Leaders of the Continental Congress – John Adams, Morris, Hamilton, Jefferson (Artist A. Tholey. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.)
This shouldn’t make you feel better, California, but here it is: Your votes are not the most undervalued in the entire United States!
Turns out votes in Florida and Texas are worth even less than ours — though not by much.
Every presidential election brings us face to face with the decidedly un-democratic nature of how we choose the most powerful person on the planet: It’s got nothing to do with who wins the popular vote. One man, one vote was not part of the plan.
Instead, we have this weird thing called the Electoral College. Each state gets a mess of votes that are not closely tied to population. The result is that the tiniest states have electoral powers more than three times greater than California’s, giving them disproportionate sway over who becomes leader of the Free World.
The ballot drop box at the Orange Public Library in March (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)
To wit: Texas has one electoral vote for every 762,583 residents; Florida has one for every 753,691 residents; and California has one for every 721,578 residents.
At the other end of the spectrum, Washington D.C. has one electoral vote for every 223,934 residents; Vermont has one for every 215,821 residents; and Wyoming has one for every 194,686 residents.
Wyoming, people! Packing the most powerful electoral punch in the nation?!
Warped representation? There’s one electoral vote for every 721,578 California residents. There’s one electoral vote for every 194,686 Wyoming residents. That’s inherently undemocratic, may note. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 270toWin.com)
“The Electoral College makes no sense as a way of choosing a president,” wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Berkeley Law School dean and the inaugural dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, in an essay for the Sacramento Bee.
“It was not a problem in the 20th century, as it never was the case that the winner of the popular vote lost the Electoral College. But population shifts and partisan realignment have caused the loser in the popular vote to become president not once but twice this century, in 2000 and 2016. And it almost happened in 2004 and 2020.
The foundation of American government by artist Henry Hintermeister. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)
“Having the loser of the popular vote become president cannot be reconciled with the most basic notions of democracy.”
Because of this system, states with just a wee 22% of the population could conceivably choose the president, Chemerinsky notes in his chilling new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
Our nearly 250-year-old founding document, he concludes, can no longer hold.
Whose idea was this, anyway?
There were fiercely competing visions when the Founders gathered at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to (secretly) rewrite their (weak) first attempt at a Constitution (the Articles of Confederation), scholars say.
Statue of George Washington in the Capitol (AP / J. Scott Applewhite)
Some argued passionately that Congress should pick the president. Others said it should be the job of state legislators. And still others insisted that voters do the deed (though only White male landowners could vote at the time).
It’s important to understand that there were no political parties back then. The Founders envisioned gobs of presidential contenders competing from far and wide. How could regular folks in rural backwaters possibly be expected to study up on all of them and make informed choices?
The Electoral College was a compromise that no one was particularly excited about, but it was hot that summer and folks wanted to get the heck out of Philadelphia. Electing the president would be the job of intermediaries, they decided — independent electors appointed by the states to choose wisely.
Every four years, a temporary group of electors — equal to the total number of a state’s representatives in Congress — would do the job.
Michigan Electoral College elector Bobbie Walton signs her ballot for President of the United States at the state Capitol in 2020. (Photo by Carlos Osorio-Pool/Getty Images)
The next fight was figuring out how many electors each state would have. Should enslaved people count when doling out electors (and House seats)? Slave-holding states insisted they must, or they wouldn’t approve the new constitution. So the Founders settled on a (pernicious) “three-fifths compromise,” where three-fifths of the enslaved Black people would count toward allocating electors (as well as seats in the House of Representatives).
“(T)he main motivation for adoption of the electoral college was the need to remove selection from the legislature and at the same time to ensure that the less populous and slave-holding states could preserve (their) advantage,” wrote James P. Pfiffner and Jason Hartke of George Mason University in “The Electoral College and the Framers’ Distrust of Democracy.”
“(T)he Framers were not designing a democracy; they were designing a democratic republic with the branches resting on different sources of legitimacy.”
Others have put it this way: The Electoral College was meant to serve as a check on the will of the unwashed, uninformed masses.
