The Case for the Electoral College

Had the protest and contest of the Florida presidential election results not lasted so long and engendered so much bitterness, we would have had more time to focus on the real uniqueness of this election. Vice-President Al Gore won the popular vote, while Governor George Bush won the vote in the Electoral College and hence the presidency. If we were not obsessing over the dangling chad or the dimpled ballot, national attention might have lingered over the wisdom of the Electoral College.

It is ironic that before the election, Gore partisans were open to the possibility of an Electoral College win and a loss in the popular vote. They anticipated that an extraordinarily large margin in Texas for Bush, might overwhelm narrower victories by Gore in electoral vote-rich states like California and New York. The outcome, of course, was reversed. Bush won in the Electoral College.

There is an easy emotional appeal to the argument that the winner of the popular vote should be the next president. It conforms to our general notions of and sympathies with democracy. While the Founders appreciated the ethical imperative that the government should be based on the ascent of the governed, they also realized that the tyranny of the majority could be just as destructive as the tyranny of the few. That is precisely why they fashioned a limited government constrained by internal checks and balances and specific Constitutional limitations.

For example, the state representation in the House of Representatives is proportional to the population. The Senate, where each state is entitled to two representatives, balances the arrangement of the House. In engineering terms, the Senators with six-year terms sequenced so that a third of the seats are contested every two years, act as a low-pass filter keeping the Representatives, with two-year terms, from responding too rapidly and with insufficient deliberation to the passing whims of the populace. In an important sense, the argument for the Electoral College is the same argument for having a Senate and a House rather than a simple unicameral legislature.

In the Electoral College, each state is represented by the number of representatives plus two, the number of Senators. Although populace states are entitled to more electors, rural and low population states are represented in higher proportion than their relative population. This arrangement has several important advantages.

The primary advantage is that the Electoral College insures that a president must have broad support over many regions of the country as opposed to popularity in a relatively few heavily-populated states. If presidents appeared to be solely regional candidates, it would tend to undermine the cohesiveness of the country. Given the current Electoral College, no person could become president without both the support of a substantial portion of the population and broad support over different regions of the country.

Go To Page: 1 2 3