We Need the Electoral College
Tags: Electoral College, Electoral Reform, Politics, American History, Libertarian Socialism

Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

Eliminating the Electoral College is on the lips of many people, but it is actually what the duopoly wants. Eliminating the Electoral College is a terrible idea for our republic. The Electoral College is the canary in the coal mine. It is telling us that elections are being gamed. Without the Electoral College computerized voting would be even less auditable. There would be only one giant precinct. We would be faced with “magic numbers” spit out by the computers unless we ALL ask for a paper ballot.

I have already postulated one fix for the lack of representation in this country and that is unfreezing the House of Representatives. This would create smaller Electoral College precincts. The smaller precincts are not going to necessarily bring about a fix to the popular vote not matching the Electoral College outcome. This popular vote disconnect is an anomaly that happened only once before 2000 and that was in the nineteenth century and never in the twentieth. Oddly, the twenty- first century has seen it happen more than once, in the elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

These divergences of the popular vote from the Electoral College certainly smell like election tampering. Technological changes are facilitating the gaming of the Electoral College. More and smaller precincts make this gaming more difficult. Conversely, the elimination of the Electoral College could make it easier to game the presidential election by making it completely unauditable. Without the Electoral College we would not even have a hint that things are not quite right with our elections.

In the beginning, it made sense for each elector to go to DC representing the constituents from the home precinct. Travel and communication were not what they are today. Sending a responsible individual to report counts from particular precincts across the country made sense at the beginning for these reasons. And though those reasons are no longer valid, citizens now have more reasons to doubt their will is making it to Washington. This makes the Electoral College more necessary than ever. The Electoral College precincts represent auditable chunks of the election that the people must not relinquish.

Of course, the founding fathers have something to say on this matter of gaming the Electoral College as well. The founding fathers did not envision political parties and despised them as parasites on the system. Unfortunately, they did not foresee the effect of political parties on the Electoral College. The founding fathers did live to see the growth of the political parties, however. In their opinion, the parties were horrific abominations. In their later years, after the formation of the republic, many founding fathers spoke quite clearly in opposition to changes brought about by political parties.

Political parties were born in the eighteenth century, but really started to take off in the early nineteenth century. Their actions had an effect on the original architecture of the representative republic, specifically the Electoral College. Political parties almost immediately saw the extra power it would give them if an entire state went toward their party versus the opposing party. As a political party gained control of a statehouse, they would institute a winner take all system. This meant any opposing party needed to take the same actions in states where they controlled the statehouse to compete. This is how we arrived at the “winner take all” inequities (the victor of a majority of Electoral College districts in any given state receives all electoral college votes for that state). Unsurprisingly, the machinations of the political parties led to this undemocratic process today.

James Madison was always concerned about the people’s representation in the central government. He was one of the first to speak out against this “winner take all” practice. Alexander Hamilton also joined him in condemning the winner take all elector system that the statehouses were implementing at the behest of political parties. In fact, the two of them tried to get a constitutional amendment to prevent the states from sending electors to the Electoral College via this methodology. Both men understood this diluted representation and disenfranchised voters.

Here we see again that the architecture that the founding fathers put in place for this representative republic was an incredible balancing act, a balancing act that came under attack from power brokers immediately upon implementation. What was so incredible and unprecedented about this balancing act, was the weighting of the individual so heavily against all power: military, police and government. From the very beginning, the founding fathers gave the individual much weight versus traditional institutions of power. This balancing act came under attack by moneyed power almost immediately.

Whether smaller precincts come to be through an expansion of the House of Representatives an immediate end to winner take all electors will have a positive effect. It is much easier to game an election, when there are only fifty chunks that need to be swung one way or another. With hundreds of precincts to now be analyzed, it becomes much harder to game them. The fact is that had the Supreme Court not stepped in and broke the process, 2000 election would have gone to the college where a different outcome would almost surely have been decided. It is the Supreme Court that requires reform not the Electoral College. Please, PLEASE SAVE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE to preserve this republic.