The Electoral College and Political Equality

This chapter argues that the electoral college does not provide a straightforward process for selecting the president. Instead, the process can be extraordinarily complex and has the potential to undo the people's will at many points in the long journey from the selection of electors to counting their votes in Congress. Congress may find it difficult to choose justly between competing slates of electors. It is even possible, although highly unlikely, that a state legislature could take the choice of the electors away from the people altogether. Yet the chapter contends that the electoral college poses an even more fundamental threat to American democracy, by violating political equality.

Chapter 3. The Electoral College and Political Equality

The Electoral College and Political Equality

The electoral college is the extraordinarily complex mechanism by which Americans choose their president. Is there any justification for such a system, which may elect the candidate who does not receive the most votes? Today, with two of the last five presidential elections having gone to the popular vote loser and the debacle following the 2020 election, the electoral college's flaws are more apparent than ever. In this fourth edition of the definitive book on the electoral college, George Edwards employs rigorous analysis and systemic data to show how the system violates core democratic principles and does not provide the benefits its advocates claim. With a new chapter focusing on the 2020 election, Edwards addresses justifications for the electoral college that were popular among Trump supporters following the 2016 and 2020 elections. Edwards concludes by offering a straightforward approach to selecting the president that maximizes political equality.

This chapter summarizes the findings of the previous chapters and concludes that electoral colleges violate political equality. It argues that the electoral college system is obsolete. The United States is now the only country that elects a politically powerful president via an electoral college and the only one in which a candidate can become president without having obtained the highest number of votes in the sole or final round of popular voting. The chapter indicates that recent reforms in democratic countries have replaced indirect procedures with direct popular voting. In this light, the chapter offers alternatives to the electoral college and considers some prospects for change.

This chapter assesses how the inequalities in voting power involved in the US Senate and in the Electoral College used to elect the president violate the requirements of political equality. The Senate comprises two senators from each state. States with large populations get the same number of votes in the Senate as do states with small populations. Because the states vary considerably in population, there are large inequalities in how many citizens are represented by a senate delegation. This unequal representation of individuals in the Senate constitutes objectionable political inequality. The Senate is thus unjustifiably undemocratic. This conclusion has implications for the election of the US president, as the Electoral College process for such election tracks what the chapter argues is the malapportionment of the Senate. This inequality, too, is objectionable, and it should be eliminated. The reasons for a more egalitarian election of the president are all the more urgent given that the inequalities in the Senate are much more constitutionally entrenched, and thus likely to remain. The election of the president should mitigate that inequality rather than exaggerate it.

The democratic imperative has shaped American politics and institutions in both good and bad ways: shifting the meaning of political corruption from official self-enrichment to democratic distortion, imposing conflict-of-interest rules on elected officials, opening up government through transparency measures, democratizing party nomination processes, and creating new opportunities for citizen governance though popular initiatives and experiments like participatory budgeting. The idiosyncratic structure and antiauthoritarian premises of US government have also guided and constrained America reform efforts distinctively. The Electoral College and the US Senate are constitutionally entrenched exceptions to “one person, one vote” electoral equality. The Supreme Court’s strong interpretation of First Amendment rights has blocked efforts to use campaign finance to create greater political equality. Election administration decentralization is a serious obstacle to achieving a uniformly fair political process. And the paths to fixing many of these problems with structural reforms at the national level are effectively blocked by politics and high institutional barriers for the foreseeable future. The latter is what Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson call the reformer’s dilemma: “Most institutional reforms cannot get off the ground without changing some of the conditions that the reforms are intended to fix” (Gutmann and Thompson, 2014, pp. xx–xxi). The pressure to expand democratic procedures will not likely abate. Fueled by a confluence of factors – inevitable disappointments with representative government, rising expectations of a more educated electorate, a general tendency to overestimate citizenship capacity and the allure of e-government – neopopulist reformers will continue to challenge older democratic practices and institutions. The democratic imperative has made some important contributions to American political reform – such as the expansion of the franchise or freedom of information laws. And a moderated populism (i.e., one that supplements and does not attempt to supplant representative government) can complement neutral expertise and pluralism.

This study aims to illustrate the political inequality and the lack of representativeness of the U.S. presidential election system by analyzing the flaws of the Electoral College system. Increasingly influenced by political polarization, money, and social media, nowadays the U.S. presidential election has become more susceptible to being manipulated so the winner's governance ability cannot be guaranteed. The U.S. presidential electoral system needs to be reformed to better reflect the will of the people, ensure democratic legitimacy, and achieve effective governance.

Democracy establishes relationships of political equality, ones in which citizens equally share authority over what they do together and respect one another as equals. But in today's divided public square, democracy is challenged by political thinkers who disagree about how democratic institutions should be organized, and by antidemocratic politicians who exploit uncertainties about what democracy requires and why it matters. This book mounts a bold and persuasive defense of democracy as a way of making collective decisions, showing how equality of authority is essential to relating equally as citizens. The book explains why the US Senate and Electoral College are urgently in need of reform, why proportional representation is not a universal requirement of democracy, how to identify racial vote dilution and gerrymandering in electoral districting, how to respond to threats to democracy posed by wealth inequality, and how judicial review could be more compatible with the democratic ideal. What emerges is an emphatic call to action to reinvigorate our ailing democracies, and a road map for widespread institutional reform. The book highlights the importance of diverse forms of authority in democratic deliberation and electoral and representative processes—and demonstrates how that authority rests equally with each citizen in a democracy.

On November 4, 2008, Black Americans, as well as many Democrats, shed tears of joy while witnessing the election of Senator Barack H. Obama of Illinois as the country’s first Black president. He was elected the forty-fourth president of the United States with 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 Electoral College votes, far exceeding the 270 threshold to capture the presidential office. The election of Obama was a significant moment in Black American history. This was a moment to be cherished for members of the Black community and African ancestry who had struggled for centuries to obtain economic, social, and political equality.

This chapter traces the origins of the electoral college. The Constitution's framers chose a unique and complex method of selecting the president—one that clearly violates fundamental tenets of political equality and majority rule. As such, this chapter considers the historical motivations behind the founding of electoral colleges, such as slavery, legislative intrigue, population differences, and voter parochialism. Afterward, it argues that most of the motivations behind the creation of the electoral college are irrelevant today and can be easily dismissed. In addition, the broad thrust of constitutional revision over the past two centuries has been in the direction of democratization and majority rule.