Calls to end the electoral college are not about protecting democracy | Opinion

Nearly every element of the U.S. Constitution is a compromise resulting from long and often contentious arguments. There was one thing, though, upon which nearly all parties agreed: the Electoral College. Alexander Hamilton spoke to this in Federalist 68, writing that the appointment of the President “is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents.”

The major point of contention at the time was the construction of Congress. Citizens from more populous states favored representation based on population. Citizens from less populous states wanted representation based on statehood. What emerged, the Great Compromise, combined both methods. Legislative power would be shared by a House of Representatives, based on the former, and a Senate, based on the latter.

The Electoral College raised no eyebrows because it was simply grafted to the Great Compromise. Each state would receive a number of electoral votes equal to the number of the state’s representatives and senators. Today, these range from a high of 55 for California to a low of three for each of the seven least populous states.

So how did we get to the point where Democratic politicians, most recently Elizabeth Warren, are calling for dismantling the only thing on which virtually all the Founders agreed? The answer is simple: Democrats believe they would have a better chance of winning without it. Expediency explains why politicians do just about everything they do. But for the nation, the important question is not about who might win with or without the Electoral College. The important question is whether, in principle, the Electoral College is still a good idea.

It is. The Electoral College is a good idea because there is more to representation than raw population. Population is important, but so, too, is geography.

As was the case when the Constitution was framed, rural and urban voters today have decidedly different interests. The Electoral College considers both. More than 80 percent of the Electoral College’s votes are based on state populations, with the remainder based on geography. Because Democrats do well in urban areas, if geography no longer mattered, they would never again need to campaign in nor care about the country’s sparsely populated areas.

This is no guarantee of electoral victory, though. If geography didn’t matter, Republican campaign strategies would change also. Whereas Republicans have long written off states like California under a popular vote model, Republicans would gain an incentive to campaign there. How all of this would affect the popular vote is anyone’s guess. What would happen to the attention paid to vast swaths of the country, however, is not. That attention would disappear.

But the move to scuttle the Electoral College is not about principle. It’s about winning. How do we know? Because Democrats could achieve almost the same outcome as a popular vote without touching the Electoral College. Under the Constitution, each state has the power to decide for itself how to assign its electoral votes. Democrats control the legislatures in 18 states. They could propose tomorrow that those states’ electoral votes be allocated proportionally according to the states’ popular votes. Two states, Nebraska and Maine, already do something like this.

But Democrats won’t propose this. If they did, solidly Democratic states like California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey, would end up allocating some of their electoral votes to Republican candidates. This reveals the real motivation behind the push to eliminate the Electoral College: Democrats want to dictate to Republican states how those states assign their electoral votes.

While the current push to disband the Electoral College comes from a host of Democrats, the Republicans would do precisely the same thing were the situation reversed. How do we know? They care about winning exactly as much as their Democratic counterparts.

This lack of principle is reason enough not to take either party all that seriously. An even better reason is that the nature of representation itself is on the line. The Framers gave us a Constitution in which both population and geography mattered. Until there is a principled reason to shift away from this, we shouldn’t. And wanting your preferred party to win is not a principled reason.

Antony Davies is associate professor of economics at Duquesne University. James R. Harrigan teaches in the department of Political Economy and Moral Science at the University of Arizona. They host the weekly podcast, Words & Numbers.