By Nic Woods
It seems the Electoral College has no friends these days.
Whether on the left (miffed as popular vote winners have not always become president) or the right (who seem to have forgotten that this system allows them to punch well above their weight, power-wise) everyone seems to want to dump the Electoral College into the garbage and set it on fire, including members of the Electoral College themselves.
Not so fast.
The Electoral College is misunderstood, mostly because we still put so much weight on what the framers of the U.S. Constitution originally intended, but not enough weight on what those framers would not have possibly understood.
Whatever the framers intended, it may not necessarily extend to, say, electric vehicles, as even Ben Franklin had not so much as envisioned horseless carriages or enough available electricity to juice up an electric vehicle, much less a fleet of them.
They may have been brilliant men for their time, but their imaginations were limited to what they knew, so they created systems that could be changed to reflect a future they could not envision.
Americans tend to conveniently forget that.
The Constitution can be, and has been, changed. It is difficult, but not impossible. The parts of the Constitution that address the Electoral College has been changed a couple times – once with the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, and one other time since, as any book with the actual Constitution in it strikes out part of that amendment.
The first step here is to admit that the Electoral College, as envisioned and even as amended, may still be outdated. Much of the assumptions embedded into it no longer hold true – that suffrage is limited to white male landowners, there are no political parties, that the redistricting process is not gamed by one party or the other to benefit it, that only the best men run for office, and they must rely on regional publishers to promote them, as self-promotion is too gauche.
Despite all that, the Electoral College has only failed to reflect the popular vote four times in our history – 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – a pretty good track record for an outdated concept.
Valid arguments say there is no reason to throw it out completely, but there are plenty reasons to drag it into the 21st Century and make changes that reflect near-universal suffrage and gerrymandering, as well as offset greater partisanship, a national but hyper partisan media landscape, misinformation and disinformation.
While the Electoral College needs to be reformed, most of us do not understand enough about it to know where to start. The next step could point toward raising the bar to become president just a bit higher.
Any Electoral College reform should encourage a candidate to work for every vote, whether it is from an urbanite, suburbanite, or exurbanite, from a swing state or a state that solidly votes for one party or another. This would require states to eliminate gerrymandering. To date, 32 states already have “faithless elector” laws (15 of them with the teeth to punish) that prevent their electors from going off-script. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared these faithless elector laws constitutional, they should be easy to spread to the remaining 18 states.
Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, advocated for a “vigorous” executive. One way to figure out how vigorous a future president will be is to support a system that will make him work to earn his office.