Question

1. What is the Electoral College?
2. Do you feel that the Electoral College fits in a Democracy?
3. Should the Electoral College be abolished? Why or why not?

Answer 1

The U.S. Constitution does not support the direct election of the president by the people. Instead, Americans indirectly elect the president through the Electoral College, a group of presidential electors whose number is assigned to each state by the Constitution. Under the Constitution, each state will appoint electors to vote for a candidate for president. Each state has a specific list of presidential candidates on the ballot from which voters can choose. Voters cast their ballot for a candidate, but those voters are actually electing electors to vote for the president on the voters' behalf. Each political party in each state will appoint electors to cast votes on their behalf if their candidate wins that state or district's popular vote.To modern ears, the Electoral College sounds like a mockery of democracy.

The people speak, but the Electoral College has the right to silent their voices. That’s right, but that’s the point. But it much the same way, the Supreme Court retains the right to veto unconstitutional democratic legislation, while the U.S. Congress has the power to impeach and remove a popular president.The Electoral College is an anti-democratic institution. From the perspective of the writers of the U.S. Constitution, that’s a feature, not a bug. The entire point of the Electoral College is to serve as a check on democratic voting. The founders didn't trust the people to choose the most powerful person in the country (and now the world).

In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. So, let me make the case for its abolition and its replacement by a simple national popular vote, to be held in an entity we will call (what the heck) the United States of America.

There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. The first is easily dismissed. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch.A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the “senatorial bump” giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states.

Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. For almost the first half century of the republic, presidential candidates were chosen by the caucuses of the two parties in the House and the Senate. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have.