Distorting Democracy

The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today

By the People will awaken Americans to the perils of our system by unveiling the Electoral College’s origins, history, and present operations. This book demonstrates that the system has no principled foundation, that it has changed dramatically over its 230–year history, and that it threatens the legitimacy of our political system in the present.

A narrative-driven mix of history and political science, By the People offers compelling stories to make its case in three distinct sections, each featuring a key argument.

Part I tells the story of the Electoral College’s origins in the Constitutional Convention. Vaunted myths often dominate Americans’ understanding of the founding, but this account highlights the full humanity of key framers and reveals the decidedly un-immaculate conception of the Electoral College. The system for choosing the chief executive did not spring from pristine political commitments or deep philosophical foundations. Rather, the framers settled on this option after months of wrangling, rambling, and back-tracking. In the Convention’s final days, the exhausted, irritable, and overheated framers opted for an Electoral College primarily to avoid selection of the president by Congress, a problematic and corrupting method that many framers nonetheless preferred. Under the Convention’s political realities, they could get sufficient agreement on no other option.

But the framers’ plan did not last long. Almost immediately, it worked differently than anticipated, as political operators manipulated it to their own ends. Part II traces two hundred years of innovations—many of them subtle but highly consequential—to the plan described in the Constitution. As the new nation rapidly descended into bitter political conflict, many of the framers themselves, driven by their partisan interests, massaged the Electoral College into a form that differed profoundly from their own founding intentions. Subsequent generations tinkered similarly with the systems’ possibilities, always exploiting its potential for political gain. The protocols of today’s presidential contests arose mostly from these efforts, though some features acquired the formal sanction of Constitutional amendment and legislation.

In recent decades our strange presidential election system has produced frustrating results with increasing frequency. Who can forget the Bush-Gore contest of 2000, when the results hinged on “hanging chads” and fewer than 1,500 votes in Florida? Americans endured weeks of a single-state recount, only to have the Supreme Court halt the process and hand the election to George W. Bush. Bush won the Electoral College by a single vote, but Al Gore captured 500,000 more popular votes. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump stunned the world with a substantial Electoral College victory of 302-227, though nearly 3 million more Americans preferred his opponent, and roughly 7 million voted for a third-party candidate. The system increasingly returns results that conflict with the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, a product of our hyper-polarized landscape and unique geopolitical distribution of party loyalists. And it doesn’t look like things will improve anytime soon.

Defenders of the Electoral College tend to invoke gauzy images of the Founding Fathers infusing our system with their unique, timeless wisdom. But history tells a different story. The Founding Fathers faced a mess; they responded by creating a mess.

Contributor: Stephen Clements (Contributions by)

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