It is time to do away with the Electoral College.
Our obsolete, undemocratic way of choosing the President made the events of January 6, 2021 possible. The bizarre nature of the Electoral College encouraged the President and his allies to try to manipulate the system to overturn a free and fair election in which Donald Trump lost by one of the biggest popular vote margins in history.
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #68 explains why the Framers created the electoral college. Hamilton wrote that the electoral college would be “small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations” in selecting the most qualified person to be President.
The Framers wanted to “to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.” Creating “an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements.” Moreover, they dictated that the electors would meet in their respective states because “this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments” from excited partisans.
The Electoral College, according to Hamilton, deliberately placed “every practicable obstacle” to “cabal, intrigue, and corruption.”
The Framers could not have been more wrong. The electoral college allowed Donald Trump and his allies to advance absurd legal theories about the election. These ideas – that the election was stolen, that state legislatures could override the vote of the people, and that the Vice President could decide which electoral votes to count - allowed Trump to rile up the crowd on January 6 and caused the majority of Republicans in the House to vote against certifying President Biden’s election.
These ideas are laughable and profoundly undemocratic. If the Vice President could decide which votes to count, then we would have a dictatorship, not a democratic republic. And if members of Congress could decide that the states did not follow their own laws, we would no longer have a federal republic where states are primarily responsible for their elections. Indeed, the need for elections would vanish. Why bother when either Congress, or state legislatures, or the Vice President could decide who gets to be President?
The Electoral College has failed to serve its purposes. It no longer filters the choice of a President through a small body of wise, disinterested persons. By the 1830’s all of the states gave their electors to the winner of the popular vote. It did not stem the “extraordinary or violent movements” of January 6. The bi-partisan January 6 commission reveals daily the “cabal, intrigue, and corruption” Trump and his allies engaged in. The attack on the Capitol brought the “tumult and disorder” and the “heat and ferments” the framers feared.
But most egregious of all, the Framers promised us that the electoral college would provide a “moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications…. there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” Instead, it gave us the 2016 election of Donald Trump, a corrupt, vulgar authoritarian, a man manifestly unfit for public office.
Let’s get rid of the electoral college and democratize Presidential elections. Over time, we have replaced some of the constitution’s original undemocratic features with more modern, democratic ones. Thus, the 17th amendment mandates the direct election of Senators, the 22nd Amendment term limited the President, the 14th, 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments enlarged the franchise, and the 24th outlawed poll taxes.
If January 6th taught us anything, it is that unscrupulous actors will try to manipulate undemocratic structures. The electoral college is obsolete, useless, and dangerous. It’s time to remove this constitutional appendix.
