The Origins of the Electoral College

In <i>Rucho v. Common Cause</i>, the Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable political question.  The Court’s opinion admits that “[e]xcessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.”  The injustice is the ability of the majority party to use political gerrymandering to entrench itself as the governing party and to remain so, long after that party falls out of favor. <br><br>Although <i>Rucho</i> was an Elections Clause case, it is easily applicable to states’ exercise of their Electors Clause power.  Republicans will wield this new, nonjusticiable power (and the concomitant political cover that it provides) to gerrymander the Electoral College.  And, when they do, it is likely that Democrats will follow suit.  <i>Rucho</i> encourages, enables and ensures an arms race to the end of meaningful participation by voters in presidential elections in many states. <br><br>Here is the template, using Texas as an example, for the “Gerrymandered Electoral College”:<br><br>“The set of elector candidates that is elected is the one that corresponds to the candidates for president and vice-president who win the most individual Texas Congressional districts.  The winners of each Congressional district shall be the candidates for President and Vice President who receive the highest number of votes in that Congressional district.”<br><br>This system for allocating Texas’s electoral college votes mimics the Electoral College system used to elect the President.  Unlike the existing “District Systems” in use in Maine and Nebraska, it is a winner-take-all system (thus maximizing the State’s influence on the presidential election) that is NOT based on the popular vote for the relevant sovereign territory.  Instead, it allocates all of the spoils of victory—all of Texas’s electoral college votes—to the winner of the most subdivisions of that sovereign territory.<br><br>Or Texas might insulate its gerrymandering of the Electoral College from any future corrective legislation by Congress by creating its own set of forty unique, extremely gerrymandered “Electoral College Districts” and mandating that Texas allocate all of its electoral college votes to the winner of the most individual Electoral College Districts.<br><br>The Gerrymandered Electoral College (1) satisfies the Constitutional requirement of population equality,  (2) mimics the actual Electoral College in its anti-majoritarian nature,  (3) exploits the fact that political gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable political question, and (4) in the second example above, leverages the fact that States have plenary power over the allocation of their Electoral College votes to avoid oversight, constraint or regulation by Congress.  This last aspect is particularly powerful.  Once a State establishes “Electoral College Districts” and enacts a Gerrymandered Electoral College, Congress will be powerless to override it.

The Electoral College is the method used in every four years to elect the President of the United States. Given that the Electoral College gives the power to elect the president to state-casted votes, the system has in recent years become a source of growing controversy given how two presidents, George Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016, without winning the national popular vote. These elections and the public discourse around them have brought new life to the purpose and impacts of the Electoral College. This paper uses key presidential elections, including those of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Harrison, Woodrow Wilson, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, give insight on how the Electoral College should now be understood. In particular, this paper examines the implications of the Electoral College on one fundamental question: Does election to the presidency via the Electoral College route fundamentally affect the ability of a president to govern effectively? Examining these elections, the context around and impact after these elections, and modern United States political history shows that when the Electoral College is not an extraordinary or exceptionally notable part of an election cycle, the Electoral College does not fundamentally affect the president’s ability to command public and political support required to effectively govern. However, when the Electoral College does become a point of focus during a presidential election and in the beginning of a president’s term, it has wide-ranging impacts. In particular, the College can shape the political and public mandate the president has to lead, shaping their overall agenda for their time in office; cause biases to arise towards certain states and conservative politics; and undermine their ability to serve as a unifying figure. With each modern election having an increased focus on the Electoral College, the system is likely to cause increased polarization and tension with each passing election if serious reforms are not undertaken.

Distinguishing between the effects of swing ratio and bias on outcomes in the US Electoral College, 1900–1992

