The Electoral Debate | Really Random Writings

I have always had a very soft spot in my heart for America. My dad grew up in the military, and instilled his love of WWII history in me at a young age. I have thought often of the sacrifices of so many for the ideals this country was founded upon. As such, my second semester at college, I was in a basic writing class and had to write a persuasive essay and present it to the class. Having read the constitution other than just to pass high school history, I knew that America was created as a republic, not a true democracy. More importantly, I learned the subtle yet important differences between the two. As it is our electoral college that keeps us from being a true democracy, I felt that I could write a decent essay with the intent of persuading people of the importance of the electoral college. This was a persuasive essay assignment I was given during my second semester of college. I hope that even though six years have now passed, this paper may still be useful to that end. Small changes have been made (mostly grammatical), but the body of this paper remains the same.

The Electoral Debate

       
          After her election to the New York Senate in 2000, Senator-elect Hillary Clinton went on a victory tour throughout the Empire State, calling for the elimination of the Electoral College. The proposed abolishment of the Electoral College, sadly, is nothing new. Over 700 attempts have been made in roughly 200 years to change or get rid of the Electoral College. Assailants generally want the Electoral College replaced with a direct popular vote. However, the Founding Fathers purposely set up this method of electing the president in order to avoid the "tyranny of the majority" that comes with a pure democracy, allowing the will of the people to reflect the new American government. The Electoral College provides one of the crucial Checks and Balances written into the Constitution with two main ideas in mind. The Electoral College is one of the most important safeguards built into the Constitution, as it as the responsibility of giving smaller states a more equal weight in the election of the president; it also removes the election of the President out of the direct hands of voters, while still reflecting the will of the public.

          In order to understand the debates on either side, one must first understand the ideas behind the Electoral College. In an interview with Eric Walz, doctor of Political Science at BYU-Idaho, he explained that in an election, people vote for electors who in turn vote for the President. Each state in the United States receives a certain number of electors. Currently, an election consists of 538 electoral votes. Each senator receives a vote, as does each member of the House of Representatives. The District of Columbia is allotted three votes. Each state has at least three electors; two representing the two senators, and one for every House member.


           When a citizen casts a vote for the President, in reality, they are voting for an elector pledged to one of the candidates running for President. Each political party chooses their own electors. Therefore, in Idaho, with two senators and two members of the House, we get four electoral votes. Each party in Idaho--Democrat, Republican, Independent, and any other party--chooses four electors. The party that receives the majority of the votes in that state gives all of their votes to a particular presidential candidate. While the Electoral College never meets together countrywide, they do meet in their respective states on a certain day. The votes are later opened and counted, and the candidate with the majority of the electoral votes becomes the next president. In the unlikely (but possible) event that no candidate receives the majority of the electoral votes, the decision rests with the House of Representatives; each Representative casts his or her vote for the candidate they think should become the next president. The candidate with the most votes from the House becomes the next President.


          Almost without fail, opponents of the Electoral College begin their arguments by calling the Electoral College undemocratic. Surprisingly, they are mostly right. But, they fail to realize one crucial thing: America is not a democracy. AMERICA IS A REPUBLIC! From the beginning of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Founding Fathers deliberately avoided forming a democratic government. In fact, they strongly opposed a democracy. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, tells us why the Founding Fathers did not want a democracy.

          "In a pure democracy, a common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole [the public]... Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention... and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." (qtd. Ross)


          Other Founding Fathers came to similar conclusions through studying other governments of the world. Alexander Hamilton stated, "The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny, their figure, deformity." (qtd. Ross) Ancient Greek and Rome provided excellent examples of what the Founding Fathers tried to avoid--a democracy. John Adams went one step further, saying, "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." (qtd. Ross)


          We must understand the difference between a republic and a democracy in order to understand the arguments for both sides. Walz describes the difference between a republic and a democracy by saying "in a democracy, the People make the laws. In a republic, the People elect people to make the laws." This means the government plans for average citizens to choose the wisest or "best" citizen to represent them, and then the wisest citizens will choose the President. The idea is to sift the passions of the people out of the voting process.


