What are the pros and cons of the electoral college?
Advantages:
- smaller states remain important to candidates
- candidates don’t need to travel the whole country
- recounts are easier because officials can isolate the issue in one state
Disadvantages:
- lots of voters feel their vote does not matter
- too much power resides in swing states (see below)
- the popular vote winner can lose the election (more on that later)
- risk of fake electors (more follows on that too)
That list is missing the most important part, though that is mostly covered by the rest of the article.
In a republic, the people elect the representatives and the representatives elect the rest of the people in power. This is quite common in places with parliamentary governments, where the prime minister is selected by a coalition of parties in parliament. The US doesn’t have a parliamentary system, but we do have member states, and the Electoral College is essentially the same idea as a parliamentary system: instead of people electing the President, the state legislatures decide how electors are selected, and electors elect the President. These electors are essentially picked along party lines and some states even compel them to vote consistent with the votes in the state (e.g. legal consequences for rogue electors), so we get a very similar election process for the head of government as a parliamentary system. However, this is skewed a bit, because states get electors based on a combination of House seats and Senate seats, meaning every state gets a minimum of 2 senate seats and 3 House seats, which means smaller states have a bigger say in who the President is (i.e. that first bullet point).
Switching to a popular vote to select the President would go against the entire way the republic is set up, and would run counter to how parliamentary systems in other countries operate. That’s not necessarily bad, it would just require a Constitutional amendment because that’s not how the government was designed.
Personally, I think the Electoral College system is absolutely fine, and the main problem is that states almost never split their votes. If the vote in your area usually goes close to 50/50, we shouldn’t be swinging all of the votes for your state based on a small percentage of voters, that’s just dumb, but instead one vote could conceivably move between parties each election. States do have the power to make that change, they just don’t do it for whatever reason. I’m no legal scholar, but I think states may be able to be compelled to split their votes by a regular federal law instead of an amendment, but I’m sure that would be challenged in the Supreme Court.
In any case, the TL;DR is that Presidents are selected by the states in the US, not by the people, so it makes complete sense that the popular vote is largely irrelevant in the election of the President. Any changes, IMO, should be made at the state level to split votes so your state votes in a more representative way to how the people have voted.
I’m not sure I agree. Wasn’t the original way it was set up to protect the slave owners? That’s a system I’d like to dump. I do think rural states should have somewhat of a vote, but that’s what the senate is for.
It was originally set up to give smaller, rural states a stronger voice, much like the reason the Senate exists. Basically, smaller states wanted to remain equal partners in the union, and the Senate was the concession they demanded to join, which was called the Connecticut Compromise. The Electoral College is essentially a mix of the ideas behind the House (proportional by population) and the Senate (equal by state).
The original reasoning had little to do with slave owners and much more to do with small states in the union, but it did eventually lead to the 3/5 compromise, which was directly related to slave owners.
A lot of other smart people disagree with you by the results.
https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
That’s not particularly fair. George Washington happened to be from Virginia, and he served two terms. The second President, John Adams, was disliked and his party was unpopular, so he was beaten by Thomas Jefferson in his re-election bid, and Jefferson’s party stayed in power for the rest of those 36 years. Jefferson didn’t win because of slaves, he won because Maryland and New York flipped from the previous election (same two candidates), and his party continued to win landslide victories until John Quincey Adams, who barely won the Electoral College and lost the popular vote. So IMO, only John Quincey Adams can be considered a “slavery win,” but he wasn’t even from Virginia, and he actually lost Virginia.
So I really don’t see the evidence there.
That said, slavery was a significant part of the reasoning for that decision, but the 3/5 compromise is the main factor there, not the Electoral College. There were other small states at the time, and they agreed to the change as well.
That article reads like an opinion piece pushing for the popular vote. That was certainly proposal at the time, but the decision wasn’t made with slaves voting since it was part of the original constitution. So at worst it was a compromise with slave-owning southern states, but it doesn’t seem to actually have change the results of those early elections.