After most U.S. presidential elections there are calls for passage of a constitutional amendment to modify the state-wide winner-take-all feature of the Electoral College currently found in all but two states,1 The two most frequent proposals are (1) to replace the Electoral College with direct popular elections,2 and (2) to have electoral college seats allocated at the level of House districts, with a two seat bonus to the state-wide winner – the rule now in place in Nebraska in Maine.3 Those who wish to eliminate or substantially modify the Electoral College, usually begin by noting that the original justification for its existence, the designation of sets of knowledgeable individuals who will meet in isolation in their respective states to deliberate and to make informed choices, has zero relevance to the modern world. Opponents also commonly point to two key problems: (a) the failure of the Electoral College to satisfy the “one person, one vote” standard because of its overweighting of the seat shares of the smaller states,4 and (b) the potential for the winner of the Electoral College majority to be a popular vote loser. In addition, and relatedly, (c) it has been argued that one party may develop a “built-in” advantage in the Electoral College if its strength comes disproportionately from the smaller states.5 A further pair of increasingly heard interlinked arguments against the Electoral College are that (d) the Electoral College focuses candidate attention only on the relative handful of potentially competitive states, leaving much of the country barely aware that a presidential election is going on, and thus reducing overall incentives for turnout, and (e) that it unduly raises the importance of issues that are of concern to voters in the competitive states relative to the issues of concern to voters whose states are not “in play.” A sixth argument against the present Electoral College arrangements is that (f) since we might expect that the outcome in the most competitive state(s) will be more competitive than the national popular vote outcome, and since the outcome of a close

Most Americans remain only dimly aware of the operations of the electoral college and feel little concern over a that seems to be working. Yet our archaic electoral college has the potential to thwart popular will, warn Lawrence Longley and Neal Peirce, two leading national authorities on the subject. In this complete guide to the electoral college, Longley and Peirce explain how the U.S. electoral college was created, how it has evolved, how it has influenced various crisis elections (including 1992), how it works today, and how it might affect future elections.The electoral college is a system of disastrous failings, the authors say, and it could lead to a political and constitutional crisis. To highlight the shortcomings of the system, they create a fictitious, but not impossible, 1996 election scenario in which neither Senator Robert Dole nor President Bill Clinton can claim a victory in the electoral college. A surprising chain of events set off by a strong third party eventually confers the presidency on the Speaker of the House -- a man who received not a single vote in the popular election. This useful handbook will provide all the information a citizen needs to understand our baffling electoral college.

Reviewed by: The Race to 270: The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004 William Crotty The Race to 270: The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004. By Daron R. Shaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; pp 216. $50.00 cloth; $20.00 paper. Daron R. Shaw's study of the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 has two purposes. The first purpose is to assess the impact of the Electoral College on candidates' decision making, while arguing the importance of the campaign period in general in moving small but ultimately significant segments of the electorate to one side or the other. Second, it is also meant to combine the expertise and skills of both the political scientist and the practitioner (because Shaw served as an advisor to both Bush-Cheney campaigns) in teasing out the impact of various strategies in shaping an election's outcome. Shaw makes a strong, and I would say welcome, argument for the relevance of campaigns in affecting voter decision making and ultimately deciding the outcomes of elections. In this context, the study helps question the notion of largely predetermined results based on partisan affiliations. Put in other terms, it serves to make the case that "politics is important." The point is not new. V. O. Key Jr. passionately advanced the cause, but it bears repeating as a response to drier, more formalistic analyses that predominate in the field of political science. Shaw's approach is parsimonious; the focus is primarily restricted to television advertising and candidate appearances. At the same time, the dynamics of campaigns are much more inclusive, with party and grassroots organizing, message definition, voter contacts, fundraising, and personal styles, media coverage, in-house decision making and strategizing, ideological perspectives, and so on. The study can be seen as a partial if important and [End Page 157] creative effort to isolate the operations and impact of a specialized set of campaign dynamics. Shaw critiques the relevant academic research and, in particular, the writings directing attention away from the campaign and therefore directly or indirectly arguing its "minimalist" importance in shaping contests. The review of the literature and the availability and quality of data sources used in the study is persuasive. Not surprisingly, the book may make its greatest contribution in assessing the adaptation of campaign thinking (Karl Rove being the principal arbitrator) to maximize Electoral College advantages (as an example, party versus ideology favoring Bush-Cheney in assessing resource allocations at the state level). Based on such calculations, the states could be rank-ordered in relation to winnability (safe, battlegrounded, lost) for targeting financial allocations and candidate appearances, and for determining the nature of the strategy to be pursued. There were alternative strategies, too: offensive, attack in weak support and battleground states; defensive, campaign in states leaning to Bush and a handful of those favoring the opponent; or "high-risk," a singularly intense focus on the battleground states needed to prevail in the Electoral College. Of particular interest to me were the factors weighed to decide a state's importance and consequently the kind of campaign to be conducted there. These included voting histories, poll numbers, party organizational development and leadership support, strength and competitiveness of lower-level races, issue potential (issue positions were tailored to each state's outlook and values), and native son roots. Likewise, media markets were identified in relation both to the campaign's master plan and to cost-effectiveness in reaching the undecided and swing voters. In allocating resources to media markets across states, importance was placed on the state profile (core, leaning, or battleground) and competitiveness ("states where the race was clear and where TV advertising was relatively inexpensive tended to get more commercials and more visits"), and the strategic allocations favored in one campaign (2000) were closely correlated with its successor (2004) (73). Not surprisingly, "battleground states were inundated with both TV ads and visits from candidates," and despite intensive programming, "presidential and vice presidential appearances … varied much more with the movements of the opposition than the campaign's own Electoral College plan" (73). The Electoral College framework provides the boundaries within which each party's campaign...

