Why the Electoral College Should be Abolished.
As the Nation holds it’s breath waiting for the results of the latest Presidential election I can’t help but feel likes it’s that special time of everyfouryears to debate the existence of the Electoral College. To start with I want to state up front that no matter who wins the current presidential election, the electoral college needs to be abolished. I’m sure there will be a few objections to this most useful of election tools but I hope to answer them with satisfaction below.
First, the electoral college fails on its face at what it was intended to do. The designers of the electoral college did not intend it to be a mere rubber stamp of the popular will but a body who themselves would elect the president. The people would vote for the wisest, most intelligent, most renowned, most virtues, men in their community (read wealthiest), and these august members would meet, deliberate, and vote as a body on who the president would be. Of course this didn’t happen even in the first presidential election of 1789 and has never happened since, the electors, barring a few exceptions have voted for who their constituents want for president ever since.
Secondly, for those who claim that the electoral college acts as some sort of check on the whims of the mob, what others might call the preferences of the majority of Americans, well the electoral college has failed at preventing this as well. Since the popular vote began to be counted in 1824, there have only been five winners of the electoral college who have lost the popular vote, (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 for those interested) so how does the electoral college prevent the whims of the mob it has only gone against the popular will about 5% of the time, how is this anything other than just a randomized and arbitrary way of electing the president? For those who want less popular participation in government, I have to ask, how far back to you want to draw that line? Should blacks and other ethnic minorities be denied the vote as was until the 1960's? Or should women be disenfranchised? Or perhaps should property qualifications be brought back? If you believe so then I have some reading on the French Revolution for you that might be illuminating.
Third, for those who claim that abolishing the electoral college would lead to presidential campaigns focusing all of their time and effort on just a few areas of the country…how is that different than what we have now? As long as I have been alive and politically conscious campaigns have focused the majority of their time and resources on the so-called swing states and ignore areas where tens of millions of people live because they are deemed “safe”. What an idea to have instead a system where presidential campaigns actually focus most of their time and resources on areas of the country where the majority of Americans actually live.
Finally I want to point out that no other democratic system elects their leaders in this way. There are plenty of modern democracies or even “democratic-republics” if you want to be snooty about it, that don’t employ an electoral college and yet the lights still turn on in the morning and the garbage still gets taken out every week. In fact American leaders perhaps know at some level that the electoral college is an cumbersome anachronism. For when they imposed an American constitutional framework on a defeated Japan and Germany after WWII, an electoral college was nowhere to be found.
So to summarize the electoral college is an undemocratic and anachronistic noose around American governance that has more in-common with the College of Cardinals or the Prince-Electors of the Holy Roman Empire than with any modern and sane democratic state and should therefore be abolished.