Everything You Wanted to Know About The Electoral College (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Daniel Franklin, assistant professor of political science, explains the ins and outs of the Electoral College and why it exists in the first place.
Interview by Jeremy Craig
Americans don't get to choose the president of the United States. Directly, at least.
When we head to the polls, we're voting for 538 people who will make the official decision for the highest office in the land. It takes 270 of them to select the person to occupy the White House.
These people—electors—are part of the Electoral College. It's not a place, but a concept baked into the U.S. Constitution.
Daniel Franklin, an expert in American and presidential politics, sheds light on the nuances and vagaries of the system.
Q: Why did the writers of the Constitution set up the Electoral College?
A: The Constitution, in some ways, is a schizophrenic document in the sense that the framers recognized that the best way for people to govern was to govern themselves. On the other hand, the conventional wisdom at the time was that democracies were a bad way to conduct business. As a result, the framers wrote a constitution that had both democratic and undemocratic elements.
As a reflection of that, the Electoral College does a couple of things. First of all, it filters people's choices through a second screen. It also, because of its structure, forces candidates to get a multi-regional coalition in order to win the presidency.
Q: What benefits are there to having the Electoral College?
A: One of the benefits was highlighted in the 2000 election in the sense that the controversy was restricted to one state. If we had a national popular vote, and there was a close election as is generally the case in presidential elections, then we would have to order a national recount of votes. And that would be a tremendous undertaking.
The benefit of the Electoral College is that it provides—because most states are winner-take-all states—a pretty clear margin of victory in the Electoral College, even though there may be a narrow margin in the popular vote. In other words, it's a good way to determine a winner, and it reinforces a two-party system.
In order to get electoral votes, a candidate has to win a state. And in order to win a state, a candidate has to have a broad coalition of voters. That means the Electoral College reinforces the tendency towards moderation in American politics.
Q: What might be the worst thing about the Electoral College?
A: The worst thing about it is that a candidate can win the presidency without winning the popular vote. And so in that sense, it is an undemocratic institution and that possibility is not theoretical—it did happen in 2000.
We recently spoke with three representatives from the Political Science Department about the importance of voting: Professor Lakeyta Bonnette, Ph.D. candidate Michael Shea and undergraduate student Joseph Velazquez. Here’s what they had to say.
Q: How often have presidential elections in U.S. history not meet the minimum number of electoral votes to select a president? With 50 states today, for example, that number is 270—and if that minimum isn't reached, the Constitution says that Congress makes the decision.
A: It's a very, very rare occurrence because our political system is structurally built to produce two parties, and because it produces two parties, it's very rarely the case that a third party takes away enough electoral votes to keep one side or the other from getting a majority.
It's theoretically possible that both major party candidates can get 269 electoral votes, sending the presidential choice to the House of Representatives.
But the fact of the matter is that because of the structural characteristics of our political system that produces two parties, it is very difficult for third parties to become players, to such an extent that they deny both parties a majority and throw the election into the House of Representatives.
Q: There is something called the "faithless elector"—electors who vote for people other than the candidate they promised to vote for in the Electoral College. There have been a little over 150 of them in U.S. history, and this month one Democratic elector from Washington state said he may not vote for Hillary Clinton. Why do faithless electors exist, especially as 30 states and the District of Columbia have, over the years, made it a crime to do this?
A: I think that it reflects the distrust that the framers had for democracy and the times in which it was written.
One of the characteristics of the Electoral College is that it's kind of a filter on the popular vote, and therefore, members of the Electoral College can vote for whom they think is the right candidate, and it happens on occasion. In fact, if (Donald) Trump loses the popular vote, and he loses badly, there might be a number of people who are Republican Party faithful who are members of the Electoral College who might vote for, say, [Vice Presidential candidate] Mike Pence for president.
Q: Is there any chance that the system of the Electoral College might be modified or changed in the next few decades?
A: First, it is difficult to amend the Constitution. Furthermore, at any given time one party or the other will not benefit from the changes that are made. Right now, I think that the Democrats have a natural edge in the Electoral College. I don't think they'd be interested in changing it. Thus, I believe it highly unlikely that the Constitution will be changed.
Q: In the future, will the two-party system still be entrenched into the American political system?
|A: The two-party system is baked into the current structure of our system. It really can't be changed as it stands. If we wanted to have a multiparty system, it would require structural changes in the Constitution. We'd have to go to a proportional representation system, or some variant thereof, as do the Germans, the French and almost all of the other industrialized democracies in the world, except for Britain and some of its former colonies.