The Sons of Liberty

Interestingly, I somehow ended up in a slightly heated discussion with my Dad the other day on the subject of the Electoral College. Pops is all for ditching the college in favor of a popular vote (he’s one of those ‘Bush stole the election’ folks). Now, off hand, it might seems as if a constitutional amendment discarding the Electoral College system in favor of a popular vote to elect presidents would make a certain amount of sense. After all, we are supposed to be a democracy, and in a democracy the majority is supposed to rule, right? But then I started to really think….

The Framers of the Constitution clearly spent quite a bit of time coming up with and later adjusting our election process. The first version of the presidential election process is stated right in the US Constitution - Article Two, Section One (although it’s not called by it’s current name there). It was even an important enough concept that they saw fit to tweak it somewhat with the 12th Amendment, making the Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections separate events as well as making other changes to how electors cast votes. It just seemed to me like a lot of time was spent in consideration of the entire election process, both before and after the Constitution was drafted, and yet we did not end up with a popular vote for president. Why?

So, I sat down and did some reading of opinions on both sides of the issue, and also took a bit of time to consider how the process works and why it would have been set up that way in the first place. The process outlined in the Constitution and later revised by the 12th Amendment was set up to give each state the same number of votes as they have Representatives and Senators combined. If the Founding Fathers thought it best to elect a president solely based on a popular vote, wouldn’t they have based the number of votes given to each state on the number of members of the House of Representatives only? That would seem like a convenient way to simulate a popular vote, given the communication limitations of the era.

That’s when the solution struck me - the Founding Fathers set up the election process the way they did for the same reason that they set up two houses of Congress rather than only one. They wanted to ensure that populated states could not completely run roughshod over less populated ones simply by virtue of having more people. The Founding Fathers saw the need to protect the rights and interests of each state individually, as well as to give the population at large adequate representation. After all, our nation is made up not only of all it’s people, but also of the 50 individual states that voluntarily agreed to bind together to form the union we have today. It’s only fair that the level of representation should reflect that.

The perfect example of this protection would be states such as Alaska and Montana. Both of those states cover huge areas of land and produce vast amounts of natural resources that are relied upon by our entire country. Due to their low population, however, each of those states has only a single Representative in the House of Representatives. It is really only the protection of having an equal amount of representation in the Senate that keeps the more populated states from completely imposing their will upon those lower population states. If not for that representation, it would be far too easy for more populous states to completely take advantage of their less populous neighbors simply by bullying them around in the House of Representatives - imagine, for example, how easy it would be to change a few laws and effectively remove the rights Alaska has to it’s oil and other natural resources, instead appropriating those rights for the ‘good of the country’ or some such nonsense. It’s only Alaska’s equal representation in the Senate that makes actions like that difficult, if not nearly impossible.

The same concept holds true with presidential elections. A small example to illustrate the point - if you removed the 100 votes from the Electoral College that represent the 100 Senators, 220 electoral votes would be needed to win the presidential election. In that case, a President could theoretically be elected by winning in as few as only 9 states, as opposed to the theoretical minimum of 11 states needed to win in the current system - California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey. Now clearly a true popular vote would afford more representation to the less populated areas than in the example used above, but I think it’s a pretty effective way to illustrate the inequality a popular vote would actually promote over the current system. Pandering to the voters in the most populated states to get elected is already a popular strategy, imagine how much worse it would get if a true popular vote were used. Entire sections of the country could be effectively ignored due to their low population. Regional issues pertaining to low population areas would get no attention, since those people’s votes simply aren’t needed to win anymore.

This also brings up a few other interesting questions in my mind. If you are going to argue in favor of using a popular vote to elect the president, wouldn’t it also make sense to argue for ridding ourselves of the 2-house system that Congress operates under, since that system doesn’t represent a true majority? Or better yet, why not just ditch the entire concept of representation and put everything to a popular vote? Is mob rule really the desired end result? That’s certainly the direction we would be heading, isn’t it?

I think this quote from Ben Franklin really sums it up best - “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” It is the Electoral College and equal representation in the Senate that gives that lamb, i.e. the individual states, a big-ass club to hold off the wolves.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 2:59 am and is filed under History, Philosophy, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.