Frequently Asked Questions About the Electoral College

Q: Why do we have the Electoral College in the first place?

A: The framers of the U.S. Constitution arrived at the Electoral College as a compromise between those who wanted direct popular election and those who wanted Congress to elect the President. They still saw our young nation as a collective of independent states, so they created a process of electing the nation's leader which reflected that view.

Also, the framers were concerned that voters would not have enough access to sufficient information about the candidates to make an informed decision, and that voters would generally vote exclusively for a candidate from their state, thereby weakening the cohesiveness of the young nation.

Q: Don't those concerns still exist?

A: Basically, no. The United States has matured into a great united country over the last 200 years, with national interests and beliefs that cross all state boundaries. We go to war and pay taxes as a country, we should vote as a country too.

Newspapers, television, radio, and the internet all provide American citizens with enormous opportunities to become informed about the presidential candidates. We are now just as well informed as the electors we vote for, so there is no need to have intermediaries to cast votes on our behalf.

Regional differences may still exist, but a candidate's home state is not a guarantee of the votes of even his or her home state, as Al Gore and the people of Tennessee will attest. Americans vote for the president they think will do the best job, not the one that hails from a particular state.

Q: What efforts have been made to change the Electoral College?

A: Several attempts have been made to get rid of the Electoral College, the last significant effort coming in 1969, when the House of Representatives passed 338-70 an amendment abolishing the Electoral College. The amendment died when it only received 54 votes in the Senate, 13 short of the required two-thirds. While this effort was ultimately unsuccessful, the overwhelming vote in the House shows that getting such an amendment passed is possible. Adding further proof that such an amendment is not only possible, but is favored by the great majority of Americans, a 1966 Gallup poll found that 63% of Americans favored a direct population of the president; a 2000 poll found that 61% did.

Q: Doesn't the Electoral College contribute to the unity of the country by requiring a distribution of popular support to be elected president?

A: No. The Electoral College actually undermines the cohesiveness of the country by creating the possibility of minority rule over the majority and by creating a system of safe states and swing states. A system which encourages the presidential campaigns to ignore two-thirds of the country is hardly one which contributes to our country's unity.

Q: But doesn't the Electoral College ensure that presidential candidates must pay attention to small states?

A: Because a state's representation in the U.S. House of Representatives is determined by its population in the census, larger states have more votes in the Electoral College than small states. However, small states end up having a greater representation in the Electoral College per capita than larger states because of the two electoral votes allotted for each state's Senators, which are not linked to population. Thus, Wyoming has one electoral vote per 164,592 residents, while California has one electoral vote per 627,253 people. This creates a situation in which a person standing on the Delaware side of the Delaware river has more than double the say of a person standing on the New Jersey side in who gets elected president.

Supporters of the Electoral College point to this as evidence that the Electoral College is working, that small states are protected from the large states. A look at the electoral map in the United States debunks this theory. We are no longer a nation in which the political divide runs along the lines of small states and large states, but one in which California, Delaware, and Maryland go one way and Texas, Georgia, and South Dakota go another.

The small-state/large-state argument is an anachronism. The truth is that the United States is a much more cohesive nation now than it was 200 years ago. We are attacked as a nation, not as a group of states. We go to war as a nation, not as a group of states. We pay taxes as a nation, not as a group of states. In picking the president, the person who would lead us on all these issues, we should vote as a nation too.

Q: What about recounts? Doesn't the Electoral College make it easier to do recounts?

A: It might, but a better way to solve the problem of recounts is to make sure up front that all eligible voters are registered and that their votes are cast and counted correctly. It's also the case that the popular vote winner could be quite clear in some elections, but the electoral vote quite close thus requiring recounts in some states, as with Florida in 2000.

Q: Wouldn't abolishing the Electoral College require amending the Constitution?

A: Yes. Abolishing the Electoral College requires a constitutional amendment, which by design is not an easy thing to do: any amendment must pass two-thirds of both houses of Congress, after which three-fourths of the states must agree to it.

Q: Shouldn't we defer to the framers of the Constitution when it comes to our elections?

A: Absolutely not. Despite the wisdom of the framers in crafting the U.S. Constitution, Americans have amended the Constitution five times to correct problems or unfairness relating to voting or our elections, including the following amendments: 15th - government can't deny the vote to a person based on color (minority suffrage); 17th - popular election of Senators; 19th - government can't deny the vote to a person based on gender (women's suffrage); 24th - no poll tax; 26th - 18 year olds can vote.

The framers recognized that values and people change; that's why they created a process by which the Constitution could be changed. In the same way Americans changed the Constitution to reflect our beliefs that women and minorities must be allowed to vote, that we can handle the responsibility of electing our Senators, or that paying a tax to vote is un-American, we should change the Constitution to place the responsibility of electing our president directly on the shoulders of the American people.

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