          Concerned about the people being uninformed and/or being swayed by their passions, the Founding Fathers addressed the problem in the beginning. Federalist Paper #49, written by James Madison, says, "Reason, alone, of the public...ought to control and regulate the government." The Founding Fathers also felt concern about the virtue of each citizen. They knew from examples such as ancient Greece and Rome that a democracy will follow the pattern told by Lord Woodhouselee, a Scottish-born lawyer, a.k.a. Alexander Fraser Tytler:
           A democracy is always temporary in nature... A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse...which is always followed by a dictatorship. (qtd, in Action America)


         Walz tells us that before the development of the Constitution, the thirteen colonies worked as 13 independent countries bound loosely together by the Articles of Confederation. The Articles, too weak to allow an effective government to perform the needed functions, did not work out for long. People proved not as virtuous as the Founding Fathers had originally thought. When setting up the Constitution, the country's leaders learned from their previous mistakes and removed the direct election of the president from the hands of the people. They wanted to save the people from their own less-than-virtuous behavior.


          Opponents of the Electoral College frequently attack the Founding Fathers. Occasionally, our country's first leaders are portrayed as unwise and imperfect, or old-fashioned, or portray them as incompetent fools who whipped up the Electoral College with little debate or discussion so that they could move on to other issues at the Constitutional Convention. Not one single shred of evidence backs up that opinion. Anyone who takes the time to read through the debates of the Constitutional Convention will see that much thought and deliberation went into this issue. Debates and discussions on the nature of the presidency and the method of elections went on for six weeks after James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed something similar to the Electoral College on June 2nd of 1787. The Founding Fathers put all their energies into the creation of what we now know as the Electoral College, which they considered one of the greatest achievements of the entire convention and of the Constitution.


          When attacking the Founding Fathers and their work on the Constitution, some say that the Electoral College was designed to send the decision of choosing the President in the hands of the government rather than the people. If no presidential contender gets a majority of electoral votes (270 is the minimum needed today), then the election of the President resides with the House of Representatives. The Electoral College is seen as a way to routinely send the decision of the presidency to the House. This has happened twice, once in 1801, and again in 1825. It seems extremely unlikely that the Electoral College was originally designed to allow the House of Representatives to choose the President because of the very few times that this has occurred. The Founding Fathers set up the default plan of allowing the House to vote for the President only in the event that no candidate receives the majority.


          Opponents of the Electoral College generally use the argument that a minority president could be elected, using the 2000 Presidential election as an example. Their argument: Al Gore won 500,000 more popular votes, yet George W. Bush won the Electoral vote. They say that this proves that a candidate who does not get the most popular votes can become the president. Bush got less popular votes; therefore, he should have lost. The wrong man became President because of the Electoral College.


          Gary Glenn, Presidential Teaching Professor at NIU, tells us that while this sounds like a solid argument, some room for debate exists. The word "more" means different things to different people. If one follows the aforementioned objection, one must assume that "more" means more votes counted as a national total. However, the Electoral College doesn't work that way. Opponents of the Electoral College, along with the popular media, teach us to count the votes on a national level. Add up all the votes, and whoever has "more" should win, right?


          Glenn presents the presidential race not as one huge race with all the votes nationally going to one person or the other. Rather, it is 51 different races run by the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The Electoral College never meets as one body but as 51 separate entities. The person who wins the most races wins, and that is exactly what happened in the 2000 election. Al Gore had 500,000 votes "more" than Bush only if you look at the numbers as one national election rather than a federal election among the states. Only if you look at the numbers "democratically." In addition, people who voted for Bush covered a larger area of electoral votes throughout the country, while people who voted for Gore covered less area geographically. Otherwise, Bush wouldn't have had a chance to win.


          For example, we could look at the issue on a smaller scale. Imagine that the city of Philadelphia had 800,000 people who voted for Gore, represented by three electors for the city. For the rest of Pennsylvania, 700,000 people voted for the electors who represented Bush. If there were four electors for the rest of the state, Bush would win even though he "lost" the popular voted. If by some chance a president gets fewer popular votes, then the only possible way he could win would be for the amount of popular votes to be extremely close, and for the distribution of voters to cover a larger area. It simply depends on how one chooses to view it.


