I have had a fascination with the Electoral College. When foreign countries that are also democracies try to figure out our system for electing a president, people in those nations scratch their heads trying to figure our how we elect our president.
if you study history, the reason the Electoral College exists is due to 2 major issues – states’ rights in the Constitutional Convention and slavery.
When the convention was held in Philadelphia to write the constitution, people related more to their state of residence and less to being a citizen of the United States. The Electoral College preserves the rights of states and empowers smaller states, since every state has 2 senators. The number of senators and members of the House determine the number of electoral votes given to that state.
Slavery was an issue at the convention because there was a major dispute about slaves – are they counted in determining the number of electoral votes for a state? The convention compromised with the “three-fifths compromise” which treated each slave as three-fifths of a person, even though slaves could not vote and had few, if any, rights at that time.
Once the Civil War was over, the three-fifths compromise no longer existed and former slaves were given rights of citizenship under the Constitution. The Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws of the south limited those rights until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed into law..
The Electoral College has come under attack in recent decades as an indirect way to elect a president and has created situations where the candidate with the most votes did not win a majority of the electoral votes. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton are two examples in recent history of presidential candidates winning the popular vote and losing in the Electoral College,
The argument often heard for preserving the Electoral College is that the largest population centers would receive all the candidates’ attention and the rest of the country would be left out. I always felt this was a persuasive argument.
However, I have changed my mind. Just look at the current situation. Both presidential campaigns are concentrating their efforts on 7 swing states. That means 43 of our 50 states are virtually ignored by the candidates.
This is not a strategy to zero-in on the most populous states or areas. Instead, the campaigns are spending time and resources on the 7 states where the polls show the election outcome is close.
Is the Electoral College still the best way to elect a president? That’s a questions each of us must answer to ourselves.