There’d be two U.S. senators for each state, regardless of size. Representatives in the House based on population (more or less). And electors equal to the sum of them both. No state would have fewer than three electors, no matter how tiny.
The result: Warped representation, bestowing outsized power on less populous states (i.e., the minority).
A Pennsylvania elector places her signed ballot into a ballot box at the state Capitol in 2016. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)
A similar system for electing Georgia’s governor was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 for violating “the fundamental principle of ‘one person, one vote,’” noted LaGrange College political scientist John Tures.
Losers win
Mathematically speaking, this system is built to almost ensure narrow victories, wrote mathematician Steven Heilman of USC. It essentially divides one big election into 51 smaller ones (one for each state, plus the District of Columbia), and that can be up to four times more vulnerable to manipulation than a national popular vote, he wrote.
The Electoral College has run afoul of the will of the people five times.
Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams by 7.8% in the popular vote in 1824, but lost the presidency.
Samuel J. Tilden beat Rutherford B. Hayes by 3% in the popular vote in 1876, but lost the presidency.
Grover Cleveland beat Benjamin Harrison by 0.8% in the popular vote in 1888, but lost the presidency.
Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 0.5% in the popular vote in 2000, but lost the presidency.
Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 2.1% in the popular vote in 2016, but lost the presidency.
California, left, has more people than the 21 states, right, combined. But it has dramatically fewer Electoral College votes. (Courtesy Fred Smoller)
California has slightly more people than the combined population of 21 other states, Chapman University associate political science professor Fred Smoller noted. But while California has 54 Electoral College votes, those 21 states have a combined 92.
“This inequality is undemocratic, which is bad enough, but it also leads to ‘inverted elections’ where the winner of the popular vote loses the election if they don’t win the Electoral College,” Smoller said. “Would the public tolerate a sporting event in which the team that gets the most points loses the game?”
About 7 in 10 Californians — 69% — would support changing to a system where the president is elected by direct popular vote instead of the Electoral College, a new survey from the Public Policy Institute of California found. Only 28% of adults were opposed.
There have been attempts to change things, but they didn’t get far. Who gives up power willingly, except for maybe George Washington?
But there are other ways to make the system fairer, scholars say. The Constitution is silent about precisely how states divvy up their electoral votes; most have adopted a winner-takes-all system, which can skew Electoral College results wildly away from the popular vote.
But Maine and Nebraska do it differently. They give two electoral votes to whoever won the popular vote — plus one electoral vote for each congressional district, going to the popular vote winner in those districts.
“I Love the Electoral College” souvenirs at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland in 2020. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
One way forward might be to assign electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in each state.
“At present it seems like a pipe dream to get rid of the Electoral College, but at least some state and local change could slowly shift voter perception toward thinking about electoral reform,” said mathematician Heilman. “Continue converting state and local elections to ranked-choice voting, to show that people can understand these other voting methods.”
Abolishing the Electoral College might require nothing short of divine intervention. It would require a constitutional amendment approved by two-thirds of both the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the states.
“Good luck!” said Chapman’s Smoller.
But as we teeter on the edge of another razor-close election, the violence of Jan. 6 still hauntingly fresh, Chemerinsky suggests it’s essentially change — or our democracy will splinter to pieces.
“The Electoral College was a mistake from the beginning,” he writes in “No Democracy Lasts Forever,” “because it was based on distrust of the people and the desire to protect the political power of states with slavery. … The simple, sad reality is that there is no easy fix.”
The time has come, he argues, to start thinking about scrapping the old Constitution entirely — and creating a new one tailored to our times.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law(Courtesy of Concerned Citizens of Laguna Woods)
“Those who grew up in the United States have been instilled with reverence for the Constitution ever since primary school,” he writes. “When they speak about James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, they do so with such awe that they almost seem to believe that the framers were divinely inspired ….”
But those were men, not gods. The document they produced worked for more than 200 years. As America grows and changes, however, people are beginning to understand that its flaws endanger democracy itself — and facilitate minority rule, he argues.
“We need to stop venerating a document written in 1787 for an agrarian slave society,” Chemerinsky writes, “and imagine what a constitution for the 21st century should look like.”
It would not have an Electoral College.
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