A recent post on a local social media site drew on an analogy to the World Series to defend the Electoral College. The poster referred to a decades-old article recently reprinted in Discover magazine that discusses the theories of Alan Natapoff, a physicist, who favored voting by districts instead of in one mass. Natapoff, thus, seemed to be defending the Electoral College over a nationwide popular vote, as the poster clearly did.
The baseball analogy refers to the 1960 World Series where the New York Yankees won three blowouts but lost four close games to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Yankees scored more runs, but the Pirates won the series. The poster and the article (https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-the-archive-math-against-tyranny) both noted, “Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states.” That was fair, they maintain. “A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available–bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field–and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.” Natapoff decided that “nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.”
There is much wrong with this reasoning. If the 60s Yankees had won the fourth game in another blowout (they scored nine runs in the final game), they would have been recognized as champs without having won a close game. Moreover, winning single games or their equivalents is not always the rule in sports. Cricket, e.g., has multi-day contests. The winner is not decided by who “won” each day, but by the total score. Had it been set up this way, baseball could be a contest decided inning by inning, or football quarter by quarter, but those are not the rules of the game. The rules are not inherent in the way the game is played and certainly not divinely inspired. They are man-made and can be changed. At one time the team that had the most wins after 154 games was in the World Series. The end. That is no longer true. The season is now longer and there are multiple playoff rounds that allow, many believe, for the possibility that a lesser team can become champions.
The poster quoting Natapoff asserts that the “popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states.” That is not a requirement in all our elections. E.g., we use the total vote to pick our governors and don’t require the victor to have won a majority of counties or parishes. It is only because of the Electoral College that winning a state is required in our presidential elections. (I have no idea what is meant when the poster says, “A presidential candidate worthy of office should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.” I don’t know of a successful candidate who runs on only one issue, and when I look at the maps that will be produced of red and blue states because of our Electoral College, I see something like isolated blocs of voters. We would not have that with a nationwide vote.)
I seldom respond to any posts except occasionally to point out easily checkable misinformation. (For example, I might respond: Fact-checking sites have made it clear that FEMA workers are not eating the cats and dogs of isolated North Carolina hill folk.) I did, however, reply to this post by saying, “It would be interesting to see the reaction if a conservative won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. We are unlikely to find out. A conservative winning the popular vote???” Almost immediately someone who had already declared the post “great” said, “I couldn’t give a damn what the popular vote says as long as Trump is elected.”
This comment, of course, typifies why discussions of the way we select our president are fruitless. Alan Natapoff may have been sincerely exploring the best way to hold our elections, but most of the rest of us only want reasons for a system that will select our preferred candidate. Electoral College discussions these days are partisan ones with conservatives, like the poster, defending the Electoral College. They want the status quo because they believe it favors Republicans while reformers believe Democrats would benefit from a national popular vote. Recent history fuels these positions. Twice in the last generation we have inaugurated presidents who did not get the largest popular vote, and both were Republicans.
We did not always have this particular partisan divide. In the summer of 1968, polls indicated that 66 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats believed that the Electoral College should be replaced with a national popular vote. After the election where the popular vote was close, but the Electoral College was not, 80 percent of Americans supported changing the electoral system. In 1969, the House passed by a wide majority (339 to 70) a constitutional amendment to select the president by popular vote. The proposal, however, opposed strongly by Senators from small states, could not get the necessary two-thirds vote in the upper house.
If such an amendment could not make it through the Senate when the populace overwhelmingly favored it, a similar amendment has no chance today. Instead, those who wish to retain or change the Electoral College search for plausible reasons for their positions. The standpatters often refer to the goals of the founding generations, which, I am positive, did not use Mickey Mantle sports analogies. Many defenders contend that the point to the Electoral College was to preserve the powers of the small states in the presidential selection. Reading such comments, I pulled out The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Max Farrand, and The Federalist Papers to see what these sources said about the discussion over the methods of choosing the president.
The issue was debated again and again in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The delegates would agree to a method, but potential flaws in that method would circulate. A different scheme would be proposed and problems with the new proposal would be pointed out. This merry-go-round continued until near the end of the convention when the delegates finally settled on the Electoral College as it appears in the original Constitution.
