By Luke Lattanzi | Staff Writer
With the 2024 presidential campaign ramping up, American political theater will no doubt become inundated with civically illiterate moans and groans about our political system yet again.
One such common complaint is the supposedly “antiquated” Electoral College, and how it stifles democracy, disenfranchising the “national popular vote.”
Such sentiment was expressed nearly four years ago by the Lariat’s Editorial Board shortly after the 2020 presidential election (which was flippantly titled “The Electoral College is dumb, time for something better”), writing, “According to NPR, a candidate could win the presidency (theoretically) with just 23% of the popular vote. How can we hold onto a system that goes against the ideals we were built upon?”
It’s hard to imagine which ideals the editors had in mind when writing that editorial, especially since the very notion of a “national popular vote” is already rooted in a conceptual misunderstanding of the American constitutional order and the principles that governed its creation.
But this conceptual misunderstanding is also evident across the entire electorate, even among Republicans who — while defending the Electoral College — will issue some justification for why the “national popular vote needs to be tempered” through indirect representation. This is nothing more than a concession.
The reality of the matter is that this so-called “national popular vote” does not actually exist, nor has it ever existed. The functions of the Electoral College, properly understood, are not in place to “temper” some fictional national majority but to ensure that one never arises in the first place. The same can be said for those who believe a compromise can be reached in which a constitutional amendment is ratified to ensure that electoral votes are awarded proportionally in each state, abolishing the “winner-takes-all” system.
Proponents of this idea would like to think that it hasn’t gained traction because America is simply too polarized, which may be true on its own, but in the end, such a proposal would never work because it simply doesn’t make sense. An Electoral College proportionally bound to do whatever a national majority wants completely defeats the purpose of the system. It is yet another concession to those in favor of its complete abolition.
The Lariat editorial portrays the Electoral College as a fatal bug in American “democracy,” but fails to understand that even though the Constitution’s preamble says “We the People,” a vital part of ensuring that promise of self-government was statehood. The editors, when issuing their complaint that the Constitution’s preamble does not say “We the States,” nevertheless fail to understand that the Constitution does quite literally ordain a commonwealth of states.
This notion of statehood, or rather, the principle that statehood would be a non-negotiable safeguard for the people to govern themselves to counter the power of a central government comfortably operating several hundred miles away, was evident far before the Constitution of 1787.
This is evident in the Declaration of Independence, in which the last paragraph begins with “We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America…” Notice how the word “united” in this sentence is not capitalized. Before the founders realized the Articles of Confederation weren’t a viable alternative to British monarchy, the word “united” was merely an adjective to describe the current relationship between the several states: United in their cause to throw off the tyranny of Great Britain.
Even through the realization that a stronger federal union was needed, this principle of statehood would endure through the ratification of our present-day Constitution. This is why the Senate was originally chosen by the state legislatures (a process imprudently scrapped in 1913 through the Seventeenth Amendment, which I believe should be repealed).
How does this all relate back to the Electoral College? Because the Electoral College was designed to reinforce the idea that, in a commonwealth of semi-autonomous states such as ours, a national majority is nothing short of downright absurd.
Complaints about how people in California have less representation than those in Wyoming, because of some arbitrarily crafted electoral vote-to-population ratio, are irrelevant when the fundamental understanding of why the system works the way it does is corrected.
Opponents of the Electoral College claim the system thwarts “democracy,” but American democracy was never about an unfettered national majority that, as Alexis de Tocqueville warned in his landmark work Democracy in America, can impose itself anywhere and everywhere at the same time, but rather a series of 50 individual popular votes from 50 states.
Thankfully, though, it would appear that even America’s most underappreciated institutions prove their virtue in challenging times. The Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots, for instance, showed to the American people the Electoral College’s immense virtue and utility. Because the Electoral College diffuses the power of electing the president and vice president to the electors of the several states, the rioters’ attempt to thwart Congress’ counting of the electoral votes had no effect on the outcome of the election, as the electors had already voted in their respective state capitols on Dec. 14, 2020.
Indeed, contrary to media headlines of Congress “confirming” or “certifying” a presidential election, the words “confirm,” or “certify,” appear nowhere in the Constitution. The power for “certifying” any such election rests chiefly in the state electors — which makes sense, considering that the Electoral College would most certainly be redundant if Congress could just say “No, nevermind, we don’t like your final tabulation,” at least under the current rules. But that’s a conversation for another day.
Perhaps opponents of the Electoral College — the vast majority of whom, quite frankly, are on the left — ought to think about that before they (inevitably) issue their routine quadrennial complaints about the system in 2024.
