by Neil Perlin
Vermont Democrat Senator Peter Welch, along with Democrat Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Brian Schatz of Hawaii, recently proposed a constitutional amendment to eliminate the “undemocratic” electoral college. They call for replacing it with presidential election by popular vote.
This idea pops up periodically, typically when Democrat presidential candidates lose elections. But supporters of the idea never say what the electoral college is or why we have it, just that it’s a bad idea… one that probably threatens “our democracy.”
Note the distinction between a “democracy” and a “constitutional republic,” which is what we are. In a democracy, the government’s job is to do what the majority of voters demand.
But in a constitutional republic, the government must also protect the rights of individual citizens and minorities. It does that through a set of checks and balances, one of which is the electoral college. The job of the electoral college is to prevent large states from running roughshod over the rights and interests of small states, like Vermont.
More specifically, the electoral college was created to give small states a voice in the election of the president and vice-president. Without it, those states would have little political influence on the election. Why?
The electoral college was created at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to solve the question of how to elect presidents. Some delegates wanted Congress to do it, but others resisted the idea because they feared that members of congress could be corrupted.
Other delegates wanted election by popular vote. (This is what today’s electoral college opponents want.) But delegates from small states resisted the idea because their votes would be swamped by votes from large states. This manifests itself in two ways today.
First, candidates would put their effort toward large, urbanized states because that’s where the most, and most conveniently located, votes are. (Lamoille county has a population of 26,000 spread over 464 square miles. Brooklyn, New York has a population of about 2.7 million, spread over 71 square miles. If you ran a presidential campaign, where would you put your effort?)
Second, many highly partisan states are considered locked up in the electoral college so candidates don’t need to devote much effort to them. (But it can be risky for a campaign to take that for granted – witness the collapse of Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall” in 2016.) But the electoral votes of those “locked up” states may not be enough for a candidate to reach the 270 votes needed to win so they have to moderate their positions to appeal to, and win electoral votes from the swing, or “purple” states. Without that need for moderation, candidates could be as polarizing as their “locked up” states allowed.
The electoral college was the compromise solution to this situation.
The electoral college gives each state a group of electors equal to the number of its representatives in Congress plus its two senators. So Vermont has three electors. In contrast, California has 54. (These numbers change as states’ populations change.)
But aren’t Vermont’s three electors just as small as its number of voters compared to those of larger states? Yes. But in a close election, those three electors might make the difference between winning or losing a presidential campaign. That’s why presidential candidates spend time in Vermont. Not as much as they spend in California or New York but it is still time.
In other words, those three electors give Vermont political clout that its population would not.
That’s why calls to end the electoral college in favor of a direct popular vote would actually hurt Vermont voters. So when Peter Welch, or anyone, calls for abolishing the electoral college, ask them how this would help Vermont.
Interestingly, another attempt to run around the electoral college is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPVIC. The NPVIC is an agreement among seventeen states, including Vermont, and the District of Columbia (oddly, all of which tend to vote Democrat) to award all their electoral votes to the presidential ticket what wins the most popular votes in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The problem with this model is that it presumes that the Democrat ticket will always win the popular vote. But if you enjoy irony, think about what the reaction among Vermont Democrats would be if the NPVIC were in effect today. Donald Trump won the national popular vote, which means he’d get Vermont’s three electoral votes.
The author is an Elmore resident.