Electoral College Is Truly Representative

¶ … Electoral College is truly representative of the actual will of the American people based on their voting patterns in presidential elections. The Electoral College is a uniquely American institution, created specifically during the Constitutional Convention of the late 1780s in order to address what the Founding Fathers saw as the problematic nature of presidential elections in a state-based nation. No other country has anything quite like it, and very few Americans today actually understand how it works, much less why it was created. The question is, does it serve a democratic government properly by adequately expressing the will of the voters, or is it a flawed, outdated, and even un-democratic institution that thwarts the will of the voters and should be abolished? Did the Founding Fathers make a mistake when they included the Electoral College in our democratic republic?

Electing a president was and is a big deal. The Founding Fathers did not want a mere majority of the American public to elect one, because the nation is a state-based nation; to have the president elected by a public majority would mean that the more populated states would have more of an input into who gets elected, which would leave the less populated states vulnerable to not having their interests represented at the highest level of government. The Electoral College was created to make sure the president was elected as a representative of the states, not the people per se, and that each state had equal input into who was elected. While it is a somewhat convoluted way to elect a president, it is the position of this paper that in spite of its flaws, the Electoral College does, ultimately, reflect the voting preferences of the American people in a democratic way. A study of past presidential elections should show this to be overwhelmingly the case, with few, if any, deviations. Any deviations found in the electoral history of U.S. presidents can be considered anomalies, if the expected evidence supports the thesis of this paper.

Does the Electoral College Truly Represent the Will of the American People in Presidential Elections?

The Electoral College is a uniquely American institution. No other country in the world has anything quite like it. It is solely the invention of the Founding Fathers of this nation, who devised it during the Constitutional Convention of the late 1780s in order to address what they saw as a serious problem with the electing of a president in this country. Because the United States is based on many different states that each operate as mini-nations, while all being part of the same larger nation, it makes sense that each state would and will have different interests. Since the president is elected to represent the entire country (unlike members of Congress, who are elected from their states and represent the interests of their states in the national government), the Founding Fathers felt that it was important for him (or possibly her now) to be truly representative of the entire nation. To them, this meant he had to represent the states as a whole, not the people as individuals (Fon 2004).

The way a normal election in a democratic nation works would mean that a president elected by the people and the people alone may end up being representative of only the more populous states. The interests of those states would then supersede those of less populous states in the presidential office (Fon 2004). More votes come from the more populous states, after all. Yet, in a democratic nation, the people MUST have a say in the election of a president, just as they do in the election of other public officials (the Supreme Court being the exception). Reconciling these two things was a point of intense debate during the Constitutional Convention, and the Electoral College was born from the dual needs of having a truly equitably state-based elected president and one that was also democratically elected by the people.

However, does the Electoral College truly represent the will of the people in its selection of the president? The way it operates makes its democratic function seem suspect. In order to win a presidential election, a presidential candidate must gain a majority of electoral votes, not a majority of the popular vote. The people DO get to vote in presidential elections, but they are not really voting for the president. They are voting for electors, who will then vote for the president on behalf of the American people at a later date (in December, in this case). In the early days of the Electoral College, citizens would actually run for the office of elector, and people would cast their votes for the elector whom they thought would cast a ballot for their preferred presidential candidate. Gradually, this changed to where each political party with a presidential candidate in the running gets a certain number of electors in each state, based on the population of the state (Warf 2009). The candidate who gets a plurality (not a majority) of votes from the general public in a state wins ALL of the electors from his or her party in that state, and the electors from the other parties are discarded (Barnett 1990). This all or nothing approach is the case in every state except Maine and Nebraska, which divide up the electoral votes based on the number of votes each candidate gets.

For example, let's say Florida gets 27 electoral votes for each political party with a candidate running for president in that state. If the Democratic candidate gets 40% of the popular vote of the people, the Republican candidate gets 35%, and the Green party candidate gets 25%, the 27 electors from the Democratic party are awarded to the Democratic candidate, and the Republican and Green party electors are discarded. It is the Democratic electors who will officially cast their ballots for president in December for the state of Florida.