The electoral college is usually considered as a single institution that, in contrast to a system of direct election, mediates the popular will and advances countermajoritarian principles. To its critics, this role is a destructive one; the electoral college thwarts the foundational democratic idea that all votes should count equally and the majority’s choice should lead. By contrast, defenders of the electoral college argue that it is a deliberately crafted institution whose deviations from nationwide popular sentiment are part of its design. Yet the electoral college is not a single institution but a combination of procedures. The electoral college produces results potentially different from those that would be achieved by direct election through several distinct mechanisms, including the two-vote bonus given to all states, the assignment of electoral votes based on total population rather than voters, and the award of state electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Of these mechanisms, the use of winner-take-all rules stands out as the least defensible. In contrast to other aspects of the electoral college, winner-take-all systems were not part of the electoral college’s original design and were adopted haphazardly at the state level, without systematic consideration of their national consequences. Further, winner-take-all rules cause considerable harm by contributing most strongly to the risk of popular/electoral splits, by creating incentives for fraud, voter suppression, and other undesirable campaign tactics, and by arbitrarily privileging some voters’ preferences at others’ expense. As a result, advocates for electoral college reform should make abolition of winner-take-all central to both their critiques of the current process and their evaluation of reform proposals.

In examination of the constitutional and political institution of the Electoral College the research shows that throughout American politics and history the Electoral College always had and has a role of great political and historical influence. Furthermore the Electoral College has also been a source of much political and constitutional debate. This is an intriguing constitutional needle in a political hay stack for the simple fact that something appears to be insignificant and inconsequential until its time for the national presidential election to roll around every four years. Thus the Electoral College takes front and center of the national political stage as the collective national eyes are all on the presidential race and the ever so magical number of 270. How the Electoral College factors into American politics has been the subject of much political discussion relevant to how the president is elected, how the American public’s voice is represented and how democratic of a political institution or representative system is the Electoral College. Through the sands of time of American history there has been camps of voices echoing concerns about the constitutional needle in a political hay stack of the Electoral College and its influential role in American politics.

This book evaluates the Electoral College as it relates to relevant theories of representation. The purpose of the study is to help readers understand the ways in which the institution does or does not align with expectations relating to representative democracy. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, heated calls to abolish the Electoral College were made in large part because the winning candidate received nearly 3 million fewer votes from across the country than his opponent. At the same time, many lauded the institution for working as intended—particularly as it relates to federalism. The Electoral College is a unique institution. It is also one of the most debated institutions in American politics. Many arguments concerning the body—it protects less populated states, it helps preserve federalism, it violates the one-person, one-vote principle, it forces candidates to produce broad-based coalitions—rarely receive the depth of attention they deserve. This book sets out to do this by examining the origin, evolution, and practice of the Electoral College. Much of the controversy relating to the institution revolves around whether we rely on the original or the evolved Electoral College to inform our perspective. Understanding the origin and evolution of the body allows us to more appropriately evaluate contemporary arguments over the institution. In addition to looking at common arguments relating to the Electoral College, this study pays particular attention to its role in the 2016 election and the often overlooked but essential position of presidential electors.

