About the electoral college.
The presidency has traded back and forth about evenly between the two major parties for the last couple decades, while democratic presidential candidates have won the popular vote six out of the last seven elections. That prompts some to wonder why we don’t just elect our presidents by popular vote. Why is there such a thing as the electoral college instead of a direct vote? Why this extra step of breaking the country into electoral districts, then determining who won or lost in each district, then adding them all up to determine who won each state, then adding up the states?
It all started with the Constitutional Convention. The southern states didn’t like the direct approach because their states had smaller populations of voters compared to the northern states and they would be overwhelmed. They had a lot of people in the South, but not all of them were permitted to vote. The framers declared that for presidential elections, there should be electors, in proportion to each state’s representation in Congress. That was more amenable to the southern states, because for congressional purposes, they were allowed to count 3 out of every 5 slaves to calculate their representation in the House of Representatives, bolstering their voting power not only in congress, but for presidential elections as well. I read one other argument in favor of the electoral college at the time: “… as a stopgap to potentially reverse the vote if the people elected a criminal, traitor, or similar kind of heinous person.”
The time of slavery has passed, so no more necessity to massage the count for the South’s representation in Congress, and the electors are declared for candidates and never substitute their own judgment now, so maybe the electoral system is obsolete as well.
A criticism of the electoral college is that candidates for the presidency can pretty much ignore the interests of states that are strongly in their camp and only have to campaign in the swing states, and the rest of the country doesn’t hear much from them. That may be true, but the swing states change a little each election cycle, so that broadens the population to presidential exposure as the process evolves. In these days of national media though, we may all get plenty of exposure to presidential politics even if we’re not in a swing state.
A criticism of a direct national popular vote is that candidates for the presidency would only focus their campaigning on large population centers and ignore the interests of the more sparsely populated rural and agricultural areas. That could be a problem if every presidential election ended up dominated by the big cities.
So we’re left with this political oddity of an electoral system. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Heck if I know.
Whatever, we voted today.
