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The way Americans choose their president is wonky at best and antidemocratic at worst.
While the Electoral College has its defenders, there’s a much deeper bench of people who don’t understand exactly why it is that 538 electors, not 330 million-plus American voters, actually pick the president.
The way it functions today — with electors acting as proxies for voters — is nothing like what the founders who created the Electoral College had in mind. They wanted electors to actually debate and consider multiple options.
That’s not a new way of thinking, either. Alexander Hamilton — who wrote the ultimate defense of the Electoral College when he praised it as a perfect system in Federalist No. 68 — was part of a plot to exploit it in the 1800 presidential election, and in 1802, he was writing a draft of a constitutional amendment to change it.
In the intervening centuries, both chambers of Congress have voted to change the Electoral College — most recently in 1969 — but these efforts all ultimately failed. If, as is possible, one candidate gets more votes in November and the other candidate gets the White House, expect a new round of bellyaching about this anachronism that somehow lives on.
A new book dissects the history of the Electoral College. Its author, Carolyn Dupont, a history professor at Eastern Kentucky University who describes herself as a moderate Democrat, comes down in favor of adopting a national popular vote model. The book is called, “Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College and Why It Matters Today.”
I talked to Dupont about the Electoral College. Our phone conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
The founders would not recognize today’s Electoral College
WOLF: The first part of the book is about how the Electoral College is essentially nothing like what the founders envisioned. What about today’s system do you think they would dislike?
DUPONT: Oh my goodness. Well, I think that they would understand, first off, that the electors no longer make choices. This is kind of a subtle change, but it’s far-reaching in its implications, because the electors now actually just serve no purpose.
What they do actually do is to provide openings for fraud, because they’re human beings. So I think (the founders) would be disturbed about that.
And I should also point out with respect to that — they don’t make a choice — they’re actually not allowed to make a choice, and that’s because state statutes require them to honor the wishes of the voters in their state. They have to vote for the slate of candidates that the party that nominated them has put up, and that’s been upheld by the Supreme Court.
If you look at Federalist 68, when Hamilton is describing what he believes they created in the Electoral College, he talks about the electors being people of wisdom and discernment and experience, and people who are making a choice. Now that wisdom and discernment is forbidden. I think we have a problem with human electors who are vulnerable to corruption.
In early presidential elections, many states did not let individual people vote
WOLF: One of the things that blew me away reading the first few chapters of this is that people weren’t voting for president in much of the country for much of US history.
DUPONT: No South Carolinian ever cast a vote for president until after the Civil War, and no New Yorker did until 1828. The states, the legislatures could make that choice, and the more competitive an election got, the more likely they were to take the choice away from the people and take it to themselves.
The classic example is the election of 1800, when 10 out of the 16 states, the state legislatures chose the electors.
Many states did not award all of their votes to the same candidate. That’s not necessarily better
WOLF: The other thing I was really interested in is this fight over “district” versus “winner-take-all” voting. Some states used to use a district method and divide up their electoral votes. Except for Maine and Nebraska, today every state is winner-take-all. And an effort to end the district method in Nebraska failed this year. Would it be better now if we were in a district system?
DUPONT: Yes and no. What I think that the argument between a district versus winner-take-all really underscores is the fact that this is an algorithm. Changing from a state or winner-take-all to a district system would just move where the parentheses go, and it would import the problem of gerrymandering into the presidential election. How those district lines were drawn would become really, really important.
(Thomas) Jefferson and (James) Madison — and actually a lot of people who wanted to reform the Electoral College in the early days — did want the district system, and Madison said that that was what the framers had mostly in mind when they designed it.
But I really think the reason that they argue for the district system, as opposed to abolishing the Electoral College outright in those years, is the three-fifths bump that the slave states got.
(Note: The Constitution, as originally written, counted the enslaved as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning House seats and taxation.)
Of course, Jefferson and Madison’s party was absolutely dependent on that three-fifths bump, because the strength of their party was in the South, in the slave-holding states. So I don’t think it would be better. If we were going to do something about the Electoral College, why not just go for broke and get a system where every vote is equal, where we vote directly for our chief executive?
The founders’ main reason for opposing the national popular vote has literally disappeared
WOLF: There are people trying to kind of end-run around the Constitution with things like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which wouldn’t require changing the Constitution but would impose a popular-vote model of sorts. Unlike the Electoral College, a national popular vote is something that the founders specifically rejected.
DUPONT: If you want to be technical, yes, they did consider it twice and vote against it twice. But what I want to say to qualify that is that they didn’t all reject it.
For example, James Madison, who’s really kind of leading this discussion throughout the (Constitutional) Convention, he advocates for it. He says twice that he thinks that’s the best choice.
Gouverneur Morris — and I always like to remind people that’s not a misspelling of Governor; it’s Gouverneur. Gouverneur Morris, who I think most Americans don’t really know much about … wrote the final draft, the language of the Constitution, and he’s really one of the key delegates there in Philadelphia. He advocated quite eloquently for a national popular vote. I think that that gets left out of the conversation.
There were several small state delegates that wanted a national popular vote. But in addition to that, I think the reasons why they rejected it are important.