While the electors who make up the Electoral College are technically autonomous in most states (meaning they are free to vote for whoever they choose, even if it isn't the candidate of their political party….though a few states require them by law to vote for their party's candidate, this is not the case in most states), the actual chances of any elector voting for someone outside of his or her political party is remote (Sterling 1981). This is because electoral positions are no longer elected offices. Electors are appointed by the heads of their state political party organizations, usually as rewards for outstanding party loyalty. This loyalty, and the likely desire to remain in the party's good graces for the chance of future rewards of an even greater nature, will naturally mean that most electors will vote as expected for their party's candidate. A rogue elector is a possibility except in states where the voting of the electors is constrained by law; however, rogue electoral voting has only happened a handful of times since the current electoral system has been in place.

Electors meet in December in their state capitals to cast their official votes for president. This is still done the way it was done when the electoral college was first invented. Having electors travel to their states' capitals and all cast their votes at the same time eliminated the chance of bribery with the electors from people outside of the Electoral College (Uslaner 1976). While faster transportation and the Internet have made this a moot point in modern times, the process for electoral voting is still the same. In order to win the presidency, a candidate must receive a majority of electoral votes from among the states (Pomper 1990). This ensures the candidate is truly representative of the United States as a whole, and not just the interests of a few largely populated states.

So, the Electoral College exists to take care of the dual purpose of making sure the one elected office in the nation that represents the whole nation really does represent it at the state level (since the states' interests are what the president is really trying to balance in his work), while still being a democratic institution that allows the American people to have a say in who is elected to the office (Sterling 1981). It is a very ingenious invention, when it is looked at from a political perspective. It is complex, yes, but that is one of the reasons why it was such a matter of contention and drawn out debate at the Constitutional Convention. Something like that isn't invented on a whim, or without a lot of thought, planning, plotting, and debate put into it.

It is easy to see that the Electoral College does its job of choosing a president that is representative of all of the states very well. But does it really represent the will of the American people? As a democratic republic, it is important that any elected official be one who has a popular mandate from the public as a whole, or at least a majority of that public. This is just as important as having a president who is equally representative of the interests of each state. The Founding Fathers succeeded admirably in the area of state-based election of the president, but did they succeed in also ensuring we have a democratically elected president? Are public presidential elections really shams, leaving us with a president who is essentially appointed by political party favorites, or does he represent the American people as well as the states? If he does not represent the American people, should the Electoral College be changed, or abolished entirely, or should it be kept as it is, with the assumption that a president that is representative of the interests of the states is more beneficial to this nation and appropriate to the office than one who is truly democratically elected?

To answer these questions, it is first necessary to examine the results of the presidential elections of the past, going back to the very first one and every one since. The electoral vote as compared to the popular vote must be examined. Did a presidential candidate ever win the presidency through an electoral vote that did not match up with the popular vote? In other words, has a president ever been elected who did not get the majority of the popular vote, but who won the office through the electoral vote alone? And if this has happened, how many times has it happened? Has it happened enough times to make the current method of electing the president un-democratic, or has it happened only a handful of times in what can be considered rare, if not purely statistical flukes of circumstances?

It would seem that in the long history of the United States, with its 45 presidents and many more presidential elections (counting the elections for presidents who served more than one term), that it would be inevitable that at least one election may come out in favor of the Electoral College alone, while leaving the popular vote, and with it, the will of the American people, out in the cold. Happening once would be an expected and acceptable outcome for an institution that was otherwise mainly democratic in nature. However, many instances of this would indicate something was wrong with the way the Electoral College operates and that it needs to be overhauled or abolished in order to give us a truly democratic federal government.

In the history of the United States, there have been three candidates who have won the presidency without winning the popular vote. These candidates were elected on the strength of their electoral votes alone. With our current roster of 50 states, we have 538 electoral votes up for grabs, and a candidate needs just 270 of them to win. In the past, when there were fewer states, the numbers were different, but it still took a majority in the Electoral College to elect a president (Wright 2009). The candidates who became president without winning the popular vote were: