It could easily happen that the next president of the United States will win a majority of the votes in the Electoral College without winning a majority of the popular vote nationwide. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have each led one or another national poll even when trailing in polls conducted in battleground states.
Should that happen on the day all the votes are officially counted, it would be a travesty, many have said. Democracy would be perverted once again. The Constitution needs to be amended. The Electoral College must be abolished.
On the contrary, it is at just these times that the Electoral College allows the world’s most powerful democracy to continue to function in good order. Charges of irregularity, mis-management, manufactured votes, miscounts bedevil every close election. Trump’s extraordinary efforts to de-legitimate the 2020 election are unparalleled, but charges of fraud, corruption, and error erupt in every close election. Al Gore pursued his case in Florida in 2000 all the way to the Supreme Court, and the election was decided barely in time for the Inauguration.
Both the 2000 and 2020 elections unsettled the body politic in ways no reasonable person wants to see repeated. But in both cases, allegations were limited either to only one or just a few states. The trauma was real, but it pales in comparison to what might happen if the popular vote should be within ten thousand or even a hundred thousand votes across the entire country were there no Electoral College. The trailing candidate would insist on a nationwide recount that could take weeks and vast administrative resources to conduct. Charges of mis-management, bribery, and ballot theft would be legion. Mass parades, demonstrations, even violent action become imaginable.
It is a myth that the College gravely distorts election outcomes. Each State has the number of Electors to the College that it has members in the House of Representatives and in the U. S. Senate. The “extra” votes given to each state for each Senator enhances the voting power of those who live in “small states” with fewer inhabitants. But that does not give either party much of an advantage. The 14 small jurisdictions (13 states plus the District of Columbia) that have no more than 4 votes each in the Electoral College are equally divided between the two parties.
In the nation’s first election, two-thirds of the College was based upon a state’s population size. But as the United States grew, the House of Representatives expanded more rapidly than the Senate so that today over 80 percent of the College is allocated on the basis of a state’s population.
In other words, the bias in the Electoral College has been diminishing to the point where it can be observed only in the closest of elections. In modern times, only in 2000 and 2016 did the winner of the popular vote fail to carry the College.
Even these two elections may not have been affected by the College. One cannot calculate the partisan bias of the College simply by calculating whether the winner of the popular contest wins the Electoral vote. Had the College not existed, campaigns would have concentrated on dense population centers—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Atlanta. Neither party would have paid much attention to Nevada or Wisconsin. Ironically, the lack of a College would produce a new bias, this time in favor of populous states, a tendency those at the constitutional convention sought to avoid.
The importance of campaigns for voting patterns is best illustrated by the 2016 election. Trump focused his attention on battleground states, whereas Hillary Clinton, confident of victory, spent a good deal of last-minute campaigning for Democratic Senators in places she was sure to win. Had she ignored her advisers and concentrated resources on key battlegrounds won by Trump, she might have been the first female president of the United States. Harris is not making that mistake.
Without an Electoral College, battles over election procedures will intensify. Currently, states place different weights on the appropriate balance between securing election integrity and facilitating voter participation. The different approaches are tolerated because most voters know the Electoral College outcome cannot be manipulated by changes in the rules in any one state.
A shift to a national popular vote would require direct federal control of elections procedures to ensure that states would not adopt less restrictive procedures to enhance the power of its voters. A national identity card would be necessary to keep partisan hacks from traveling from one state to the next, casting their ballots again and again on the way. A national commission would be needed to keep parties from changing the rules with every shift in the balance of power inside the beltway. Struggles to control the composition of the commission would be endless.
All of which is to say that the College is here to stay, like it or not. Small states will never approve an Amendment to the Constitution that reverses the small edge they currently enjoy, and abolition of the College raises issues so complex and controversial that the consensus needed to pass a constitutional amendment will never be formed.
Do not despair. The College helps preserve a stable democracy even if an election is sometimes so close it yields results that differ somewhat from the total number of ballots cast. Please do vote on Tuesday, even if your vote is cast in one of those states where you know the outcome already. That, too, is good for democracy.
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Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a professor of government at Harvard University.