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2016 Election

What Is the Electoral College and Does It Have a Future?

Screen Shot 2016 11 22 at 12.35.56 PM
Screen Shot 2016 11 22 at 12.35.56 PM

Election years send everyone scrambling to their high school civics book (aka Wikipedia) to learn just what the hell is that Electoral College thing that decides the election.

After this year, you can’t peruse Facebook for more than about 10 seconds without bumping into an online petition to abolish the Electoral College or a think piece your friend shared about how it ruins democracy. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, actually just introduced a bill into the Senate to do away with it.

There are several tenets of the institution that draw the ire of the voting public, but some people think it can actually be used to make things fairer. Get up to speed below.

Purpose

So, when you cast a vote for president, you’re actually voting for a party’s slate of electors. Those people then hold the official presidential vote in December.

Now why the fuck is that how it works? Alexander Hamilton gave his take in The Federalist Papers, when he said:

…that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.

The founders were freaked out by the idea of direct democracy because they didn’t believe the general public could be trusted to elect its leaders responsibly all the time, and thought the Electoral College was a necessary intervention; should the people (in the electors’ view) fuck up, the electors could save the day by making a better decision.

Winning by losing

Over the years, likely due to modern sensibilities, electors have tended to faithfully vote for whomever won their state’s popular vote. In fact, half the states passed laws mandating them to do so.But here’s the rub: It’s still possible for a candidate to lose the popular vote but win the race even when electors vote for the candidate who won their state. The College makes this possible in a couple ways.

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First, one electoral vote represents a very different number of popular votes depending on what state you’re in. The least populous states have an outsized impact, because each state has the same number of electors as it does members of Congress. And each state has at least one member of the House of Representatives.

For example, Wyoming has three electoral votes and a small population. Each electoral vote represents just over 180,000 people over the age of 18 in the state (according to the most recent data from 2010). California has 55 electors, and a big-ass population. Each electoral vote there represents about 670,000 people.

Another factor to consider is that almost all states award their electors on a winner-take-all basis. You win one more vote than another candidate in a state and you get all its electoral votes.

That, along with the uneven weight of votes in different states outlined above, make it possible for a candidate to win the national popular vote but lose the election overall. It happened in 2000, and it’s happened again in 2016. Before this millennium, it only happened three times, all in the 1800s.

Repeal, circumvent or take advantage?

So a lot of people are pissed about the Electoral College – not necessarily just those who didn’t want Trump to win, but those who, on principle, can’t get down with an institution that opens the possibility of overriding the popular vote.

There are a few different scenarios being proposed by people who aren’t pleased with the College. Sen. Boxer is proposing a constitutional amendment to officially dismantle it. That’s kind of a hard thing to get through, since it would take, first, two-thirds of members in both the House and Senate to pass it, and second, at least three-fourths of the states to agree to enact it.

There’s another effort to render the College moot without actually doing away with it, advanced by the organization National Popular Vote. They are trying to get enough states to agree to give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote to ensure that candidate wins.

A candidate needs to win a majority of electoral votes to win the race; based on the current number, that’s 270. So if states with a cumulative 270 electoral votes get on board, the winner of the national popular vote would always be the winner of the election.

Currently, they have 10 states and D.C. signed on, with a cumulative 165 electoral votes.

Then there are the folks who advocate going old school and embracing the original purpose of the institution, in a sense, by encouraging electors to choose to vote for the candidate who got most of the national popular vote rather than based on the popular vote within their state.

Takeaway

The Electoral College has been around for a long time, but controversy surrounding it only tends to spark up around presidential election time. The College isn’t likely to go anywhere, or to face substantial reform, if those who have a problem with it forget about the whole thing by February.

 

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Header image: Getty

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