As the Electoral College Goes, So Goes the Constitution
The 2000 Presidential Election was certainly one for the books. Most of them, alas, will probably be written by professors who believe that the will of the people was thwarted, if not by the Supreme Court, then by an outmoded and undemocratic method of presidential election...
More along the lines will be forthcoming in the months ahead, as Democratic propagandists construct a mythology of the “stolen” election in preparation for the 2002 and 2004 campaigns. In due course, the Constitution’s provisions for electing presidents will be targeted as an obstacle to the effectuation of popular will. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the late would-be reformer of the nation’s health-care system, has already announced plans to abolish the Electoral College....
Strictly speaking, voters choose only a slate of electors pledged to one of the nominees, but as a practical matter the office of elector might as well not exist. With but a handful of exceptions, electors have faithfully cast their ballots for the popular-vote winner. The “faithless elector” problem (which is easily enough cured in any event) diverts attention from the larger agenda, which is to remove the states from presidential elections. That step would alter our political customs and constitutional order as nothing before....
Our major political parties came into being, and exist today, for the primary purpose of capturing the presidency. Their structure follows the structure of the Constitution because the Constitution apportions electoral votes to the states and requires a majority of electoral votes to win. Each state has a minimum of three electoral votes, with the larger states having more in proportion to the number of seats to which they are entitled in the House of Representatives. The Electoral College, in short, is organized on precisely the same principle as the United States Congress, and for precisely the same reason. Neither institution recognizes population alone as the exclusive measuring rod for democratic legitimacy....
Once the states are removed from the presidential election system, these important and celebrated features of political locale will lose much of their significance....
As John F. Kennedy said in defending the Electoral College in the 1950s, changing the mode of presidential election affects not only presidential candidates, but the whole solar system of our constitutional and political arrangements—in ways that are difficult to predict but unlikely to be beneficial....
The Framers understood the limits of simple-minded majoritarianism of the sort embraced by direct election. If elections were simply a matter of counting heads and stopping when you got to 50% plus one, we could dispense with all the checks and balances of the Constitution, including federalism, bicameralism, the separation of powers, and, yes, the Electoral College. The point of these time-honored devices, which are all part of an integral whole, is not to circumvent popular sentiment, but to shape and channel it in ways that support the principal end for which popular government is constituted: to secure the equal rights of all. Majority rule can become majority tyranny, as the wisest thinkers on politics have always known. The trick in establishing popular government is to empower the majority without endangering the rights of minorities....
Related
The Importance of the Electoral College, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, May 23, 2019.