by Jake Doherty Munro
The 2016 Presidential election ended last month and has now given way to a heated debate about the electoral college. This is largely due to the fact that, as has happened before, the winner of the election was the loser of the popular vote. This is the fourth time it has happened, and each time has caused a comparable amount of outcry – generally by whichever side lost. As such, a substantial number of Democrats are now calling for the abolition of the electoral college for reasons ranging from the fact that they believe it to be undemocratic, to their belief that the electoral college causes candidates to focus too heavily on so-called “swing states.” These reasons are, however, misguided, and while the electoral college has its flaws, the path to improving our elections lies not in repealing it, but reforming it.
The most common grievance levied against the electoral college is that is it undemocratic and makes individual votes irrelevant. While there is a fairly strong argument to back this claim, there is also a simple fact that refutes that argument, and that is that America simply is not a democracy. When America was founded, it was not only done so upon the ideal of being a virtuous republic, but also on the founders’ genuine fear of democracy (which they referred to as “mob rule”), and it was these values that the electoral college grew out of. So, yes: the electoral college is undemocratic. However, so is America.
Another complaint frequently voiced about the electoral college is that it causes candidates to focus too heavily on “swing states,” who do not consistently vote for one party or another, and to ignore more solidly liberal or conservative states, whose votes candidates’ campaigns consider to be locked up one way or another.
This is true, and it happens in every campaign, but it is not necessarily a bad thing: in fact, it often serves to give smaller states a voice, which could otherwise be overpowered by states with a larger population should the President be decided by popular vote. For example, New Hampshire lays claim to only four electoral college votes, yet in each presidential election, it has been one of the most contested and campaigned-in states, in both primary and general elections. This seems strange, as those four votes appear minuscule when compared to the fifty-five votes of California, thirty-eight votes of Texas, and twenty-nine votes of New York, but all of those states are solidly Republican or solidly Democratic, and therefore allow candidates to pay attention to states such as New Hampshire that would be ignored should our president be decided exclusively by popular vote.
None of this is to say, however, that the electoral college is perfect because it isn’t. The fact that our 45th president will have lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes is unacceptable: the majority of voting Americans did not want or select him. However, while the electoral college does have flaws, and this is the most egregious of them, it remains more viable to rid the system of those flaws through reform rather than abolition, which is in many ways too extreme a response.
This reform could come in several different forms: the seemingly simplest solution would be to depart from the winner-take-all method of allocating electoral votes in each state, which effectively silences the minority in that state who did not vote for the winning candidate, and instead award them to each candidate proportionally. This would ensure that all voices in each state are heard, while also allowing candidates to focus on smaller swing states, where even more votes could be earned, ultimately resulting in elections and elected officials more representative of all Americans.