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Frequently
Asked Questions
What's Wrong
Reasons
State Advantages
Winner-take-all
Electors
Power of State Legislatures
Spoilers
What if...?
Why did the Founders decide on
instituting the Electoral College?
There are actually a few main reasons for
establishing the Electoral College (which was actually a compromise
by the time it was finally established).
First, the Founders recognized that some areas were
more populated than others to an extreme degree.
This difference, they noticed, was not because of size, but
rather because of slavery. While
slave states had by then been given permission to count each slave
as three-fifths of a person for population tallies, slaves did not
have suffrage. This, of
course, would have negatively affected the South’s population
advantage in the Electoral College.
So, in order to compensate for those massive population
differences, the smaller states were given a chance to have more
influence than their populations alone could render them and the
larger states were given the advantage by population turning into
electoral clout. Second,
travel and communications technology were primal at best, leaving
little opportunity for candidates to visit every state to campaign.
This, the Founders feared, would result in the Favorite Son
effect. In this case,
even if the citizens of any given state have never heard of him,
they would vote for the candidate from their state simply because
they share a home, and because that is more than they would be able
to say about any of the other candidates.
This reason also leads us to a third, which was a
distrust by the Founders of the people to make an educated and
responsible decision about electing their leader.
Since they knew the citizens would have very little knowledge
of the candidates, they wanted to make sure that an well-informed
decision could still be made. They
also envisioned electors as more educated and connected elites who
would have a better insight into the leaders of a nation overwhelmed
by illiteracy and isolation. Therefore
they installed a system of electors to act as a filter between the
people and the candidates to ensure that the election was
responsible and not contingent on favorite sons and flighty
passions. In the end,
as George C. Edwards III puts it, “The Electoral College was not
the result of a coherent design based on clear political principles
but, rather, a complex compromise that reflected the interests of
different states and the search for consensus.”
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Does the Electoral College favor certain
kinds of states?
Yes. There
is actually a two-sided argument on this subject.
Some say that the Electoral College favors small states
because each of their electoral votes represents a relatively
smaller population. However,
some others argue that the advantage is for larger states simply
because they have such a tremendous amount of total votes (Read
about one such study here).
Although each of these arguments has its point, the better
assertion would be that those states with a consistently higher
voter turnout, like Minnesota (71%), Maine (69%) and Wisconsin (68%)
in 2000, have more chances of having a distinguished affect on the
election. Either way
the argument is stated though, the simple fact that some states are
favored more than others in the Electoral College system undermines
democracy and equality and tells us that our system must be properly
adjusted.
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Did the winner-take-all system develop
from the Founders?
No. When
the Founders developed the Electoral College, they established a
manner of states dividing their electoral votes, giving the
Presidency to the man with the most votes and the Vice Presidency to
the man with the second most votes.
However, as the two-party system developed (which the
Founders, and specifically George Washington, strongly warned
against), the dominant party in each state began to realize that it
could gain more votes for its candidate in a winner-take-all system
of allocation. This was
then passed in state legislatures and became the most common form of
electoral vote distribution. Greed,
on behalf of the developing dominant parties, was the catalyst in
creating the winner-take-all system.
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Why can’t we trust our electors?
One reason it is hard to trust electors is because
there only 29 out of the 50 states have any sort of state control,
by law or pledge, over their electors.
This is not even to say that all 29 of those states would, or
do, actually enforce their control if an elector defects from his or
her pledge. This
provides several electors with the opportunity to ignore their party
pledge or their state’s popular vote result in favor of their own
individual preference. As
USA Today (November 9, 2000) explains: “Twenty-[nine] states have
laws that require electors to support the candidate who won the
general election, but all electors are free to vote however they
want. State laws restricting the votes are probably
unconstitutional, constitutional scholars say. Either way, only four
states impose a penalty, and the harshest is a $1,000 fine.”
By early September 2004, Richie Robb, a West Virginian
elector had declared that although he was pledged to the Republican
nominee, George W. Bush, that he would not cast his electoral vote
for him if he won West Virginia.
As he explained, his reason is that he finds Bush’s
national security and economic policies faulty, and believes that he
needs to be taught a lesson. This
is extremely unacceptable and not the intention of the Founders at
all. When a system can
be so twisted and distorted like Mr. Robb is showing us it legally
can be, it is time for reform.
(West Virginia has no legal control over its electors and
provides no punishment for faithless electors).
Also, in 1988, Margarette Leach, also a West Virginian
elector declined to vote for the state’s winner, Michael Dukakis,
and instead voted for his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen. (To see a
list of past faithless electors click here).
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How
much power do State Legislatures have over electors?
Legislatures,
until the 1820s, were actually relied upon to choose the state's
electors. Although today electors are traditionally chosen the
state party leadership, state legislatures continue to retain the ability to discard the party’s electors and
replace them with its own. Florida’s
state legislature was fully prepared to do so in 2000, as it was
controlled by Republicans and in favor of Bush winning the state’s
electoral votes. However, in the places that state
legislatures need control over their electors, namely in binding how
they vote, only 29 possess that
power.
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What is the spoiler problem?
Under the assumption that a third party
candidate cannot win an election in a two-party system, the spoiler
problem describes a situation in which such a candidate takes away
votes from one of the two major party candidate, making it harder
for them to gain votes and win the election.
(Ralph Nader was a spoiler for Gore in 2000; Ross Perot was a
spoiler for Bush, Sr. in1992).
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Are there Constitutional rules or
procedures that outline how to handle events like the one in 2000?
No. In
these sort of cases, since the 2000 election is now effectively a
precedent, we can assume that cases like these are to be decided by
the Supreme Court, a body which we do not elect and which has a
creed of not hearing or deciding "political questions".
What happens if a Presidential candidate
or the President-Elect dies?
In both cases, the candidate’s party would
normally just choose a replacement, perhaps moving the
Vice-Presidential candidate up to the Presidential candidate and
replacing the VP, or by coming up with someone new entirely.
Either way, the electors are normally expected to abide with
the party and vote for its candidate.
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