What are the benefits to the US Electoral College system?
So I’m a New Zealander and I have a pretty good idea on how the electoral college system works but it honestly sounds like something that can be easily corrupted and it feels like it renders the popular vote absolutely useless unless I’m totally missing something obvious?
So yeah if someone could explain to me what the benefits of such a system are, that would be awesome.
Edit - Thanks for the replies so far, already learning a lot!
the main ‘advantage’ i believe is that it allows non-voting people to lend weight to the votes of those who do vote. it allows states to disenfranchise voters, without that impacting their state’s influence on national politics. it also allows smaller states a larger proportional influence than their population would make reasonable.
personally, i don’t see those as advantages, but i’m not some wealthy slave owner from the 1700s.
I am an American. There are none other than ensuring the ruling class continues to wield unbalanced power over the masses.
Upon the founding of this country the office of president was very severely limited in what its function was (technically still is, which has been the great grift of American politics—true power is in congress but no one pays attention to congressional elections).
Nowadays the presidency has expanded a bit from its original design, to the point that it really should be a directly elected office, but it is very difficult to change the constitution of this country so the electoral college remains.
Like most weird things with the American federal government, you have to remember that at the founding, the individual states were much more autonomous, more similar to individual countries than they are now.
Primarily, the electoral college was one of many compromises made between the states so that all of them would sign on and join the union. It was deliberately designed to give smaller states a disproportionate say in the presidential election, to sooth their fears that they would end up being controlled by the larger more populous states (again, at the time, people would have identified much more strongly with their state than with the federal union.) So, the benefit was that it gave the smaller states enough of a say that they were willing to join the union.
If you conceive of the United States as a single nation state, which many today do, but was not historically a universal norm, then there’s no real benefit and only serves to help Republicans maintain power, since less populous states tend to vote Republican. This is what most people tend to believe, especially people on the left, and why you largely see most people online oppose the electoral college.
If you conceive of these United States as a group of states and not just a giant nation state, then the electoral college allows the separate states some hedge against being dominated by their larger neighbors. Almost no one actually believes this. You’ll mostly see Republicans bring up this argument, but by and large they’re hypocritical about it(they’ll use states rights when it serves them, and federal power when convenient). There are some people who do truly think that the states should be left to govern themselves, as a matter of principle and not just as part of a political game to get their way when convenient, but they are very rare.
Just look at how the EU government works, they ended up with a very similar system, just with a parliamentary twist. It’s a bit of a natural compromise when you have a bunch of nations with their own identity coming together to form a larger body.
In general, complicated electoral policies help maintain the status quo and a disconnect between the people and the state. It makes the people always think that things are bad because they didn’t use the system right. Come on guys we need more voters. Come on guys we need to focus on swing States. Actually guys we need to vote in Congress too. Guys we also need local elections. Omg guys, we forgot about the supreme court!!
Rather than revolting against your government, you will always be presented with another route forward that won’t take you there.
It helps candidates that don’t actually have a policy win elections anyway. Helps the side that keeps losing popular elections get into office regardless.
The main benefit is that it pushes a lot of issues to a more fault tolerant system.
Technically, the election of President was not supposed to be decided by the people. Only two state legislatures devolved the authority to choose the Electors in the Electoral College to a vote when Washington was elected. All states voted for the President after the Civil War, but the layout wasn’t even.
In its current state, the Electoral College provides a fire break between the different states in how they vote. The states are supposed to run all elections, which may have impacts on who gets elected.
The system becomes easy enough for a lawyer to understand
Seriously, the reason we keep it is that it’s written into the constitution. Now is not the time to use either method to amend, so we’re stuck with it.
There’s no reason for it to exist, though I can see its utility before communications were instant.
This may sound cynical, but in my experience with it, 100 people are a lot easier to bribe than 230 million.
E: see, the people vote, and the EC are supposed to vote for what their state’s people vote for. But, as free citizens, they’re allowed to vote for who they want. So, we may get into situations, where the popular vote in a state was for A, but the EC vote was for B. The EC are supposed to represent their state, but should also be allowed to vote for the candidate they think is best (like the other citizens). IMO, it should be a point system. Each state gets the points of the EC count they currently have. The state’s popular vote decides the candidate that gets the points of the state. The EC is disolved. Done. This allows the popular vote to win, while still maintaining the original reason for the EC (rural states have less people, but now have as much of a voting power as urban states, when compared to popular votes alone).
EC is great when you’ve got too many people to tally votes efficiently. So basically it’s only use since the advent of the telegraph is to ensure mega cities don’t disproportionately affect rural locations via election results. With EC, rural states have more weight than they otherwise would. I still think we should switch to a popular vote for elections.
What doesn’t? That rural states have more weight via the EC than they would in a popular vote? It’s not a benefit to the country and citizens as a whole, but it is to those individual states.
Sorry for confusion, thought you were saying it had a benefit.
My country has Mixed Member Proportional, which means even minorities get some level of representation. I prefer it to winner-takes-all systems like what we had when I was a kid.
Saying it’s more efficient was meant to be a little tongue in cheek. It’s not now. It was a few hundred years ago when communication was still done by horseback.
Having local governments does mitigate the effect megacities have on rural locations, yes, but not regarding national elections. An argument I’ve heard time and time again for keeping the EC is that without it, each president would be decided by NYC and LA.
I guess most other governments would never need a system like that given I don’t imagine there’s any other country in the world that is made up of as many States as the US.
We have an interesting electoral system in NZ called MMP which is essentially a first across the post system so even if a party gets more votes than anyone else, it they didn’t get enough to cross the post/finish line, they don’t win and so a coalition can be formed by smaller parties that got less votes to get across the finish line and therefore the country is then run by multiple political parties.
The “popular vote” is also not a perfect system. When there are a majority of rural voters in area, and those voters are poorly educated, they come up with some interesting choices of town mayors, who then have no clue how to actually run a town council and provide services (not inside the US but just saying, no political system seems to be perfect).
It’s a decent idea that’s been devastatingly crippled. We could fix almost all the problems with it by doing two things: unbinding electors, and uncapping the House. If more states moved to a proportional system, that would help, too.
The thing is… to forbid states to bind their electors (binding means the elector is not free to choose their vote for President, but must vote as dictated by state law) or to force states to choose electors proportionally, is beyond the power of the federal government. It would be better for everyone if states did this on their own, of course, but they can’t be forced to do so.
Uncapping the House is desirable both in itself (for greater, and more granular, representation in Congress) and would also make the EC more representative by allowing more electors to populous states, without diminishing the representation of less populous states. But making the EC more democratic, without the check that unbound electors provide, could be dangerous, pushing the country further towards populism.
But alternatively, it could be easily abused in the opposite direction. Better to just get rid of it and replace with some better voting system in my opinion.
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