By David De Paz
About 250 years ago, The United States declared independence from the most powerful empire in the world, Great Britain. A revolution followed, with Americans fighting tirelessly to escape the tyranny of the empire that ruled them. Against all odds, the underdogs pulled through, and in 1783, Great Britain officially recognized the United States of America as an independent nation. Following the revolution and a few years of political anarchy under the Articles of Confederation, the Founding Fathers decided to create the government as a constitutional republic with a focus on restricting tyranny, drawing inspiration from the ancient Romans, ancient Greeks, and even their old rulers: the British.
With independence secured and a new government developing, the Founding Fathers faced a new challenge: How would the nation’s leader be elected? Some founding fathers argued that members of congress should elect the president, while others advocated for a democratic popular vote. After years of discourse and debate, a compromise was met in the Electoral College, where based on the popular vote of an individual state, the favored presidential candidate would receive an amount of votes equal to the state’s number of representatives in Congress.
This system arose due to a discrepancy between life in each of the states, aiming to balance the interests of states with different populations and economies. The northern states were more densely populated and industrialized, while the southerners lived rural and agricultural lifestyles. The premise was that each state had its own identity and rights, and that a popular vote would lead to a system that only represented the populous northern states while the interests of people in less populous states would be left underrepresented, despite their equal importance to the nation’s success. Therefore, it was decided that while still having the people vote for the president, votes would depend on the number of representatives that a state had in congress, giving the smaller states influence on the presidential election slightly disproportionate to their population in order to give them a greater opportunity for representation.
Nevertheless, the Electoral College has been challenged many times throughout the nation’s history, and many people today question the system, especially with recent elections such as in 2000 and 2016, when the winning candidate lost the popular vote. Instead, critics believe that a popular vote makes more sense, or that the Electoral College is an “outdated system” in need of reform. They argue that the differences between urban and rural states are no longer as stark as they once were, and that a common national identity and culture has developed over time with mass media, technology, and mobility. They also point out voting patterns, which have become less regionally divided and more homogenous over time. Together, they argue, these factors reduce the need for a system that amplifies the political power of small states in modern times.
On the other hand, supporters of the Electoral College continue to argue that the reasons for the Electoral College’s creation still apply today. They argue that it remains an important system to represent all states and ways of life in the United States, and that a popular vote would go against the principle of federalism by reducing the importance of states, therefore nationalizing the system, which would lead to the treatment of all states as one homogenous entity rather than distinct polities. They also argue that a popular vote would lead to a “tyranny of the majority,” where minorities are overshadowed by the culture of the masses, and that the Electoral College promotes political stability by forcing candidates to take a broad range of issues into account in order to meet the interests of many states.
Debates over the system of the Electoral College will likely continue in the foreseeable future, as over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress throughout the nation’s history to reform or eliminate the Electoral College, making it the subject with the most proposals for constitutional amendments. As the nation evolves, the debate over the Electoral College forces us to ask: How can we balance representation and democracy in a nation that continues to change?
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