Politics Professor Explains the Electoral College

[Music] why do we have an electoral college the topic of presidential selection was very much contested debated at the Constitutional Convention and a number of options were considered including direct popular election which was actually rejected and election by the legislature which was the method that was used for selecting governors in a number of the states the solution that they ultimately uh landed on was the idea of an electoral [Music] college now the idea of an electoral college was that each state would be assigned a number of electors based on the size of their Congressional Delegation

so a state's electoral college is the number of members of the US House of Representatives it has combined with two to represent the two senators that the states have now they are not the same people in fact a congressman can't be an elector at the same time they wanted the Electoral College function as something of a mini legislature that had only one job the selection of a president and it seems to be that the original intention was that electors would be chosen and then once selected they would be asked to use their independent judgment so

they they would deliberate they would think about Alternatives and then finally on an individual basis they would make a choice and the idea here was to balance a number of factors uh one of those factors was obviously the will of the people needed to be registered but it's important to note and Alexander Hamilton talks about this in some detail in Federalist 68 that registering the will of the people was not the only consideration they also wanted to be sure that they selected someone who Hamilton said was preeminent for ability and virtue in other words the

outcome mattered too they were concerned about registering the will of the people about government by consent but they were also concerned that they uh secured a president who was going to be conducive to good government who was going to ex the laws effectively to administer them justly and efficiently and so they wanted to make sure that they got the right person in the office now from the earliest days of government under the Constitution the Electoral College didn't really function in the way that it seems that it was intended of course for the first two elections

Washington was the man he dominated the political scene he was elected unanimously in 1788 89 and when he was reelected in 1792 all that was really necessary was for Washington to make it known that he was willing to serve in that capacity again and he was reelected unanimously once Washington exits the political stage however things begin to change you have the the uh introduction of partisanship into the presidential selection process where you have Federalists and you have democratic repu Republicans and they are competing and so what ends up happening is parties nominate candidates and states

begin the process of pledging electors or binding electors in some way so that instead of exercising their independent judgment electors if chosen will be bound to the person they have publicly proclaimed that they are supporting so you have a change in the system away from this idea of electors functioning as legislators and using their best judgment the other thing that happens is that states begin to realize that they can maximize their importance to the presidential selection process if electors from that state cast their vote in a block so now you have the introduction over time

and of course all this happens gradually of what we now know as the winner take all system whereby if a a presidential candidate wins that state even if by the narrowest of margins even if not necessarily with a majority he secures 100% of that State's Electoral College vote so if that's the case if the electoral college has never really functioned in the way that it was originally intended why do we retain it I think one thing to think about is that we have to remember that again presidential selection is not simply about securing the will

of the people the the Constitutional system separation of powers federalism all of these layers and processes that are included in the Constitution are designed in many ways to check the raw will of the majority you know they had an example before them and that was the British parliamentary system if you look at the way British parliamentary style governments work whether it's in Britain or Australia or Canada the idea behind a parliamentary system is that the majority rules you have a fusion of the executive and the legislative branches whereby the Prime Minister the the head of

the government is also the leader of the majority in the legislature you have a system that doesn't not have a constitutional order that enumerates powers and limits the power of the majority so the system is really designed to put the majority in a position to be a kind of sitting Constitutional Convention our system does not allow for that and the framers of our constitution I think very specifically rejected that option they said look we don't want to system where the majority can do whatever it wants we had some experience with this in the period uh

between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and that really didn't turn out so well right what they learned was that these kinds of majorities can be just as tyrannical as kings and Aristocrats and ministers in Far Away places right this this idea that the people can be despotic and so they they wanted to restrain that another factor that we might consider is that the Electoral College and the electoral college system dictates uh campaign strategy uh campaign rhetoric right dictates campaign Behavior right it forces presidential candidates to campaign Nationwide it forces them into places where

they might not necessarily go presidential candidates cannot simply Retreat into their safe areas and look to build up the most massive majorities possible in those safe areas because at a certain point in the electoral college system heaping up votes doesn't really help you now it's nice to say that you've won a national popular majority but our system is not decided by national popular majorities and so for a Democratic candidate for example to rack up huge majorities in California is great but only up to a point because again once you've secured the electors from that state

there's really nothing more to gain it also I think encourages or at least it used to encourage moderation among candidates which is to say candidates have to put together platforms and campaign strategies that appeal to diverse constituencies all over the country in other words it's a reflection of the fact that even today right and even with all of the Transformations that have taken place in technology in the way our government functions we are still a federal republic now finally let's take a look at the other side of this and the other side of this is

what would the Presidential selection process look like without an electoral college well the first thing I think you'd notice is that you'd have the transformation from what we might think of as retail politics to what is sometimes called wholesale politics instead of being forced to go into diners to go to uh Township halls in little places candidates would put their resources M to a much greater extent even a much greater extent than we see right now in a national popular vote based election that would mean the major media markets where advertising dollars bought could translate

much more readily into votes obtained and in a national popular vote system a vote obtained for a Democratic candidate in California or republican candidate in Texas is equally valuable so there would be an incentive there to to pile up those votes right through National mass media campaigns I think it's also the case that you would see uh a a a landscape where Urban politics and urban political issues dominated because those were going to be the places where the greatest concentration of votes took place so rural issues agricultural issues small town issues right those areas those

those vast sways of the country in between those big cities the issues that mattered to them would be largely neglected and the people that lived in those areas I think would be increasingly treated as second or third class citizens because they're really weren't a lot of votes to harvest there I think finally election Integrity issues would suddenly become Nationwide because every tiny Precinct in America would be a place to scavenge to harvest a few ballots so a few votes here and a few votes there all over the country and so the the the issues with

ensuring fair and legal elections right would become vastly increased and the the amount of resources that it would be necessary to deploy in order to ensure that those elections are fair and honest would increase exponentially and every little Precinct in the country would have to be on the alert so even though the Electoral College does not function in the way that its authors originally believed it would function it still carries out very important responsibilities within the system and I think that in the end even though it doesn't mechanically function in the way that it's authors

believed it still operates in that Spirit it still contributes to the idea of a federal constitutional republic [Music] [Music]