Questions and Answers about the U.S. Electoral College

Not enough people care to ask about the Electoral College, so we can't call this "Frequently Asked Questions." But there are some basic questions and answers about the U.S. electoral system:

• Why doesn't the U.S. elect a president by direct popular vote?
• Why don't states allocate electoral votes by congressional district, or by proportion to the popular vote?
• Why isn't there a run-off if nobody wins a majority?
• Why does the system make it so hard for third parties?

The founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention rejected the idea of electing a president by popular vote. They also rejected the idea of having Congress or the state legislatures do the honors.

One argument against a popular vote was that the popular vote could be influenced by demagogues. In present day terms, you could translate demagogues as "media candidates." In these terms, the argument seems as valid today as it did then. Basically, the founders didn't want a system to be just a popularity contest or a contest of name recognition.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE AND MASS MEDIA The mass media constently slight the Electoral College. Every four years, the reporters and pundits repeat stock phrases about the Electoral College, "constitutional relic," "anachronism", "most people think that they are voting for the President, but they are not...." As a representative institution in a democracy, the Electoral College is not nearly as peculiar as the U.S. Senate. But reporters and pundits don't say, "Now the bill goes on to the Senate, a Constitutional relic where each state gets two votes regardless of its population ...." U.S. citizens lack knowledge about many aspects of the government. Only in the case of the Electoral College is the blame put on the institution, rather than on the ill-informed public. As an institution, the Electoral College suffers because it lacks a PR budget (in fact, it has no budget at all). And it lacks a permanent bureaucracy to defend itself. So the press gets away with sneering at the Electoral College.

Not only did the convention suspect that the most popular person might not be the best qualified. They also suspected that a popular elected President might be too powerful. The convention was afraid of giving the executive too much of a mandate. In this respect, too, the original argument seems just as applicable today. As much as Americans want reforms, the thing we fear more than anything else is an executive that is too powerful.

The idea that the presidential race should be a popularity contest was first promoted by Andrew Jackson in 1824 when he lost the presidency to John Quincy Adams in a House vote. The idea is appealing at first glance, but on reflection it has been important to the U.S. that popularity is not the only factor that matters.

The Electoral College system has been very successful in promoting candidates on the basis of factors other than celebrity and popularity. Hardly ever has the President been the most famous or the most popular person in the country, particularly at the time of his first election. Some ex-generals and maybe Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan might have had a chance in a popularity contest system. Forget Polk, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Nixon and Clinton, to name a few.

So to sum up, the reason we don't have direct presidential elections is that the founding fathers wanted the presidential choice to be based on more than popularity or name recognition. Somehow, that argument seems as good today as it did then.

Why don't states allocate electoral votes by congressional district, or by proportion to the popular vote?

In the constitutional convention, another objection to a popular vote was that regional candidates would emerge and split the country. So one of the most important aspects of the Electoral College system is that the voting is state-by-state. That way, a candidate has to have support in more than one region in order to win. In a direct popular vote, a candidate could run up a big margin in one region and overcome a smaller losses everywhere else.

To prevent the regional effect, states have to give all their electoral votes to the winner in that state. This wasn't immediately obvious, so some states allocated votes by district up until the 1830s. But as political parties emerged, states enacted a "winner take all" stance. Once one state did it, the other states had to do likewise or lose all chance of influencing the outcome.

ELECTORAL COLLEGE: MODEL GOVERNMENT The Electoral College represents the model of representative government that current "reformers" are advocating. The electors meet for one day -- not even in Washington -- cast their two votes (one for president, one for vice president), then they disband. Some states don't even pay for their lunch on election day. If only the rest of the government could be so efficient and effective!

A serious regional concentration of votes occurred in 1888. In six Southern states, Cleveland got 72% of the vote and won the popular vote. Due to the "winner take all" system, he lost in the electoral college. Far from being a rejection of the popular will, the election of 1888 demonstrates why a country as large as the U.S. needs a system to prevent regions from running away with the vote.

So states have a "winner take all" rule to prevent other states from "running up the score."

Why isn't there a run-off if nobody wins a majority?

A run-off election was not even feasible in the late 1700s. What to do if the election did not produce a clear winner was one of the most difficult questions faced by the convention. Many delegates expected that there would be numerous candidates, so the idea of taking the candidate with the most votes (a plurality) was not acceptable. There had to be a majority (more than half). Some way of making the final decision had to be found.

What they came up with as a grand compromise was that the House would vote, but each state delegation would have one vote. (They didn't want the Senate, because the Senate already had enough to do, but small states objected to a vote based on population.)

So today, with a run-off feasible, why not have a run-off?

Actually, there's an advantage to this peculiar system. The House vote is like a tie-breaker in sports, say, a shoot-out or a sudden death overtime, where anything can happen. As such, it serves as a check on the popular vote. The Constitution says, "OK, American people, stop fooling around. Make a clear choice, or the House will choose for you."

Americans seem to have gotten the message. In those elections where a third-party candidate threatened to throw the election into the House, the voters appear to have turned away from the third party and selected among the candidates most likely to win. The happened in 1968 and 1992, and it probably happened in 1912 and back when the Whigs ran 3 candidates against Martin Van Buren (Van Buren got a majority).

Why does the system make it so hard for third parties?

The Electoral College system makes it difficult for third parties to get in the door. The biggest blocker is the "winner take all" rule which means you have to win an election SOMEWHERE to get into the game.

The problem with making it easier for third parties are two:

1. Any system that makes it easier for third parties makes it easier for parties 4 through 50 as well. How do you keep the electorate from shattering into dozens of parties?
2. Even with three candidates, the strategy of winning the election becomes confusing. In a multi-candidate, two-stage election, the top two candidates in the first round wouldn't necessarily represent any view acceptable to a majority of the population.