The convention first voted to have Congress choose the President, but criticisms soon emerged. In James Madison’s words: “If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction: it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals; real merit will rarely be the title to the appointment.” Madison and others maintained that an Electoral College, however selected, would obviate some of the concerns of a congressional selection. The electors would be chosen for only one purpose and would gather just once. In the adopted version they would not meet together in one place but in the separate states so that there would be little opportunity for cabals, intrigues, and foreign influence. The congressional selection of the president, they said, would also upset a basic goal of the Constitution — the separation of powers — since the President would be beholden to Congress for his selection.
Many other methods of choosing the president were proposed and rejected: The state governors should select the President; electors selected by Congress should make the choice; electors drawn by lot from Congress should choose the President. Madison did state that the “fittest” way to select the President was to have a direct election, but he then noted two problems: “The first arose from the disposition of the people to prefer a Citizen of their own State, and the disadvantage this would throw on the smaller States.” Madison did not find this problem insurmountable and said “that some expedient might be hit upon that would obviate it.” The next speaker, however, differed with Madison’s optimism by saying, “The objection drawn from the different size of the States, is unanswerable. The Citizens of the largest states would invariably prefer the Candidate within the State; and the largest States would invariably have the man.” The delegates thought that a direct election would prejudice the smaller states, but what concerned them was that candidates from small states could not get elected. (Reminder. In 2016, Trump was a lifelong resident of a large state, but New York overwhelmingly voted against the hometown boy. Perhaps the Founders were not familiar with the adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”)
Madison also maintained that a direct vote would undermine the South. Many northern states had eased the traditional requirement that only white male citizens who owned real property could vote by allowing white males who paid taxes to also have the franchise. Thus, a higher proportion of people in the North could vote than in the South, and the South’s power would be diluted by a direct election. The Electoral College would prevent this calamitous possibility. It was not suggested that extension of the franchise might benefit the South as well.
Today many assert that the founders were protecting the small states by giving them a slightly greater number of electors than was justified by their populations. However, the founders addressed the small-state problem in a different way. The concern was that a candidate from a small state, even if worthy, would inevitably lose because the large-state electors would vote for one of their own. The solution: each elector would vote for two people, one of whom must not be from the elector’s state. The delegates thought that while one vote may go to the home state favorite, the second vote would be for the person seen as the best in the rest of the country. If that person was from a small state, he could be elected with a collection of second-choice votes.
The Founders added another “accommodation to the anxiety of the smaller States,” as Madison wrote in a letter in 1823. If no person got a majority of the appointed electors, then the House of Representatives would choose the President from the five highest on the electoral list with each state having one vote. The largest and smallest states would be equal in this process, which, according to Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, would be “a case which it cannot be doubted will sometimes, if not frequently, happen.”
The constitutional convention delegates knew that the large states would dominate the Electoral College, and they did. Luther Martin writing to the Maryland Legislature after the draft Constitution was promulgated but before it was adopted said that the “large states have a very undue influence in the appointment of the President.” Gouverneur Morris, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, writing in 1803, noted that it was recognized that the large states would dominate the Electoral College. Only if the matter went to the House of Representatives did the small states have a substantial voice in the presidential selection.
The major effect of the original Electoral College was not to give power to the small states but to the slaveholding states. Madison had said that a direct presidential election was “fittest,” but it would harm the South, citing the more “diffusive” franchise in the North, but the Virginian slaveholder continued with the curious comment that with a direct election the South would “have no influence on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty….” The “difficulty” was avoided by basing the number of electors on representation in the House of Representatives. The apportionment of the House, of course, incorporated the three-fifths clause where that percentage of slaves was used in the allocation of House seats.
The three-fifths clause was, therefore, incorporated into the Electoral College giving extra power to the large slaveholding states. The first census in 1790 found that New York had a free white population of 313,000 and North Carolina had a free white population of 289,000. Each state had the same electors, however—twelve—after that first census. While New York had 21,324 slaves, North Carolina had 100,572. However, when 60% of the slaves were included to determine representation in the House, North Carolina’s “population” was larger than New York’s. South Carolina had a free white population of 139,000, but New Jersey had thirty thousand more. Even so, South Carolina had twelve electors and New Jersey eleven. South Carolina had 107,094 slaves and New Jersey 11,423. (New Jersey is the starkest example of why Madison feared for the effect on the South were there to be a direct election of the President. As Madison had to know, New Jersey alone among the states then allowed white women to vote, and its total vote might have been twice that of South Carolina’s. With the Electoral College as adopted, even though South Carolina had the smaller white population, it had more power in the presidential selection than did New Jersey.)
