So it's Election Night. That means any moment now it is time for the editorials to start appearing asking, "Why do we have an Electoral College? Why is it still kicking around after all these years? And doesn't it thwart (or risk thwarting) the Will of the People?"
Sure. Right. All that. Fair questions, I suppose. But only the last one has an interesting answer.
After all, the real answer to "Why do we have an Electoral College?" has to do with the bickering and dickering in the Constitutional Convention, lo these many years ago. There are plenty of places to go read about it. And the real answer to "Why do we still have an Electoral College?" -- or, in other words, "Why haven't we gotten rid of the blasted thing yet?" -- is that it's actually a lot of work to change the Constitution, and it just hasn't been worth it to anybody to bother. Most of us have day jobs, and the Electoral College isn't that much of a nuisance most of the time.
Ahhh, but. There's always that last question. "Isn't the Electoral College fundamentally wrong, because it thwarts the Will of the People?" This one is a bit more interesting.
First off, let's unpack the argument against the Electoral College. The basic problem is that it is possible for a candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote and win the electoral vote, thereby winning the election. Rutherford Hayes won against Samuel Tilden. George W. Bush won against Al Gore. As of the moment that I am writing this, the websites I'm looking at are all calling the election for Barack Obama against Mitt Romney, and right now they also report Obama ahead in the popular vote. (Who knows what tomorrow morning will bring?) But for several hours this evening those same websites were reporting Obama ahead of Romney in the electoral vote and behind him in the popular vote. Heck, by tomorrow maybe something will have changed again in either one tally or the other. This one too might have turned out to be one of those elections like Hayes-Tilden or Bush-Gore, and strictly speaking it might still.
So what?
It's only a problem if you think there is something special about winning the popular vote, that makes you a better choice for President. Of course, we all learned as schoolchildren that we live in a democracy, and a democracy is supposed to be governed by the majority.
But step back a minute and reflect: Is the majority always right? Does the majority always pick the best guy? Unless you define "best" to mean "the majority choice" I think the answer is pretty obviously No. The majority is made of human beings, and humans can be notoriously pig-headed and obtuse. We aren't always, but we are sometimes. Why should we be better during elections than we are the rest of the time? And if we aren't any better during elections, why should the bare numerical majority -- especially in a close election -- always infallibly choose the right guy?
There's no reason. We can't suppose they do. But what are our other options for choosing a President?
Since I wrote in my previous post about looking at the world through classical eyes, you might wonder if there were anything to Plato's suggestion in the Republic that the wise should rule. But it's hard to see any practical way to determine who is wise; and in fact Plato himself abandons this notion in the Laws for a more complex scheme that seems to give the preponderance of authority to the old and well-connected.
What's more, even if we could identify the wise and virtuous, there is a strong empirical argument that they make ineffective Presidents. In the twentieth century alone we have clear examples of men in the White House who were intelligent, informed, committed, and compassionate -- fine human beings all around -- whose performance in the White House was nonetheless strikingly lackluster. (I am thinking in particular of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.) And at the same time we can point to other men in the same office -- men like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who had a far more ... ummm ... flexible sense of morality -- who nevertheless achieved important things. So it is not so easy to pick out the right guy ahead of time.
The one thing we can ask for, though, is political stability; and this in turn requires a deterministic method for deciding who shall be in charge. Hereditary monarchy provides such a system, at least most of the time, but monarchy is out of fashion these days and would never be accepted in this country. No, for reasons of political culture and history we plainly have to use some kind of election. But it's better if it is a form of election that converges quickly to a clear and certain answer.
And this, the Electoral College gives us. Do you remember the mess involved in recounting the vote in Florida back during the election of 2000? If we relied on a strict nation-wide popular vote to choose the President, then in a close election we might have the same mess in state after state across the Union. It might take months -- routinely -- for us to know who really won. And in the interim, nothing could be done because nobody would really know who was in charge. As it is, there are maybe half a dozen states where we have to scrutinize the results carefully. And then we have plenty of others -- California for the Democrats, Texas for the Republicans -- which are just no-brainers. We know how they will turn out. And so in the absence of some huge electoral upset, the kind that would be visible as soon as the very first precincts started reporting, we can drive to an answer pretty fast. Often in a single night. We give up the ideal of rule by popular democracy (although as noted I think we wouldn't much care for the practical consequences if we had to live with them), but we achieve a kind of deterministic certainty nonetheless consistent with genuine voting. We get to the end of our counting pretty fast and painlessly. We declare a winner, and we move on. For the most part (let's say the last century and a half) we have been able to change ruling parties without gunfire or tanks in the streets. And that has to be worth something.
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