Most Americans Say Abolish the Electoral College

Last updated on: December 18, 2016 at 5:36 pm by Kermit Zarley

Most Americans Say Abolish the Electoral College 2016-12-18T17:36:48-07:00 Kermit Zarley

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Tomorrow, the electors of the Electoral College will meet in all fifty states of our union to decide who will become president on inauguration day, January 20th, next year.I think the Electoral College is antiquated and that it should be abolished. (See my post, “The Electoral College Is a Farce.”)

In this century, Americans have twice elected a president–George W. Bush and Donald Trump–who won at least the required 270 electoral votes to become president despite the fact that the defeated candidate–Al Gore and Hilary Clinton–won the popular vote. In Gore’s case, he won the popular vote by 500,000+ votes, but in Clinton’s case, she won it by over 2 million votes.

Also in this century, a majority of Americans think the Electoral College should be abandoned and the presidential elections determined only by the popular vote. Thursday, CBS News reported its recent poll taken of over 1,200 Americans who were phoned and asked which they prefer. CBS said 54% said our presidential election should be determined by the popular vote, and 41% said it should continue to be determined by the Electoral College. A similar poll was taken during the last presidential election, in 2012, and those results showed that 62% of Americans said the presidential election should be determined by the popular vote.

Nevertheless, the Electoral College surely will not be overturned by a required amendment to the Constitution in the near future. Why? In both of those contested elections, the Democratic nominee lost and thus the Republican nominee won. With Republican Donald Trump now about to be our president, and Republicans having gained in this election both majorities in the House and Senate. Thus, Republicans surely will not allow such an amendment to happen.

John McCain (R-AZ) was the Republican nominee for U.S. president in the 2008 presidential campaign. He has said concerning our Electoral College, “Our system is vital to making sure that all of Americans determine the next president, not just the majority of the population, which is on both coasts.”

I live in Arizona, and I like John McCain; but for me, that is a non-sensical statement. I would even say it reflects a Divided States of America (my expression in my previous post on the Electoral College) rather than the United States of America. The Electoral College provides citizens in the lesser populated states with a vote than counts more than the votes of people who live in the most populated states. That is, the Electoral College allots the same number of electors for each state as the number of representatives to the House of Representatives plus two more electors for each state representing their two senators.

So, John McCain’s statement is skewed in saying “all Americans” determine the president when all Americans do not have the same value for their vote. If we allot a numerical value of 1 to each vote, it’s sort of like each voter in California–the most populated state in the union–having a vote that is worth .8, and each voter in Wyoming–the least populated state–having a vote that is worth 1.2.

To me, that is unfair. But it’s more than that. It’s also racist, as I said in my previous post. The most populated states have a greater racial diversity of population than do the lesser populated states such as Wyoming and Vermont, the next least populated state. Those two states consist of a higher percentage of Caucasians than California. Not only that, there is a troubling and growing movement in the U.S. of white supremacy, and it contributed toward Donald Trump being elected president. Our Electoral College exacerbates that problem.

In fact, our Electoral College was created partly to accommodate slavery. Our founding forefathers decided at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 on the number of representatives for each state in the House of Representatives by what was called the “Three Fifths Compromise.” Delegates from the north consented to the demand of delegates from the south that each slave would be counted as three fifths of a person, with all free people being counted as the number one. (It also had to do with taxation, but I won’t get into that.) Yet this was despite the fact that slaves didn’t have the right to vote. The southern states got a third more seats in the House than the northern states did compared to if slaves had not been counted, which they shouldn’t have been since they couldn’t vote. The result was that the votes of southern voters were worth more than the votes of northern voters.

After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution changed this prior situation so that all males, thus all blacks, but not Indians, counted as one vote.

The purpose of the Electoral College was that since voters might not have sufficient information upon which to choose a president, electors would be chosen to meet in their various states a few weeks after the election to “deliberate” and then choose if the candidate who won the popular vote possessed sufficient qualities necessary to govern as president.

But since the creation of the Electoral College, it has become something other than its founders had purposed. The political party whose candidate won the electoral vote in each state chooses electors, not to deliberate that candidate’s qualifications for president but, who will be “faithful” in choosing that party’s candidate. So, nowadays the Electoral College is all about the party loyalty of its electors rather than the wisdom of deliberating a person’s qualifications for president. Thus, our antiquated, racist Electoral College does not even serve the original purpose of its founders. Some states have even passed laws requiring that its electors choose their party’s candidate, thus nullifying qualification altogether.

So, I think the U.S. should have abolished the Electoral College a long time ago. But it won’t happen any time soon. Since Republicans have benefited from this farce twice in this century, and they now control both houses in Congress plus the White House, they are not likely to agree with this thinking. The USA will continue for now with its antiquated, racist Electoral College. Yet over fifty nations in the last century adopted democracy, with the U.S. as model, but with no electoral college in any of them. The popular vote wins every time. In my judgment, that’s the way it should be if a nation really wants its citizens to be equal before the law, united, and truly be able to say, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more Perfect Union, . . .”

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