We continue to pay a heavy price for our history in slavery. It is no exaggeration to say that the legacies of slavery determined the outcome of the most recent presidential election. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. As a matter of democracy, and according to the will of the voters, he lost the election. Yet as a matter of constitutional law and state electoral-vote allocations, Trump received a substantial majority of the votes in the electoral college and won the presidency. In addition, millions of otherwise eligible voters were denied the right to vote through calculated voter suppression efforts and felon disenfranchisement. For a few days after the election, there was a brief flicker of interest in the electoral college and its origins in slavery. Now, several months since the election, this interest has waned and there is little reckoning with the reason why we have such undemocratic elections. Donald Trump won the presidency because of two artifacts of slavery: the electoral college and our post-Reconstruction legacy of state voter suppression and disenfranchisement efforts. The electoral college was created in the Constitution to protect the interests of slave owners. And current voter suppression efforts are a direct legacy of white efforts to prevent blacks from voting after the 15th Amendment prohibited race discrimination in voting. Our failure to know and appreciate the depth of the legacies of slavery leaves us entirely unprepared to understand why presidential elections come out the way they do. In addition, the lack of historical perspective leads us to accept that certain aspects of elections, like state control over voting qualifications and felon disenfranchisement, are somehow neutral and benign doctrines. State voter-suppression efforts enjoy a surface plausibility they do not deserve. This essay describes the principal legacies of slavery in our electoral law and their major effects on the most recent presidential election. First I discuss why the Constitution itself is properly considered a proslavery document. One of the proslavery features of the Constitution is the electoral college, enacted as a way to protect the interests of slave owners. Next I discuss two aspects of state control over voter qualifications that had a major restrictive impact on the electorate: ostensibly neutral efforts like voter ID laws and felon disenfranchisement laws.

The Electoral College and the election of 2000

Almost every American has either studied something about the Electoral College in school or at least heard of it. Yet to many people used to electing municipal, state, and Federal officials by the democratic principle “the one who gets the most votes always wins,” the Electoral College looks quite mysterious and antiquated. The mystery concerns how such a system could have existed for so long, and why it has not been replaced by a system that is based on the above democratic principle. In contrast, people who are curious about the election system often try to grasp (a) how the Electoral College could have emerged in the first place, and (b) what could have been the Founding Fathers’ logic of designing the system for electing a President and a Vice President. This chapter considers the Electoral College origins and analyzes a logical mistake made by the originators of the Constitution, which still remains in its text, as well as the election problems that were overlooked by the Founding Fathers in the original design of the Constitution.Keywords1787 Great CompromiseArticle 2 of the ConstitutionCommittee of Eleven, Electoral College ElectorsElectoral votesExecutive powerFounding FathersFounding Fathers’ logical mistake“One state, one vote” principleSlavery

Subjective pattern recognition is a class of pattern recognition problems, where we not only merely know a few, if any, the strategies our brains employ in making decisions in daily life but also have only limited ideas on the standards our brains use in determining the equality/inequality among the objects. Face recognition is a typical example of such problems.For solving a subjective pattern recognition problem by machinery, application accuracy is the standard performance metric for evaluating algorithms. However, we indeed do not know the connection between algorithm design and application accuracy in subjective pattern recognition. Consequently, the research in this area follows a “trial and error” process in a general sense: try different parameters of an algorithm, try different algorithms, and try different algorithms with different parameters. This phenomenon can be observed clearly in the nearly 30 years research of the face recognition: although huge advances have been made, no algorithm has ever been shown a potential to be consistently better than most of the algorithms developed earlier; it was even shown that a naïve algorithm can work, in the sense of accuracy, at least no worse than many newly developed ones in a few benchmarks.We argue that, the primary objective of subjective pattern recognition research should be moved to theoretical robustness from application accuracy so that we can evaluate and compare algorithms without or with only few “trial and error” steps. We in this paper introduce an analytical model for studying the theoretical stabilities of multicandidate Electoral College and Direct Popular Vote schemes (aka regional voting scheme and national voting scheme, respectively), which can be expressed as the a posteriori probability that a winning candidate will continue to be chosen after the system is subjected to noise. This model shows that, in the context of multicandidate elections, generally, Electoral College is more stable than Direct Popular Vote, that the stability of Electoral College increases from that of Direct Popular Vote as the size of the subdivided regions decreases from the original nation size, up to a certain level, and then the stability starts to decrease approaching the stability of Direct Popular Vote as the region size approaches the original unit cell size; and that the stability of Electoral College approaches that of Direct Popular Vote in the two extremities as the region size increases to the original national size or decreases to the unit cell size. It also shows a special situation of white noise dominance with negligibly small concentrated noise, where Direct Popular Vote is surprisingly more stable than Electoral College, although the existence of such a special situation is questionable.We observe that “high stability” in theory indeed always reveals itself in “high accuracy” in applications. Extensive experiments on two human face benchmark databases applying an Electoral College framework embedded with standard baseline and newly developed holistic algorithms have been conducted. The impressive improvement by Electoral College over regular holistic algorithms verifies the stability theory on the voting systems. It also shows an evidential support for adopting theoretical stability instead of application accuracy as the primary objective for subjective pattern recognition research.

