by Ashley Evans
As the framers of the Constitution wrote the document, one of the large questions at the time was the distribution of power between the states. Remember they didn’t want any one group to have more control than the other. When they tackled the issue of representation they spent time trying to determine how to distribute it equally.
In the formative years of this country just as we do now, several states, namely New York and Pennsylvania had large concentrations of people. This left the rest of the forming country to feel as if they would be left to the will of these two power house states. Rules were established to try to even the playing field. Therefore, in Congress, the Senate has two Senators despite the state population, but the number of seats in the House of representatives is proportional to a state’s population size. They also decided that they should create a body to govern the presidential election with representatives equal to the number of Congressional seats. They formed the electoral college which was Article II of the Constitution, but later became the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution. It gave each state the same number of electors as their House representatives plus the two senators.
The Constitution however, allows for the electors and rules for each elector to be determined by the state party. It is the Secretary of State who is responsible for the oversight in each state. The potential electors are generally members of each party that have either held positions or have had long lasting or major contributions to the party in each state. Many of the states that we often hear about in the media are states with a relatively large number of electors and the state’s general population are closely divided between the two major parties. The electors are slated by the states central committees or at the party national conventions.
Electors that are able to vote are then based on the popular votes. This is done in two ways. There are winners takes all states. In these states, such as Florida, the presidential candidate that wins the popular vote statewide gets all the electoral votes in that state. In other states, the winner of the statewide popular votes tends to receive the two electoral votes that represent the senate seats and then electoral votes are cast based on the winner of each precinct/district. Therefore when we vote, we vote for the electors to vote for the President.
At this point, we get the reason for the creation of the electoral college and the problem of how the Electoral College has fallen short as the country has continued to grow. There have been five elections where the number of electoral votes cast did not reflect the popular vote. In most recent years those elections were in 2000 and then 2016. In October, The Guardian wrote on the uphill battle faced heading into the November election.
In 2016 President Trump was elected despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. This is due to the distribution of electors across the state. The Guardian cites that “While the number of electoral votes a state is assigned somewhat reflects its population, the minimum of three votes per state means that the relative value of electoral votes varies across America.
The least populous states like North and South Dakota and the smaller states of New England are overrepresented because of the required minimum of three electoral votes. Meanwhile, the states with the most people – California, Texas and Florida – are underrepresented in the electoral college.”
The Guardian also suggested, “At the moment, the electoral college favours Republicans because of the way Republican votes are distributed across the country. They are more likely to occur in states that are closely divided between the parties.”
To many the electoral college is now seen as a hindrance to the direct power of the vote. What does a free and fair election mean if the majority of the country does not agree to it’s leader? To abolish the electoral college a constitutional amendment would be required. In the last 20 years we have had two presidents that fit that bill and we are still dealing with the effects of an contested election as we await approach voting day for the electors.