The Electoral What???

So what’s the deal with the Electoral College? What is it? Why do we have it? Why not just base the election for the president on the popular vote? What were the Founders thinking when they set up this complicated system of presidential elections, and why not change it now?

Establishment of Electoral College

The Electoral College was established in Article II of the Constitution, although it was not given that exact name within the Constitution, it simply talked about the electors. The official name of Electoral College was assigned to these electors in 1845.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution states:

Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may
direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress; but no
senator or representative, or person holding office of trust or profit under the
United States, shall be appointed and elector.

This article explains how the electors are allocated to the states. Electors are distributed the same way that members of congress are apportioned; the number of representatives per state is based on the population of that state, with the number of senators being equal in all states, that number being two. The number of congressional members ensures that all states have an equal say in at least one body of congress, but that all people have a voice within that same body. States have equality through the Senate and each person is represented in the House of Representatives.

Reason for Electoral College

The Founders believed that all states should be seen as equal no matter how large their populations grew. The Electoral College keeps states like California and New York from holding absolute power over presidential elections. All those small states in the middle have two electors just like the large states. This might not seem supper important when you look at California’s 55 votes compared to Arizona’s 10, but take away the two equal votes the states have and the smaller states would have no chance influence presidential elections. With those two electors, a cluster of smaller states can stand against the overwhelming number of electors in one populous state.

That is why the mid-west or the South can form voting block, allowing all those red states to carry as much weight as the larger but less numerous blue states. The Founders were all about balancing out power.

How the Electoral College Influenced Elections

The 2000 presidential election revealed the balance of power concept. Al Gore won the big population states, like CA and NY, but the smaller states joined together, with a couple bigger states and shifted the win to George W. Bush. At the time everyone was upset. We had not had an election that was decided by the Elector College in over 100 years at the time. People were upset that the popular vote had not decided that election, that the Supreme Court gave the win to Bush, but it wasn’t the Supreme Court, but the Founders and the Constitution that gave the win the Bush. The balance added by the Electoral College was lived out in that election.

The 2000 win for Bush was not the first nor the most dramatic win by a man not receiving the largest number of popular votes. In 1876, Samuel Tilden received a quarter of a million more votes than Rutherford B. Hayes. Three states had accusations of voter fraud, and their election results were disputed, so no one had enough electoral votes to claim the presidency. A commission of fifteen members was appointed to solve the dispute. They (8 to 7) gave the disputed states to Hayes, and he was elected president.

In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and 99 electoral votes, but not the majority of electoral votes needed to win the presidency. John Quincy Adams won 84 electors, and Henry Clay and William Crawford split the 78 electors that were left. In order to resolve the issue, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Clay threw his support behind Adams, causing the House to vote for Adams. Jackson accused Clay and Adams of unfairly swinging votes in Adams direction, and came back four years later to claim the presidency back from John Quincy.

The first time the Electoral College came into play in a presidential election was in 1800. The Founders had to live by the rules they established in the Constitution, when Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Aaron Burr ran against one another. Jefferson defeated Adams soundly, but the electors divided sending the election to the House, where the votes lined up behind Adams. At that time, the person who won the second most votes in an election became vice-president. Adams won the presidency with Jefferson winning the vice-presidency. It was a long four years for Adams, and Jefferson came back to win the 1804 election easily.

Balance of Power

The Founders gave us the Electoral College to ensure that the states with the largest populations would not overwhelm all of the political landscape. I think at many levels they succeeded. California, with the largest number of electoral votes went to the democrats in the last two elections (2000, 2004), yet republicans won the White House in those elections. The last Californian elected president was Ronald Reagan, and before him Richard Nixon, but we have had presidents from Georgia, Arkansas and Nebraska within that same period of time, showing that population is not all that matters within our electoral system of government. If not for the Electoral College, limiting the effect of the popular vote, New York, California and a couple of other states would determine every presidential election.

Thankfully, the Framers of the Constitution understood the need to limit power, and realized the best way to do that was to balance out power among the branches of government as well as between the larger and smaller states. The Electoral College is a complicated system, but it has served us well for the past 219 years.

Check out this years electoral map as it changes and shapes up over the next week at:

http://rove.com/election