vice president of the United States — opens the certificates and counts the votes.

This takes place on January 6, unless that date falls on a Sunday. (This year January 6 is a Wednesday).

The Electoral College was created in 1787 by the framers of the U.S. Constitution as an alternative to electing the president by popular vote or by Congress.

In fact it was conceptualized as a compromise between members of Congress choosing a president, and qualified citizens voting.

The Brennan Center for Justice attributes the forging of this compromise to the fact that the Founding Fathers were uncomfortable with giving power to the people.

More aptly, it wigged them out.

The Electoral College, the bane of many’s existence, is one of the most unique — and undemocratic — elements of the U.S. government.

It was originally included in the Constitution as a means to thwart direct democracy, i.e. a democratic bypass if you will.

It was also designed to protect the influence of slave states.

Under the proviso which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of Congressional representation, Southern slave states achieved outsized influence in selecting the president.

The antiquated system has endured the test of time, never mind the expansion of suffrage and the abolition of slavery.

Nonetheless, the problems of the Electoral College extend far beyond its history.

Using congressional delegations as the foundation of elector counts continues to ensure disproportionate voting power to those in smaller states.

As an example, voters in Wyoming have nearly four times as much influence (3.6 to be precise) as those in California.

How can that be when Wyoming has three electoral votes and California has fifty-five?

Do the math.

It’s about the size of the state.

Perhaps the biggest vice of the Electoral College is its inherent unfairness to voters in the bigger states.

Wyoming’s population in the last census was 563,767; it gets 3 votes in the Electoral College based on its two Senators and one Congressman.

California’s 55 electoral votes seems like a lot, but its population in the last census was 37,254,503 and that means that the electoral votes per capita in California are much less.

To put it another way, the 3 electors in Wyoming represent an average of 187,923 residents each.

The 55 electors in California represent an average of 677,355 each.

That is a disparity of 3.6 to 1.

Additionally, under the Electoral College system, electoral outcomes can undermine the popular vote.

Because 48 states and the District of Columbia employ the “winner-take-all” methodology, it is technically possible — though highly unlikely — for a candidate to win the presidency with around as little as 23% of the national popular vote.

The point is, that the system is flawed; it can and does fail.

In the 1991 book entitled, “Wrong Winner: The Coming Debacle in the Electoral College,” two political scientists predicted that the Electoral College would select the “wrong winner” within 20 years.

As we have seen, their forecast proved to be spot-on — twice since 2000.

The candidates who won the popular vote have lost in the Electoral College two times in the last five presidential elections.

In 2000, just 537 votes in Florida (and a 5–4 Supreme Court decision preventing a recount) kept Al Gore out of the White House, even though he received in excess of a half-million more total votes — 547,398 — nationally than George W. Bush.

And in 2016, Donald Trump won the Electoral College by a wider margin than did Bush, despite receiving 2.9 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.

National Popular Vote (NPV) advocates are looking to the 2024 presidential election as the time to further promote and secure their platform, and gauging recent momentum, lawmakers across the country have opened their eyes to the possibility of reforming the outmoded and undemocratic Electoral College.

As William Petrocelli, in a 2017 contributing piece published in the Huffington Post astutely observed,

“This has to change. Each resident of the United States should have the same voting power. The simplest way to achieve this is to abolish the Electoral College and insist that everyone’s vote stand on its own. That would constitute true electoral reform. You can call our current anachronistic system many things, but you can’t call it a democracy.

In a democracy, the election is awarded to the person with the most votes.”

[This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in November 2020.]

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