You Decide

… that the Electoral College creates political stability by encouraging the two-party system?

The Christian Falangalist Party of America, the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, the U.S. Marijuana Party — these are but a few of the many minority parties that today clamor at the fringes of our two-party system.

No doubt, the aforementioned parties do not have the popular traction of, say, the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. Nonetheless, supporters of the Electoral College argue, our current electoral system protects our presidential elections from being hijacked by these quixotic causes. In part, the College’s winner-take-all system protects presidential elections from these fringe interests by dictating that any progress a candidate makes on the state level is erased in the Electoral College if they do not achieve a statewide majority. Practically, this means that even if a candidate has a significant percentage of the national popular vote, their impact will not register with the Electoral College if they do not manage a simple majority in at least one state.

Meanwhile, the College’s winner-take-all system prompts presidential candidates from the two major parties to build broader coalitions as they try to attract third party interests. The net result is that the sharper edges of the third parties are rounded off as they are absorbed into the two major parties, which trend toward the moderate center. In addition, supporters argue, the College actually empowers ethnic minorities and third party interests because candidates often view these groups as key to carrying competitive states, endowing these groups with political leverage they otherwise would not have.

Supporters add that the Electoral College stabilizes our political system because these coalitions are built at the party — as opposed to the governmental — level, thus delivering a clear winner in most election years. They point out that were the country to elect presidents via a popular vote, presidential elections — and indeed, our very system of government — would be besieged by third party candidates. Although these candidates would have no realistic chance of winning an election, supporters argue, they would nonetheless wield inordinate power in their ability to splinter the vote and extract unreasonable promises from the more mainstream candidates in exchange for their support in a subsequent runoff election.

…that the Electoral College betrays the principle of majority rule, threatening every four years to override the popular vote?

Proponents of the Electoral College can talk all they want about the College’s stabilizing effects, its tendency to force politicians to cobble together broad-based coalitions and the framers’ constitutional intentions, but the fact remains: Under the Electoral College system, the candidate who wins the majority of the votes in the popular election is not necessarily the candidate who is elected to the presidency.

For opponents of the Electoral College, there is no starker example of this fact than the 2000 election, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote but won the election. In fact, these detractors argue, Bush didn’t merely lose the popular vote: He lost it by a whopping 500,000 votes — that’s the number of people in an entire mid-sized city, like Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, or Las Vegas, Nevada.

Nonetheless, in the winner-take-all calculus that is the Electoral College, it did not matter that Bush’s opponent, Al Gore, beat him by significant margins in states like California, where Gore received roughly 1.3 million more votes than candidate Bush. To the contrary: A state’s allotted electoral votes are based on the state’s population, not its voter turnout. In other words, it doesn’t matter if a candidate wins a state by 100 votes or 1  million votes — as far as the Electoral College is concerned, the state’s number of votes remains the same.

Meanwhile, candidate Bush, though he did not fare as well as Gore in the national popular vote, cobbled together a victory by winning many small states as well as a few large states that are rich in electoral votes — including Ohio, his home state of Texas and, memorably, Florida — allowing him to win a simple majority in the Electoral College.

By contrast, the winner of the popular vote managed only 266 electoral votes. And since the candidate that wins a simple majority in the Electoral College is elected president, George Bush became one of only a handful of men in U.S. history to win the presidency after losing the nation’s popular vote.

For detractors of the Electoral College, the notion that the popular will could be superseded by an electoral system that could potentially silence 49 percent of a state’s voters is not merely contrary to the spirit of majority rule, it is an anti-democratic system that defies the will of the people.