Electoral College is no way to show off democracy: Column

Once again, the Electoral College has foiled the popular will in a presidential election, although this fact seems lost in the general astonishment over Donald Trump’s victory. For the second time in 16 years and for the fourth time in U.S. history, the winner of the popular vote in a presidential election is the loser in the all-important Electoral College. There are many good reasons to get rid of the Electoral College, but the most important is that it no longer represents our most fundamental political beliefs about how a democracy should work.

Hard as it may be for us to imagine, the Founders were not fans of democracy, which they believed was rule by the mob. One of the core tenets of their republican beliefs as they drafted the U.S. Constitution was to limit the voice of the people. U.S. senators were generally chosen by their state legislatures. Only members of the House of Representatives were directly elected by the people, and even there, state laws limited who those people were. Slaves (and often free blacks) and women were not allowed to vote. Most states also imposed property restrictions, which kept lower-class white men off the voting rolls. The creation of the Electoral College was a jury-rigged system that was only adopted after the Constitutional Convention decided that having Congress select the president would violate the principle of the separation of powers.

Gradually, though, this country has come to have an entirely different view of democracy. We see it not as something to be limited and controlled but as the very foundation of a legitimate government. During the 19th century, most restrictions on voting were eliminated for white men, and the 15th Amendment, which was passed after the Civil War, theoretically gave the vote to African American men (although the South would effectively keep the vote out of their hands for almost another 100 years). Women were finally given the vote with the 19th Amendment ratified in 1920, and the direct election of senators began in 1913 when the 17th Amendment was ratified.

Keep the Electoral College: Our view

Everyone from city dog catcher to U.S. senator is now elected by popular vote — everyone, that is, except the president of the United States. The main reason that hasn’t changed is that most of the time it doesn’t make any difference. The electoral vote and the popular vote usually end up in favor of the same candidate. Whenever those two differ, though, we do not celebrate that as a sign of our forefather’s wisdom. We decry it as a miscarriage of the popular will.

Regardless of which candidate a voter preferred this year, I have yet to meet anyone who believes that the popular vote is somehow less legitimate than the Electoral College (and that is leaving aside the debacle in 2000 when election officials were left to wring their hands over hanging chads and other lacunae of balloting before the Supreme Court, the branch most insulated from the popular will, effectively decided the election). Whenever the popular vote and the Electoral College fall different ways, the legitimacy of the eventual winner is undermined, and understandable doubts are raised about the electoral system.

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If we had three or four of these botched elections in a row, we might muster the political will to change the system, but that is unlikely to happen. Instead, we continue to roll the electoral dice every four years. After all, we tell ourselves, these mishaps rarely occur. So we trundle along from election to election, and when the inevitable happens again, there is a great deal of hand-wringing for a few months. Then we forget and move on.

But perhaps the time has come to do the right thing before the will of the people is thwarted again. If we really want to hold ourselves up as a democratic exemplar for the rest of the world, we should start acting like one, especially when it comes to the highest office in the land.

Andrew Trees is the Montesquieu Forum Post-Doctoral Fellow at Roosevelt University and author ofThe Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character .

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