Democracy miscarries again, thanks to Electoral College

The Miami Herald ran a piece after the election by Joseph E. Uscinski, an associate professor of political science, titled “There’s a strong case to be made for Electoral College.” He claims that popular election of the president of the U.S. would make vote rigging easier “anywhere in the country.” Apparently he has not visited a local polling place or vote-counting huddle at the courthouse bossed by the election commissioner. There he would see lines of volunteer election judges, mostly elderly ladies with a few token men, who are very serious about their jobs. There’s a lot of scrutiny and integrity on the local level and election fraud would not be easy or widespread.

We already vote for president in 50 states, so all you have to do is transmit the final tally for each candidate to the federal level and they add the 50 numbers; no need to convert the winner’s total to electoral votes and the loser’s votes to zero.

Uscinski says that big numbers like 130 million voters are “hard for most people to comprehend.” Is he saying we can’t tell which number is bigger? This condescension preserves intact the original reasoning for the Electoral College, which was that the public really didn’t have the information or judgment to decide anything, and it should be left up to the “best men.”

Uscinski’s most peculiar argument is that the Electoral College gives a “decisive result.” What it does is skew the results wildly, with no guarantee that the person with the most votes will not go home a private citizen.

As a professor of political science should know, the result has not been decisive in a number of notorious cases. Samuel Tilden, the courageous reformer, won the election of 1876 by 250,000 votes but fell one electoral vote short. Eventually all disputed states were snookered away from him in a deal to take federal troops out of the South, and Rutherford B. Hayes became president. In 1888 Grover Cleveland had a 100,000 vote majority over Harrison but lost the election. In our time, Al Gore in 2000 won the popular vote by half a million and watched the election go to Bush. Now in the recent election, Hillary Clinton triumphed nationally by nearly 3 million votes and will see Donald Trump take the oath of office, another miscarriage of democracy.

Clearly the will of the electorate was subverted in all these cases by the flukey power of the good old boy Electoral College network.

U.S. senators weren’t popularly elected until 1913. Before that the “best men” in the state legislatures picked one of their own. So now the only holdout is the presidency.

Probably the most egregious power grab of the Electoral College is that for people who comprise the loyal opposition in areas dominated by the other party their votes count for nothing. All but two states are winner-take-all electoral contests.

One of the great figures of the Constitutional Convention was Roger Sherman, who proposed the crucial Connecticut Compromise whereby the U.S. Senate would include two senators from each state, no matter how small, and the House would include members apportioned according to population. This guaranteed power to the small states, of which Montana is a good example. If senators were based on population we wouldn’t have any senators, not one. As it is, we have a congressional delegation of three and three electoral votes. So part of the original rationale for the Electoral College was to guarantee that the small states had their say-so. We don’t need that now; the Senate is working for us just fine. What we do need is for our votes to count.

The clubby Electoral College system introduces dangerous, unnecessary distortions into a simple process and can easily declare a false winner, an unforgiveable insult to the voter. It is a mark of the civility of our country that all of the disappointed winners of the presidency took it in good grace, and I’m sure Hillary Clinton will do the same.

Carter is a resident of Libby.