Vol. 88: Scrap the Electoral College?

Not so fast.

         Election Day will soon be upon us, which means that wherever I go lately, Americans of good will are constantly telling me what I already know: The Electoral College fails to reflect the will of the American people.  

         Donald Trump, they point out, lost the 2016 popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than 2.8 million votes, yet he won the Electoral College by 74 votes. George W. Bush lost the 2000 popular vote to Al Gore by 544,000 votes but won the Electoral College by five votes. And don’t get me started about the wrongs suffered by Grover Cleveland in 1888, Samuel Tilden in 1876, and Andrew Jackson in 1824.

         Wait, it gets worse. The Electoral College is disproportionately skewed in favor of smaller states, which means that larger states are disproportionately screwed. And even within their states, voters don’t actually vote for a presidential candidate at all; they vote for electors who are theoretically committed to a political party but are technically free to vote for Homer Simpson if they choose. In 2020 a cabal of smart but morally deficient lawyers deliberately tried to confuse the post-election process by fraudulently creating alternate slates of unauthorized electors in seven battleground states that Joe Biden had already won.

Would Hillary have won?

         At least 700 amendments have been proposed to modify or abolish the Electoral College. The latest Gallup poll found 61% of Americans— among them Hillary Clinton— in favor of abolishing the Electoral College altogether.

         “If it weren’t for the Electoral College, Trump NEVER would’ve been President,” claims an email message I received the other day from an organization called Progressive Voter Turnout.

         What could be more obvious, right?

         Color me dubious. It’s not that I love the Electoral College. It’s just that I fear the cure may be worse than the disease.

         True, in 2016 the Electoral College didn’t reflect the popular vote. But if presidential elections were determined by popular vote, presumably the campaigns would pursue different strategies.

When Penn ‘beat’ Princeton

         In politics as in sports, players adapt to rule changes. After 1979, when long-distance baskets were awarded three points instead of two, basketball players started taking more shots from long distances. If home runs hit into the upper deck were awarded two runs instead of one, more baseball players would be swinging for the fences. If field goals were worth more than touchdowns, football kickers would be paid more than quarterbacks. And if presidents were determined solely by nationwide popular vote, politicians would find different ways to game the system.

         I recall a Penn-Princeton football game in my day in which my Penn teammates pushed Princeton all over the field for 51 minutes and dominated every statistical category except one: points scored. Should we have claimed that our victory was stolen from us by an archaic scoring system?

Mayor Daley’s limit

         In any election, losers can (and often do) claim an election was rigged. That claim is easier to make if there’s just one nationwide election, as opposed to 50 state elections. Trump can rail about alleged ballot-box stuffing in, say, Philadelphia or Detroit. But such abuses, even if true, can’t harm the national outcome beyond a state line. In 1960, when Kennedy narrowly beat Nixon, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley was accused of holding back his city’s vote until the downstate Illinois vote came in, so he could deliver the state’s electors to his fellow Democrat JFK. True? Maybe. But under the Electoral College rules, whatever damage Daley caused ended at the Illinois state line. In effect, the Electoral College told Daley, “There’s only so much trouble you can cause.” (As it turned out, JFK would have won the 1960 election even without Illinois.)

         In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes, prompting Trump’s infamous phone call requesting that his fellow Republican, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, “find” 11,780 votes for Trump. (Raffensberger, to his eternal credit, declined.) Arizona’s race was even closer: Biden won it by only 10,457 votes. Biden won Wisconsin by just 20,682 votes, Nevada by just 33,606 votes, Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes. In each case, Trump seized on the closeness of the vote to claim that those five states had been stolen from him. But he made no such claim concerning the other 21 states that went for Biden.

         Now, suppose the Electoral College were abolished and presidents were determined solely by the popular vote. And suppose the nationwide margin of victory was only 50,000 votes. Who could ever say with assurance that the vote wasn’t stolen? What candidate could take office without being widely perceived as a fraud?

A Northeast blizzard?

         Or consider another hypothetical situation. Suppose a devastating blizzard hit the northeastern U.S. on Election Day, preventing most voters in those states from leaving their homes? In a strictly popular vote, their election choices wouldn’t count. But the Electoral College would at least guarantee that their state’s preference— represented by however few of their neighbors made it to the polls— would be reflected more or less in proportion to the state’s population.

         I guess I feel about the Electoral College the way Churchill felt about democracy: It’s the worst of all possible systems, except for all the other systems.

         Could the Electoral College stand tinkering? Sure. But before we change it or eliminate it, please remember the words of the late Penn sociology professor E. Digby Baltzell: “Beware the unintended consequences of virtuous acts.”

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com