Virginia had a free white population of 441,000; Pennsylvania had 422,000, about a four percent difference. Virginia had 292,627 slaves and Pennsylvania had 3,731. Even though the enslaved people could not vote, because of them Virginia had forty percent more electors than Pennsylvania—twenty-one to fifteen.
A direct vote for President would have lessened the power of the South; instead, the Electoral College as adopted magnified it. Founders recognized and said that large states would dominate the vote in the Electoral College, but Southern states would have special influence in picking a President because of the peculiar way in which slaves were counted.
The Founders did not protect small states via the Electoral College, and their sop of requiring electors to vote for two people with one not from the state of the elector proved to be laughable. The Framers in adopting the Electoral College did not foresee the rise of political parties even though parties were in place only a few years after the Constitution was adopted. Partisanship was evident in the first contested presidential election, after Washington retired in 1796.* By then, two men ran as a team with one running for President and the other as Vice-President. The country made it through 1796 without a major problem, but the Electoral College caused a crisis in 1800.
Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr ran as a Republican team in the presidential election. The widespread understanding was that Jefferson was running for President and Burr for Vice President. John Adams, the Federalist incumbent, ran with his vice-presidential running mate Thomas Pinckney against Jefferson and Burr. Jefferson got seventy-three electoral votes to Adams sixty-five, making Jefferson the apparent victor, but of course, because each elector had two votes, Burr received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson. With two candidates yoked together by party affiliation, it was not a surprise that they would get the same number of electoral votes. A tie, which was not foreseen by the Framers, was close to inevitable with the rise of political parties.
The selection of the President in 1800 went to the lame-duck Federalist-dominated House, even though the Federalists had lost the election. That losing party had to decide which Republican, Jefferson or Burr, was the lesser evil. Thirty-six ballots later, Jefferson became the third President. And we got the Twelfth Amendment to fix this major flaw. That Amendment required electors to cast separate votes for President and Vice-President.**
At least when it came to the method of selecting the president, the Framers’ wisdom was faulty. Perhaps there are good reasons today to have the Electoral College but not because the founding generation created a perfect system. It did not protect the integrity or sovereignty of the small states. Our first six presidents all came from large states. Four of them were Virginians. This was not a surprise for the original Constitution through the Electoral College gave the major slaveholding states the dominant power in picking the President.
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*The Framers also did not foresee that electoral votes would be allocated by a winner-takes-all approach where the candidate with the most votes in each state would get all of that state’s electoral votes. That development, however, did not come quite as quickly as the rise of political parties. In 1796, even though Jefferson won the most votes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, one elector in each of those states voted for John Adams instead, and those three votes made Adams president. He received 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. Jefferson received the second most votes. Adams’s running mate, Thomas Pinckney, garnered 59 electoral votes. Thus, under the electoral system then in place, Jefferson became Vice-President under his political enemy, Adams, an uncomfortable result.
**Elections might be more fun if we still had the original electoral scheme as indicated by Alexander Hamilton’s devious actions in 1796. Although Adams and Hamilton were both Federalists, Hamilton did not want Adams to become President. Supposedly Hamilton approached electors in states Jefferson had won and urged those electors, after voting for Jefferson, to give their second vote to Thomas Pinckney. Hamilton was hoping that Jefferson-Pinckney votes plus Adams-Pinckney votes would give Pinckney the most electoral votes and the Presidency. Hamilton’s machinations seem to have borne some fruit, most notably in South Carolina where both Jefferson and Pinckney received eight electoral votes. The scheme failed because in several states that Adams won, the electors divided their second votes between Pinckney and other candidates or did not give any second votes to Pinckney. For example, Adams received nine votes in Connecticut, but Pinckney got only four, with five votes going to John Jay. New Hampshire gave six votes to Adams, but none to Pinckney. Pinckney received twelve fewer electoral votes than Adams. But think of the gamesmanship we might have if this original electoral edifice still existed.
