Five times in the history of your country, the American people have made their voice heard – taken time out of their busy days to participate in the electoral process, and despite it all, the president who the majority of Americans found fit to lead the country was not the one who ended up in power.
John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump all became president against the will of the American people because of slavery.
So why do we use such an inaccurate, undemocratic, and inelegant system? Not because the founding fathers believed it was a good idea – most of them hated it. Not because it prevents unqualified candidates – Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower all had no prior government experience when elected. Not because it prevents mob rule – faithless electors have never prevented someone from becoming president.
The real reason that the 12th amendment was passed and the electoral college system was kept in place was slavery. At the time, in a direct election system the North would heavily outnumber the South because a large amount of the population of the South was slaves, who couldn’t vote. Instead, James Madison proposed an electoral college in which each state could count its slaves at a 2/5ths discount when determining its share of the overall count, since they were viewed as 3/5ths of a person. This system gave a lot of power to the southern states, allowing slaveholding southerners to maintain power for the 32 out of the first 36 years of the Constitution. By the time slavery had been abolished and African-Americans gained the right to vote, the system had been entrenched in the minds of Americans as the way the president was elected, and a movement to do away with it never gained the momentum needed to amend the Constitution, especially since the electoral college creating a different result than the popular vote in an election immediately turned its process into a partisan issue.
Slavery has since been abolished, so this system wouldn’t be a problem if it awarded electoral votes proportionally to the votes received, but it doesn’t. Candidates can win the electoral college despite losing the popular vote because most states in the electoral college award votes based on a winner-take all system. In a winner-take all system, when you win a state 51% to 49%, you effectively get to turn that other 49% of the vote into votes for you, because you get all the electors from that state. Therefore, if Candidate A wins 60% of the nation’s popular vote, but their voters are concentrated in a few states, she could lose the election because Candidate B got to flip more votes to their side.
Contrary to popular belief, this winner-take all method is not required by the system, but rather a byproduct of it. The constitution makes no requirement of how states award their voters, but most states use a winner-take-all method because it makes more economic sense for them. Take Florida as an example. If they use a winner-take-all method, it attracts a lot of money and attention to their state because campaign money spent there has the chance to flip all 29 votes held by the state, instead of just flipping one or two.
The winner-take-all method’s favoritism towards votes in contested states is amplified by the three-elector minimum imposed by the electoral college that blatantly gives more power to those in small states than those in large ones, to the point that FiveThirtyEight publishes a “Voter Power Index” for every major election.
As with the Senate, one can dismiss this favoritism as a way to keep the rights of small states, but it makes even less sense here because the President is not a representative of any one state, but of the whole country, and the issues important to some Americans should be of no less importance to his election than the issues of others.
Furthermore, the Electoral College encourages the views and needs of swing states to be of greater importance than the views of ‘safe’ states. If North Dakota was a major swing state, the Dakota Access Pipeline would likely have garnered a lot more attention. Voters in swing states have their voices better heard, more opportunities to see the candidates in-person, and have more out-of-state ad money in their economy.
It is vitally important this does not become a partisan issue — in 2012, Donald Trump called the electoral college a “disaster for democracy” when he thought it would allow Obama to unjustly keep the White House. Since his election, he has praised it on multiple occasions, even going so far as to refer to it as “genius” in November of 2016.
So let’s recap: the electoral college silences minorities in ‘safe’ states, distorts the will of the American people, and only exists as a byproduct of one of the most vile practices in out history. In a country that prides itself on freedom, liberty, and democracy, it is a terrible irony that 1 in every 9 presidents were elected against the will of their people.
This system does not, has not, and will not serve the best interests of the American people.
It must change before it subverts our democracy again.