Those who rejected it just didn’t think that ordinary people had access to the information. The belief was that the way you would know the character of an individual is if you had served with them in the legislature or in your state legislature. And there were very few Americans at the time who had national reputations. George Washington and maybe Benjamin Franklin, but really no one beyond that.
So they think that the choice needs to be in the hands of people who would know — and I would also note that eight of the 13 original state legislatures chose their governors this way, and the other five, it was kind of a combination of methods.
So it’s, you know, it’s not as if the idea of directly electing the chief executive has got much currency at the time.
We have maybe the opposite problem now. We have too much information about national characters. So I think the reason that some of them didn’t like it, that reason has disappeared.
Side note: One forgotten founder was also a libertine
WOLF: Just to go back to Gouverneur Morris –—you paint an interesting picture of him. I wanted to read more about him after reading your book. What I came away with is that he’s this peg-legged ladies’ man.
DUPONT: Yeah, he just fascinates me. There are two good biographies of him. There’s also a very poor one.
But if you’re interested, there’s also an article — you might not want to put this in your article — but it’s in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, about his sexual escapades when he is the US envoy to Paris, to France. It’s just quite entertaining to check that out.
(Note: Morris was enmeshed with European libertines. It is, indeed, entertaining to check out.)
There have been many efforts to end the Electoral College
WOLF: You write about various efforts to end or reform the Electoral College, and there are more than I think people realize. Which one would you say got closest? I know the most recent would be the overwhelming vote in the House in 1969 to ditch the Electoral College in favor of an amendment to switch to a national popular vote. But you write about efforts that came close at the outset of the country.
DUPONT: What I would note about the 1969 amendment — and that’s the only one that would have abolished the Electoral College, at least the only one that passed either (chamber of Congress), and it passed the House with 83% of the vote.
I find that astounding. That there was that much agreement in the House and it … I don’t know what its fate would have been in the Senate, but it never got to a vote in the Senate because Strom Thurmond and two other Southern segregationists filibustered it.
The November election could rekindle this debate if Trump or Harris gets more votes and loses the White House
WOLF: Depending on what happens in November, it could be the third time in 25 years that more people vote for the losing candidate.
DUPONT: That’s right, and that’s the way to say it too, because what this system does is allow the candidate who lost confidence of the American people to occupy the White House. And that seems very problematic to me.
WOLF: If they called a constitutional convention of one and gave you a magic wand, what would you do?
DUPONT: Well, I would phone a friend. No, to me, what we need is a national popular vote where every vote is equal. That’s really the problem with the Electoral College — it distorts our votes so that some weigh more than others. It’s institutionalized political inequality.
Now, if I had the magic wand, I would probably want to, at the same time, reform the primary system. There was a proposal during Reconstruction that I thought made so much sense.
One of the radical Republicans from Ohio, James Ashley — he wanted to have a national primary in April. This would be an open primary, and it would winnow the field of candidates. And then you would have a runoff or a general election in November. To me, that seems something on that order, because our primary system is also a problem. And I think while we’re trying to fix one, we ought to try to fix the other.
There are millions of Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states
WOLF: The obvious modern objection to a national popular vote is that campaigns would essentially get everybody to vote in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas and New York, and everybody else would be ignored.
DUPONT: I hear this all the time, and that’s actually one of the misconceptions that I wanted to write the book to address. Because not everybody in California votes the same, or even in LA.
So, 25% of Angelinos voted for Donald Trump, and in California, Donald Trump got more votes from California than any other state. He got 6 million votes there (in 2020). So this idea that one place, or even one or two places, is going to overpower the vote of the whole country, it really won’t happen, because those places are actually very diverse.
I think of Houston, which is the nation’s fourth-largest city. It’s almost 50-50 red and blue. So we’ve got these myths out there that there’s this big blue juggernaut on the coast. But it’s kind of the logic of the Electoral College that is leading us to think that.
New York City is another example here. So it’s true that Manhattan is very, very blue, but Staten Island is red. Much of Long Island is red. I think the idea that some people deserve more weight because of where they live is an absurdity.
What about small states?
WOLF: To your point, it is possible that turnout is being depressed for Republicans in a blue state like California, because why bother? Similarly, more people will vote for Kamala Harris in Texas than in New York, presumably, by the same logic. How would you make the argument to Delaware or Wyoming, or Alaska, places that have three electoral votes but one congressman, maybe a million or fewer voters? Why should they support giving up some of their influence?
DUPONT: It’s not really clear that the Electoral College advantages the small states. Because, think about it, if you live in Wyoming, you vote for three electors. Now, you think you vote for a presidential candidate, but you are actually voting for three electors. And every Wyomingan votes for three electors, no matter how many vote. So 10 of them could vote, or half a million can vote, but they’re each voting for three electors.
But a person in California votes for 54 electors, and that’s regardless of turnout as well. And so you can see that you have much less weight if you are from Wyoming or Delaware.
And then the other thing I would say: Historically, proposals to end the Electoral College have come from representatives of the small states. Proposals for a national popular vote came from delegates from the small states at the Constitutional Convention. So it’s kind of a myth that the small states are not going to accept this.