The Electoral College, a voting system established by the Founding Fathers in the United States Constitution, has been a subject of controversy and debate for decades. This paper explores the shortcomings and ethical implications associated with the Electoral College, particularly in the context of modern democracy. The analysis begins with an introduction to the Electoral College system, its historical origins, and its role in balancing the interests of large and small states. It also explores various issues with the Electoral College, including the divergence between the popular vote and the election outcome, the impact on voter turnout, and the presence of faithless electors who deviate from the popular vote. It highlights the instances where the College has undermined the democratic process and emphasizes the dangers of decision-making falling into the hands of a closed group rather than reflecting the voice of the citizens. It addresses the arguments that it protects the interests of small states and acts as a safeguard against uneducated voting, concluding that these concerns are no longer valid in the contemporary political landscape, where power balance is already achieved through representation in Congress and education has improved voter awareness and understanding. While eliminating the Electoral College is naive, the paper suggests that amending the system is necessary to address its flaws and ensure a more equitable representation of the people's will. By enacting reasonable amendments, the United States can uphold the core values of democracy and ensure that the election of the president truly reflects the people.

This article strikes a blow in defense of America's much-maligned system of choosing a president: the Electoral College. It argues that, although imperfect, the Electoral College is superior to the alternatives and should be retained because it does an excellent job of balancing the two central purposes of presidential elections: choosing the right winner, and doing so in a reasonably timely and undisputed fashion. Whereas most literature defending the Electoral College focuses primarily on federalism, this article details the pragmatic and procedural case for maintaining the status quo. Simply put, a direct national election would be a nightmare in a close race. Recounts and legal challenges would stretch from sea to shining sea, and with two centuries of legal precedent tossed aside, courts would have a very difficult time managing it all. Without the multiple layers of unappreciated procedural safeguards provided by the current system, post-election uncertainty could stretch well into January, raising doubt about whether we would have a clear winner by inauguration day. No election system can be perfect, because an election is a measurement of the popular will, and all measurements have margins of error. The current system, however, has served us well for more than two centuries. It gets the result right, at least arguably, almost every time - and it gives us a definitive result every single time, as any presidential election system must. It always gives us a president. And in a very close election, an arguably wrong president is better than no president at all. The article's introduction discusses a hypothetical 2012 election between President Barack Obama and Governor Jeb Bush. In this scenario, the interstate compact system, a proposal currently under consideration in various states, has come into effect. This means the Electoral College still exists, but now purports to represent the nationwide popular vote. The scenario briefly outlines some of the dire results this change could have in a very close election. The remainder of the article is split into five parts. Part I argues that, as mentioned above, presidential elections have two main purposes: choosing the right winner, and doing so in a reasonably timely and undisputed fashion. Parts II, III and IV analyze how well these purposes are served by three different possible election systems: the current Electoral College system, a true direct popular-vote election, and the hybrid interstate-compact proposal. The article contends that the current system is, on balance, superior to either alternative; it more reliably fulfills both purposes than would either proposed reform. However, acknowledging the possibility that this balance could someday shift, Part V suggests a set of minimum requirements that would be absolutely necessary for a functional popular-vote system, should it ever become necessary to abandon the Electoral College.