A tortured 2020 election again puts the spotlight on the Electoral College

As Election Day has dragged on to become Election Week, the days of anxious waiting and dubious tea-leaf reading may have reminded many Catholics of the selection of a new pope.

While there’s no white smoke wafting over Pennsylvania, the Electoral College and the College of Cardinals once shared strong similarities when the U.S. body was created in 1788. And the College of Cardinals may have even inspired the name of the Electoral College, which doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution.

But years of well-meaning democratic reforms to the Electoral College system have stripped away these similarities, causing some critics now to question whether the Electoral College should even continue to exist.

Since Election Day, former Vice President Joe Biden has held a comfortable lead over President Donald Trump in the national popular vote, but the process has been a nail-biter because the president isn’t elected nationally, which leaves many modern voters asking, “Why do we even do this?”

Michael Towle, a professor of political science at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, said it all boils down to federalism.

“The strongest argument is a constitutional one. That is that we are a federal republic and that it preserves the role of the states because, in order to win the presidency, you have to go from state to state,” Towle said.

The Electoral College is a group of 538 people. The number of electors each state holds in the electoral college is determined by the size of its congressional delegation. In addition, the District of Columbia is allotted three electors. For example, Maryland has 10 electors, one for each of the eight congressional districts and one for each of its two Senate seats.

Although keeping the states front and center was the primary motivation, Towle said, expertise did play a role.

The framers of the Constitution envisioned that these electors would be insulated from popular pressure. As respected pillars of the community, these electors would be highly educated, well-informed and committed to the common good much like the cardinals of the Catholic Church who are entrusted with selecting the pope. In theory, this body could act as a backstop against a hasty, ill-informed choice of the people.

“It was intended to create a sort of informed, deliberative body that would make a wise choice. It was not meant to directly convey the wishes of the average Joe,” said Julie Varner Walsh, a political podcaster and former legislative lobbyist for the Maryland Catholic Conference. “So the original design for the Electoral College is nothing like what it is today.”

Being an elector is now mostly a ceremonial position. (Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is one of New York’s electors this year.) Electors now routinely give votes to the candidate who won the popular vote in their state. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia even have laws prohibiting electors from voting contrary to the result of the popular vote.

Therefore, without that expertise factor of the College of Cardinals, the Electoral College is now merely a geographically proxy for the popular vote, and an imperfect one at that, which has led to calls for it to be dissolved.

The chief complaint is that the Electoral College gives small states with low populations disproportionate amounts of power. For example, in 2016, a Wyoming voter had 3.6 times more influence in the presidential race than a California voter because of the Electoral College. But that may be by design, Towle said.

“The one thing that James Madison was most concerned about was the tyranny of the majority. And his concern (was that) if the majority controlled everything it would eventually crush the minority,” said Towle, a parishioner of St. John in Westminster.

However, Towle warns it is equally problematic if the minority controls everything.

Only five times in U.S. history has the president lost the popular vote but won the electoral college, but it’s happened twice in the past 20 years, in 2000 and 2016.

Also, some say the system allows competitive swing states to set too much of the agenda. Issues such as fracking dominated the 2020 presidential debates because of its importance to the key state of Pennsylvania, overshadowing an issue such as climate change, a topic critical to fire-ravaged Western states such as California and Oregon.

But the Electoral College isn’t without its supporters. They point to the fact that major cities including New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles already dominate most areas of American life from finance to culture to technology. Giving small states and rural areas more say in politics helps level the playing field.

“A small-state person would argue that if this system didn’t exist, then the only concerns would be the concerns of California,” said Walsh, a parishioner of St. Peter the Apostle in Libertytown.

Towle said part of the reason that the Electoral College has endured is that there is no good alternative. A purely national vote could give rise to multiple parties, potentially splitting the vote so a president could be elected without enough support of the country to effectively govern, Towle said.

Towle also cautions against solving problems that have developed relatively recently with the most permanent of fixes – changing the constitution.

“I would just say, yes, we can solve the problem according to the politics of the year 2020. But what about the politics of the year 2042?” Towle said. “I don’t like changing our Constitution over a short-term political gain.”

Walsh said doing away with the Electoral College isn’t the only option. Other states could take the lead of Maine and Nebraska and award their electoral vote proportionally rather than winner take all. For example, in Maine, Biden won the state overall but lost Maine’s rural 1st Congressional District. Conversely, Trump won Nebraska overall but lost the state’s 2nd Congressional District, centered on Omaha.

However, Towle said proportional systems in states larger than Maine and Nebraska, could lead to more gerrymandering – the process of drawing congressional districts to benefit a particular political party.

“I do think it would be good for Americans to consider whether this vestige of our 18th-century self is well suited to our 21st century,” said Walsh, a former political columnist for the Catholic Review. “I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it’s a conversation we should be having.”

Email Tim Swift at tswift@CatholicReview.org

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