No Matter Who Wins Today, the Electoral College Has to Go
The Electoral College: Abolish It, Please.
Last week I tried to explain the Electoral College to a very bright teenager from France. She’s attending my daughter’s high school for a couple of weeks as part of an informal exchange—last year my daughter spent a couple of weeks attending her lycée in Nantes—and when she returns home she’s supposed to write a report about the presidential election. She’d heard that Americans do not elect their president by popular vote, but she had trouble understanding exactly how we did elect them. Over a dinner of truite amandine (I was trying to make her feel at home), my girlfriend and I answered her questions. (My daughter was busy making phone calls for Obama, bless her heart.)
We explained that in the U.S., people don’t elect presidents; states do. Not every state has an equal share in the vote, but the state shares aren’t entirely proportional to population either. Each state gets as many electors as it has U.S. representatives (a population-based allocation) plus U.S. senators (two for every state, regardless of its size). That gives small states an advantage. “So big states have a disadvantage?” she asked. Well, no, we explained, because every state except Nebraska and Maine awards its electors on a “winner-take-all” basis. Small states get an advantage, but big states get an advantage, too. It’s in the medium-sized states where individual votes get diluted. And these “electors”? Qui sont-ils? They’re actual people, chosen at the state level to represent one candidate or another, but there’s no federal law requiring them to, and nobody’s ever been prosecuted for voting for somebody else instead, as some oddball “faithless elector” will do now and then (most recently in 2004).
At about this point a puzzled frown appeared on our French guest’s face, and I could tell that she was thinking: C’est stupide.
Oui, bien sur. Foreigners can never understand why American voters put up with the Electoral College, and I’m hard-pressed to come up with any explanation other than this. We Americans love our Constitution so much that we can’t bear to change even the stupid parts. It took 74 years and a bloody Civil War to get the Constitution to say that human beings are never property, so don’t expect fast action changing a system of choosing presidents that makes most people’s eyes glaze over—even if it is an affront to most contemporary notions of democracy.