On the Electoral College

Out of 60 U.S. presidential elections, the winner has gotten a majority in the Electoral College without a majority of the popular vote eleven times: 1824 (John Quincy Adams), 1848 (Zachary Taylor), 1854 (James Buchanan), 1860 (Abraham Lincoln), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes), 1892 (Grover Cleveland), 1912 (Woodrow Wilson), 1968 (Richard M. Nixon), 1992 (William J. Clinton), 2000 (George W. Bush), and 2016 (Donald J. Trump).  This is a rate of occurrence of 18.33%.  

After the election of Dubya in 2000 with a majority of the EC vote without a majority of the popular vote, Democrats screamed bloody murder for abolition of the Electoral College.  After Trump repeated Dubya's feat with a popular vote deficit of over 3 million, the screaming bloody murder for EC abolition got even louder and shriller.  

Strange, but I don't remember them screaming bloody murder about the need to abolish the EC after Bill Clinton's victory in the Electoral College without a majority of the popular vote in 1992.

One of the chief arguments made by Democrats is that wealthy white male property owners at the Constitutional Convention came up with the Electoral College as a way to ensure support for slavery.  This is an example of what Kellyanne Conway would call alternative facts and historians and political scientists would call bullshit.

The Electoral College was not created to support slavery.  The original Virginia Plan was to have Congress elect the President but that fell out of favor after several delegates pointed out that the process would violate the separation of powers principle.  James Madison and others wanted direct popular election, and the EC came as a compromise from those two positions.  Thus the convention created a separate body whose members were appointed by the legislatures of the various states whose sole function was to elect POTUS, with electors from each state equal to the combined number of its Senators and Representatives in Congress.

The only provision of the Constitution at all relevant here is the Three-Fifths Clause, which came out of the compromise of the same name.  In the Three-Fifths Compromise, the states with larger populations of affluent free white male property owners over the age of 21 agreed that slave states could count each of their slaves who had no voice of any kind as “three-fifths of a person” for purposes of apportionment of Representatives.

The only reason it is relevant, and even at that not directly so, is because by that clause slaves in the various slave states were counted as three-fifths of a person each for purposes of that state’s representation in the House of Representatives.  Now, for that to be relevant to the Electoral College in any way, we need to go a step further still to the fact pointed out above that a state’s electors are equal in number to its total Congressional delegation, and that is the only way in which slavery was at all relevant to the EC.

It was much like the way convicted felons and all prisoners count toward a state’s population for representation in Congress and for budget allocations but are allowed no voice of any kind.  By all rights, a state’s population count for purposes of representation, taxation, and allocation of funds should be reduced by two-fifths of the total number of prisoners, a provision which would strongly encourage sentencing and other penal reforms.

However, I don’t like that solution.  What I believe is that not only should formerly imprisoned convicted felons be allowed to vote, especially after finishing terms of parole, probation, or suspended sentence, but that all prisoners currently incarcerated should be allowed to vote, regardless of their crimes, provided they meet the qualifications for citizenship.  And also that citizens should be automatically registered at birth or naturalization.

The fact that the past two Republican presidents have been elected with a majority of the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote is a travesty and an abomination of the democratic process.  But changing the election of the President to a purely popular vote presents its own issues.

The third largest city in the United States, Chicago, has a larger population than the U.S. states and territories of New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Hawai’i, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, District of Columbia, Vermont, Wyoming, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Marianas, and U.S. Virgin Islands.

The City of Los Angeles has a larger population than all those states and territories plus the states and territory of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Iowa, Nevada, Arkansas, Puerto Rico, Mississippi, and Kansas.

The City of New York, our largest city, has more people than all the states and territories above plus the states of Washington, Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Oregon.

The metro areas of Los Angeles (13.3 million+) and of New York (18.3 million+) each alone have a greater population than each of the above states and territories plus the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. 

Combined, the L.A. and N.Y.C. metro areas have a greater population than any state except California, and if we add that of the Chicago metro area (14.5 million+), then even that is surpassed.  Those three metro areas alone have a combined population of 46.1 million+.

The myth that the Electoral College was created to support slavery became popular among Democrats after the 2000 presidential election when Dubya won by the EC count while losing the popular vote.  The myth’s second coming was in 2016.  Simply doing away with the Electoral College for direct popular election of POTUS brings with it its own set of problems.

As you can see from the map, the overwhelming majority of U.S. population lies in states along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which also happen to be areas where the Democratic Party is strongest.  The party’s elite and apparatachiks believe that abolishing the Electoral College will give them a permanent seat in the Oval Office.

That delusion arises from their hubris that tells them their majority in those two regions is permanent.  It’s similar to their push to reduce the margin of Senate approval for judges and justices from two-thirds to simple majority during Obama’s terms in office during the time they actually had a majority in the Senate.  The cute idea gave us Gorush, Kavenaugh, and Barrett.  Also, once the oceans begin to swamp the actual coasts when the seas rise due to the climate apocalypse, the population will shift radically.

Is the Electoral College anti-democratic?  Indubitably.  Should it be abolished?  Absolutely, but not until some mechanism has been devised to ensure that voters in the vast majority of territory physically do not have to see their voice reduced to the point where they are no more than two-thirds of a person in one of the states on the coast.