It’s futile to wish for things that can never be – as Nanci Griffith sings, “If wishes were changes / We’d all be in roses” – but we’d sure be better off as a nation if the Electoral College did not exist.
If we were any other western democracy, the Biden-Trump race would be over. If we were any other western democracy, we would’ve known days ago – without waiting around for some TV network to make “the call” – that Joe Biden was the decisive winner. If we were any other western democracy, the desperate loser would not be wasting his time (and ours) racing frantically from this state or that state to sue with zero evidence. If we were any other western democracy, all voters in all states would be equal, and no states would be singled out by ranting or gun-toting goons.
Without the Electoral College – a remnant of the racist powdered wig era, a contrivance that was denounced by the American Bar Association 50 years ago as “archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous” – we would hew to one simple principle: The candidate with the most votes wins. What a concept.
If we did things that way, we wouldn’t be waiting around for Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania (all of which will go blue anyway). We’d already know – we would’ve known days ago – that Joe Biden is the next President of the United States and that Donald Trump is destined to spend 2021 fending off criminal indictments.
Currently, Biden has won nationwide by 4.3 million votes – and his winning margin will widen further as the last ballots are counted. And as Biden pointed out in his remarks last night, he has already won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. It’s game over.
But instead we slog on, mindlessly violating the fundamental principle that each citizen’s vote should be equal. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice endorsed the principle of “one person, one vote” – in 1962 and 1964 – but those were not Electoral College rulings. How nice it would be if a voter’s clout, or lack thereof, was not hostage to geography. The way we do things, a Republican living in blue California has no clout; a Democrat living in red Alabama has no clout. The voters in a handful of “swing states” are more equal than others.
We’re hostage to a vanished past. The original Electoral College deal was cut partly to mollify southerners who were seeking to protect slavery and feared domination by the more populous North. That was one big reason why the less populated rural states got the same number of senators as the more populated metropolitan states; and why, today, a disproportionate share of the 538 electoral votes go to less populated states that would have less clout if life was fair.
There’s no need for me to get into the details. You get the gist. Suffice it to say that James Madison, one of the Electoral College architects, ultimately concluded that the delegates who wrote the EC rules did a lousy job; he blamed “the hurrying influence produced by fatigue and impatience.”
Most Americans want to flunk the College. Earlier this fall, Gallup reported that 61 percent, including 68 percent of independents, want it gone. That’s consistent with polls dating back many years. The problem, of course, is that Republicans have come to love the College – given the fact that it elevated Trump and George W. Bush despite the will of the people – and that basically puts the kibosh on any constitutional amendment to abolish it.
There’s a potential workaround, called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Each state can decide to award its electors to the candidate who wins the national popular vote, and, indeed, 15 states with 196 electoral votes have already joined the Compact. Colorado joined up this past week, in an election day referendum. The Compact is even constitutional, because our founding document says that states can award their electoral votes however they see fit. But the problem, again, is that red states refuse to join.
Our sole alternative – admittedly symbolic, but still empowering – is to call the 2020 race for ourselves. Biden is President-Elect, and Trump is toast. The will of the people has decreed it to be so. That’s fairer than the Electoral College, which was denounced back in 2012 as “a disaster for democracy.”
That was Trump, on Twitter.