As posted to TheTimes of Israel Blogs, and to FaceBook.
We have just completed
the process of electing a new President of the USA, and, as occurs every four
years, the Electoral College of the USA has again come under scrutiny.
As my friend Stuart Schnee has queried on FaceBook: Is there a good reason to keep the electoral college now?
Like Stuart I am
conservative about changing things in the political structure of a reasonably
successful democracy (actually, a Republic - as James Madison says [“A
republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation
takes place” …] in Federalist No. 10 of "The Federalist Papers").
However, I have been
hearing about this and thinking about it for at least fifty years now
(political awareness begins early in my family), so I have some thoughts to
share on the topic.
It DOES seem to me that
that there is no longer a rationale for keeping the US Electoral College (and I
say this without any relation to the present Presidential elections, in which I
understand that Hillary Clinton has actually won the popular vote, though
having lost the Presidency – after all, four other Presidential elections have
gone that way over the years as well).
Looking over the
Federalist Papers, I see a host of explanations for having an Electoral College
of which few, if any, seem to have any applicability today.
The electors aren't even
people whom we, the voters, know, anymore. We are much more likely to have in
depth information about the candidates than to know anything about the electors
(even their names) - the opposite of the situation which pertained when the US
Constitution was written.
There is no reasonable,
democratic way to guarantee that at least one of the houses of Congress be
dominated by a different party than the President's - which seems to me the
best way to guarantee against "the tyranny of the majority" which so
many of the USA's Founding Fathers were fearful of - but, I assume that this
why we also have the Judicial Branch of the USA Government.
Therefore, it seems to me
that the Electoral College has "run its course" and should be
abolished, and that the President might just as well be elected by direct
popular vote - the other checks and balances of the American system should
protect against the gross abuses that many feared, and wanted the Electoral
College to protect against, in the late 18th century.
However, this change will
only come to pass when enough of the USA electorate and legislators actually
invest enough of their time on this issue to come to an informed opinion about
it (and even then, there may be a majority who, nevertheless, want to remain
with the traditional Electoral College), and I, personally, am not particularly
concerned about this.
After all, the system is NOT
UNFAIR to the CANDIDATES for President, since they all know how it operates and
all plan their campaign strategies in order to win a majority of the electors –
it is just silly, in the age of instantaneous electronic communication, to
continue with a system constructed largely based upon the constraints of a period
when one could not communicate between one end of the (much smaller) USA and
the other in less than a few days of travel by horse or boat!
Since altering the
Constitution is a serious matter the Founding Fathers made approving an
amendment a rather involved process, though it is possible and has been done
several times when enough public interest was raised on a topic.
Therefore, whenever there
is enough popular pressure (from citizen actions groups, or whatever – if this
ever actually occurs), the houses of Congress, or the legislatures of the
states (each option is possible), can, by a two-thirds majority, cause the initiation
of the process which can, if ratified by three-fourths of the states, alter the
situation to something less silly.
Or maybe not enough
people are really interested enough for this process to occur with regard to the
Electoral College, and most people are willing to live with this silly
institution even in this day and age?
