End the Electoral College

We live in an advanced, developed democracy with a 21st century economy, technology, and social structure, but an 18th century political structure. Our U.S. Constitution — — adopted as the supreme law of the land in 1789 — — was originally constructed to protect the political and economic power of the slave owners. There are three ways the Constitution did this, and we have since fixed only two of them. It is well past time to fix the third and abolish the Electoral College.

Fix #1. Before the Civil War, most — — but certainly not all — — enslaved people lived and labored on the big plantations in the Southern states, because the agrarian economy of the South was largely based on a labor-intensive production of export crops. The northern states had far fewer enslaved people because their economy was based more on shipping, trading and finance, which were concentrated in the major urban centers where there was a larger white population. The U. S. Constitution originally counted only whites as “whole persons” in apportioning each state’s allotment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. To bolster the power of the slave states, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U. S. Constitution established the 3/5 rule. This rule says that, for purposes of House apportionment, 3/5 of the total number of enslaved persons were to be added to the white population count in each state. The effect of this rule was to put a disproportionate share of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in the hands of southern slave holders.

Slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution in 1865. The 3/5 rule was abolished by the 14th Amendment in 1868. African American males were granted voting rights by the 15th Amendment in 1870.

Fix #2. The upper chamber of the national legislature, the U. S. Senate was created by Article 1, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Each state was allotted two Senators to be selected by the state’s legislature. Even though the intent of the founders in creating the Senate was to equalize the power of the small and large states, the custom soon emerged, starting in about 1815, to maintain a balance of power in the U. S. Senate between the slave states and the free states by admitting states to the union in pairs. This was the idea behind the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery north of the 36030’ parallel, except for Missouri, which was admitted to the union as a slave state; separate legislation admitted Maine to the union as a free state the same year.

This practice held until 1854, when it was undone by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, setting off a fast-moving chain of events that led directly to the Civil War. Even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, control of the U. S. Senate remained in the hands of state legislatures, most of which in the former Confederate states were still in the hands of white segregationists. It was not until 1913 that this untenable situation was remedied by adoption of the 17th Amendment, which provides for the direct election of Senators by popular vote.

Fix #3. That leaves the election of President and Vice President still done under the archaic rules set up by Article 2, Section 1 of the U. S. Constitution. Clause 2 in this section says that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in Congress ---.”

Thus, the U. S. Constitution grants authority to the individual state legislatures to decide how Electors are chosen. The main problem with this system is that it is highly undemocratic. For example, the least populous state in the union, Wyoming, has 3 Electors, each representing some 193,000 people; California, the most populous state, has 55 Electors, each representing some 718,000 people. Thus, the vote of an individual Wyoming voter carries nearly four times the weight in the Electoral College as the vote of an individual Californian.

Compounding the problem, all states except for Maine and Nebraska have a “winner-take-all” system, where the winner of the popular vote in the state garners all the state’s Electoral College votes. These circumstances lead to situations where a candidate who loses the overall popular vote in the country wins by garnering a majority of the Electoral College vote. It has happened five times in history — — in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 with the election of Donald Trump.

This system inevitably leads to great upheaval, controversy, and division, even in elections where the winner of the national popular vote also wins the Electoral College vote, as we saw in the wake of last November’s election. Trump did not succeed in overturning the Electoral College vote, but the potential is still there for some future authoritarian leader to succeed in pressuring state legislatures to disregard the popular vote.

This anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College is intolerable and ill-suited to the America of the 21st century. Let’s abolish the Electoral College.

Jeff Colvin is a research physicist and resident of Gettysburg. He is chair of Gettysburg DFA Government Accountability Task Force.