Abolish the Electoral College

Joshua Marshall reveals that he is coming to believe that the Electoral College should be abolished.  Welcome to the fold, Joshua!

My problem with it isn't that it's undemocratic, at least not in the sense that the winner of the popular vote can lose the election. That's a very big problem, certainly; but I think it will continue to be a relatively rare occurrence. The problem is that it makes the votes of too many Americans into an irrelevancy or a mere exercise in symbolism.

I feel so strongly about this myself, that I was compelled to write to him.  Here is what I wrote:

Dear Joshua,

I am glad to see you advocating for the abolition of the Electoral College.  I find it a travesty of democracy that the votes of those in swing states are magnified totally out of proportion to the votes of those in "safe" states. Why should moving a mile across the border from western Texas into eastern New Mexico magnify your vote's importance so much?  Similarly, why should moving a mile across the Ohio River from Kentucky into Ohio do the same?

The only states favored by the EC are the few swing states.  The other 40 or more states are completely left out in the cold.  That should be plenty of states to pass a constitutional amendment abolishing the EC, if we can get rid of the misconception that "small states" are the ones favored by the EC. 

In recent history, we have had one occasion where the loser actually won the election (2000), but we have had several close calls, of which last week's election is the most recent.  The other recent close calls are 1960, 1968, and 1976.  That's 5 elections out of the last 12!

This should be a priority.  But perhaps even more dangerous to our current democracy is the practice of partisan gerrymandering.  Voters no longer choose their legislators; instead, legislators choose their voters.  This needs to be fixed as soon as we possibly can.

Thanks for bringing attention to these issues.

Comments

[Andrew Kohtz]

I wrote a post in my blog, Civil Banter, about the Electoral College just a few days ago. Personally, I disagree with the notion that it should be abolished.

[Peter]

Andrew, Thanks for directing me to your blog. Perusing your site, it is obvious that our political views are extremely different. I would hope we could agree on this subject, however. It should be a non-partisan argument, and the last two Presidential elections illustrate that well, I think.

This year, if John Kerry had won an extra 150,000 votes in Ohio, he would have been elected President, despite losing the popular vote by over three million votes. Would you still like the Electoral College if this had happened? This close call, I would hope, would convince Bush supporters, who were thankful for the Electoral College in 2000, that it is a double-edge sword.

Whatever ugly compromises were made in the late 1700s are not necessary any more. Until the early twentieth century, the Constitution dictated that Senators be chosen, not by the people, but by state legislators. This was properly changed by Constitutional amendment, and I don't see any movement to change it back just because it was the way the original framers intended Senators to be chosen.

Similarly, I think the Electoral College should be done away with. Why should voters in Florida (in 2000) and Ohio (in 2004) have the only relevant votes for President?

[Gary Michael Coutin]

The Framers of the Constitution claimed that they followed the political philosophy of David Hume to “…make politics a science.” [2] But the Electoral College established in Article II of the Constitution of 1787 abandoned the true and eternal natural law of logic and mathematics for a false and temporal fuzzy math of political arithmetic.[5] As The Federalist Papers, the Constitution of 1787 operates upon the principle that “…in political arithmetic, two and two do not always make four.” [6]

[james]

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