A Letter to the Electoral College

Dear Electoral College,

I never dreamed I’d be writing you, but here I am. I have discovered your dirty little secret. Your designers tried to hide it, but it’s embedded in our system and when we look seriously, it’s there for all to see.

The first time I recall hearing about you was in Miss Louters' history class. The one held in that dungeon basement classroom under the auditorium with the plumbing and venting system hanging from the ceiling. (Little did we suspect we were being treated to the advance chic of 21st century restaurants.) Anyone else would have resented such a room for teaching, but Miss Louters made it cool. Her magic influence made those grey cement walls vibrate with history as she walked and lectured and threw the occasional book or chalk. We all loved her and believed everything she told us.

So on the fateful day when she told us about the Electoral College, she gave all the important reasons why you were there: to stand up for the minority and the oppressed. To keep the big states from running rampant over the little ones. To make sure that democracy was democratic. Her explanation was overly detailed for our early adolescent minds and it made more or less sense because it was about being fair. And democracy is all about fairness.

So we all believed. I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker: the Electoral College makes sure the majority does not oppress the minority. It protects the underdog. That was what the Constitution and all those founding fathers of ours were about. After all, they were the underdogs when George III was taxing them without their representation. So the Electoral College was just more of our exercise of the freedom and liberty we fought for in the War of Independence.

Why is it then, that every time I have voted, I have wondered. I have voted quite a few times over the decades: whether in person or absentee, it is my right and responsibility. I vote. But there was always a niggling feeling that my vote didn’t really count. After all, our individual votes don’t elect our president. We have an Electoral College that makes sure things are fair. Sometimes when we all get out and vote, the majority vote for the person who doesn’t win the Electoral College votes.  Five times the popular vote and you, Electoral College, have not agreed. And you have determined the winner when most of us cast our votes for the other. If the majority of us don’t choose our president, how does “one person, one vote” actually work?

It would appear that it doesn’t. So why do we still have a college of people voting and in most cases giving all the votes of a state to the person who wins 51% of the popular vote? What part of democracy is that? What is fair about being in a state where I vote with 48% of the people and all our state electoral votes count for the other guy in the overall grand scheme? 

So I did some homework because every time someone dredges up this mystery, people older and wiser and more politically savvy (or just more brain-washed) remind them that the Electoral College is about protecting the few against the many. And it’s about being fair and just. They get long winded and repeat all the arguments I read in the websites about why we have this complicated system—to protect us from ourselves.

Then I found out why we really have you. And the explanations are all pretty much basically true. But all the explainers, including my hero, Miss Louters, failed to explain how you got started. Why were the founding fathers so prescient and worried about protecting the “minority”?

It turns out, they were the minority. Yep. Turns out they weren’t all that much excited about pure democracy because that meant that everyone was supposed to be endowed with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We know the drill. But quite a few of our founding fathers were wealthy slave owners and in the minority. Madison, one of the architects of our Constitution, designed it to safe-guard democracy on his terms and those of his fellow rich plantation magnates. Madison and the other slave-owning founders could see that if people started getting the hang of their rights as people and understood that democracy meant they had a voice in the government, the situation might not go well for them. If straight up democracy was the name of the game, they stood to lose quite a bit. So they had to figure out how to protect their own minority rights (the lives and work of their slaves and their plantations) within the context of a democratic government purported to be founded on the sovereignty of the people. Much later Lincoln described it as government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Of course, when Madison and company were hammering out the Constitution, they had to create ways to protect the minority of extremely wealthy people from having to abide by the will of the general populace. They didn’t want to have to pay taxes to provide for the welfare or education or health or anyone else. So they invented you, Electoral College, and the Senate, both designed to protect states (usually slave states) with smaller (white) populations by favouring them. And to insure that minority people like slaves and First Nation people would not be able to access this democracy, they were legally designated as three-fifths of a person.  As for who could vote, they certainly couldn’t—only white male property owners had that right. 

To protect slavery, non-free persons were less than full humans and had no voting rights. So much for the self-evident truth of all men being created equal. Now the secret is out: the freedom our founders were protecting was their elite status so they could enjoy their own productive property without being accountable to anyone else for it.

And now, hundreds of years later, we still cling to an archaic pomposity designed to prevent the will of the general populace from overpowering the elite wealthy who use their influence to prevent the government from raising the taxes on their millions and putting it to work for the average people for things like education, health, police, parks, libraries, roads, and transport. 

But slavery is over, as Madison knew it eventually would be. So why do we still have the Electoral College? Because although slavery is over, there is still an elite group of wealthy people who want to keep control of the situation so they are not subject to the “tyranny” of democracy—living by the will of the people. The Electoral College is brilliantly designed to create the illusion of fairness. 

There are several big arguments in favour of keeping you around, Electoral College. One of them is our marvellous two-party system.  Although we have all seen numerous other parties and candidates listed on our ballots, and our democracy allows people to freely run for office, none of them ever has a chance of winning because you, Electoral College assure they never will. You hold a binary system in place that is nearly iron-clad. Getting another party into the game is insanely difficult. Despite the move for progressive parties and green parties as well as all the ones we have all heard of: communists and libertarians—no one stands a chance against the two major players. And the weird thing is these two parties are like siblings who simply cannot get along. As soon as one gets into office, all the bipartisan chitchat goes out the window and the one who loses spends the next four years trying to undermine what the current leadership is attempting to implement. But it is all part of the game because the winners, aside from their own agenda, are trying to undo what the previous party accomplished during their stint. 

And the folks defending you, Electoral College, say that this is a good thing. We wouldn’t want the confusion of more parties, more voices, more opinions. No we are much better off with two parties who (at the time of this election) offer us the vast selection of two white males in their seventies who urge us to vote for them by tearing the other guy apart.

Now, why would it seem so important to keep a two-party system? Because, it is argued, that when you have multiple parties, the only way to get elected is to create coalitions. And we all see how coalitions have failed in Europe. Oh, have we? It seems that in fact, Europe is learning about process as more voices are being heard. People are having to compromise and implement a little give-and-take. Elections are not simply a “winner take all” when parties have to negotiate and listen. Of course, it’s a situation rife for spin-doctors. But let’s not fool ourselves by trying to say we don’t have spin-doctors here. They are part of the political landscape as long as people are trying to hear what affirms what they already believe instead of being open to what is truly happening.

Electoral College, I wish you could quietly take yourself out of the picture. Let us try real elections without you. Back when we were a country of only a million or so and two parties was plenty to represent both points of view, you may have had a vital role. But 320 million is far too many people to be heard by two predominantly white, middle and upper class people who are not completely convinced that the climate is changing on our planet or that we should be doing something about it.

Please, go swiftly, go wildly, but go.