Viewpoint: L. Phillips Runyon III – The Electoral College is flunking out

Published: 10-28-2024 11:01 AM

Few of us fully understand the workings of the Electoral College, but it has come to dominate the presidential election process in ways the Founders could not have imagined or intended.

The basics are that each state has a number of electoral votes equal to the number of its senators and congressmen – i.e., two senators and two congressmen means four electoral votes, as in New Hampshire. And with just a couple of minor exceptions, the candidate who wins the popular vote in a state gets all the electoral votes the state has.

The consequences can be extreme, in that even though millions of a state’s votes may have been cast for one candidate, if the other candidate receives just a few more votes, those millions of votes cast for the former candidate will have no impact at all in determining the winner of the election.

So, in a state that heavily supports one party’s candidate, the supporters of the other candidate have very little incentive to vote at all, because they know their votes won’t make any difference in the outcome. That hardly seems the American way, much less ensuring that everyone’s votes will be of equal value.

But it’s even worse than that. In the half-dozen or so “swing states,” where the popular vote is likely to be closest and the outcome could swing either way, the political scientists who study voting dynamics have determined that there’s likely to be just one county’s votes that will determine the final electoral outcome for the entire state. So, even in those states where a voter may hope for real value from his/her vote, there’s still no compelling incentive to go to the polls if the voter isn’t from the critical county.

Then, why do we have this patently unfair system that’s actually designed to frustrate and undermine the wishes of a great majority of the nation’s voters? After all, presidents have been elected with many fewer popular votes – sometimes millions fewer – but enough electoral votes in the right places to put them over the top, most recently during the 2016 election.

Why does that not seem like a fair or reasonable system that we ought to strenuously perpetuate?

What’s more, the Electoral College wasn’t even a good idea to begin with. When the Constitution was first proposed, it would have allocated congressmen among the states based on their populations. Not surprisingly, the Southern states didn’t like that plan, because they weren’t nearly as populous as the Northern states, and so would have been outvoted in Congress. This caused them great concern because they feared their slave-centered economies would be in jeopardy if they were outvoted by all those rabid, Northern abolitionists. The compromise finally brokered allowed each enslaved human being to be counted as three-fifths of a person (though not as a citizen with any rights), so the millions of those fractional persons would increase the number of representatives the Southern states would be awarded.

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

Maggie Goodlander defeats Lily Tang Williams in 2nd Congressional District
Tractor-trailer catches fire in Jaffrey
BUSINESS: Monadnock Eats brings dining and catering to downtown Peterborough
Tim McGough picks up state Senate seat for Republicans
Local residents came out in droves for Tuesday’s election
Rindge joins Purple Heart Trail

Of course, more representatives meant more electoral votes for those slave-holding states, which, in turn, helped perpetuate the enslavement of up to 4 million human beings for another 76 years, only to be ended after the deaths of almost 700,000 Americans during the Civil War.

So, pardon me if I’m not a fan of the Electoral College. And not only for the part it played in the denial of civil and human rights for people who never came here voluntarily in the first place and then were treated like dirt, but also because of the part it now plays in denying the equal protection of every American’s vote.. Frankly, if a candidate can’t persuade even a majority of the nation’s voters to support what he or she stands for, where every vote counts exactly the same, is it really better to have someone elected just because he or she benefits from a system that was based on a despicable premise to begin with? See you at the polls.

L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court.