          The counter argument for this suggests that if the President can be elected without a majority of the electoral votes, then the smaller states have more power, and the larger states are less represented. The principle of "one person, one vote" is being violated. They often use the example of Idaho vs. Florida. A few hundred thousand votes in Idaho are supposed to count a whole lot more per electoral vote than the millions of votes coming from Florida. However, Glenn tells us that if one looks at it from that point of view, then one assumes that we should not count the popular votes as if the states existed. Instead, we should count them as if they did not exist. We might as well abolish the states of the Union for every election. Again, if we do not assume that the votes are counted on a national level, then we already have the "one person, one vote" in each state.

          So in actuality, the small states have a very small advantage over the large states, keeping a delicate balance between the states. In fact, if we take a look at what would happen if the country moved to a national popular vote, an even more unbalanced situation would arise. The small states would be all but forgotten. "The raw numbers of the large states would swallow the smaller states" (Glenn, 5). Walz tells us that the population of the large states would make the small states such a minority that their voice would not be heard. In fact, a large city such as Philadelphia could potentially outvote the states of Utah, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming put together. So, either the small states are given a small boost to allow them equality with larger states, or large states have almost complete dominion over smaller states.


          Complaints against the Electoral College are nothing new and become more creative as time goes on. People who want to abolish electoral votes in favor of a direct popular vote use rhetoric to make some very persuasive arguments. But the Electoral College remains one of the most important of the Checks an Balances in the Constitution. It keeps us from a democratic form of government. It removes the passions of the people from the electoral process, yet still reflects the will of the people. It balances out the power of the large states and the small states. The Founding Fathers, some of the most brilliant minds in history, spent many months carefully crafting the government we have today. Should we throw their sacrifice away so cheaply? If we abolish the Electoral College, we are gutting the delicate system of Checks and Balances that remain so vital in today's America.


          Why would people in positions of power promote this amendment? They may not realize why the Electoral College came about in the first place or understand how it works. Or, as Walz tells us, they may know exactly how it works, saying "In my opinion, a person promoting the abolishment of the Electoral College sees benefits to be had by either themselves or their party." The people can vote themselves benefits directly out of the public treasury. But the public will only do so if people in positions of power alerts the people that the masses have this power. In other words, the candidate who offers the most will be the one elected 100% of the time. Once voters realize that they can vote someone into power who benefit themselves, they will do it. Our own unvirtuous and unbridled greed will destroy us. It happened in Ancient Rome; it is one of the major reasons that the Roman Empire fell. The fiscal policy of the country became so loose because the people were voting themselves so many benefits that the country imploded financially. The result: a dictatorship.


          The Electoral College makes this country a republic rather than a democracy. Deliberately put into place to protect this country from tyrants and the weaknesses of the people themselves, this important safeguard keeps the balance of government working during elections. Some of the most brilliant and virtuous men that have elver lived worked for months to create the Constitution. The amendment to abolish the Electoral College would take our country a huge step toward the eventual destruction of the America the Founding Fathers envisioned.

WORKS CITED

"Alexander Fraser Tytler: An Observation on Democracy." Action America 18 Sep. 2008.
          <http://www.actionamerica.org>

Glenn, Gary. "The Electoral College and the development of American Democracy."
          Perspectives on Political Sciences 32.1 (2003). ProQuest. Brigham Young University Idaho
          Library, Rexburg, ID. 13 Mar. 2008. <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=592373591&
          sid=12&Fmt=3&clientId=9330&RQT=309&VName+PQD>.

Gregg II, Gary L., ed. Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College. Wilmington,
          DE: ISI Books, 2001.

Meyer, Karl E. World Policy Journal 17.4 (2000/2001). ProQuest. Brigham Young University
          Idaho Library, Rexburg, ID. 18 Mar. 2008. <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=
          67263160&sid=9&Fmt=3&clientId=9330&RQT=309&VName+PQD>.

Ross, Tara. "The Electoral College: Enlightened Democracy." The Heritage Foundation 1 Nov.
          2004. 5 Mar. 2008. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/LegalIssues/lm15.cfm>.

Walz, Eric. Personal Interview. 14 Mar. 2008.