With election season in full swing, Democrats, including vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, are questioning the preeminence of the Electoral College. “I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go,” Walz said at a fundraiser hosted at California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s home, according to reports.
Many Democrats describe the Electoral College as undemocratic, arguing that it diminishes the vote of the individual. In contrast to the archaic Electoral College system, democratic opponents idealize a pure democracy that elects the president by a national popular vote.
This invites the question: Is election by popular vote the original intent of our founding documents? And, for that matter, is the original intent of our Founding Fathers worth following today?
Importantly, the U.S. is not a pure democracy. It is a constitutional republic that protects individual rights even from the will of the majority.
The Electoral College acts as a safeguard to one of the primary fears of the Founding Fathers: tyranny. James Madison argued that a pure democracy paved the way for tyranny. "[In a pure democracy]," Madison wrote, “common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
The Constitution provides the necessary framework for a smaller decentralized government, which gives equal power to the states that the Electoral College protects. By giving power to the states, individuals are represented more fairly than they could be by an overarching and overreaching disproportionate vote.
The Founders spent a great deal of time composing the framework of the Electoral College in the Constitution, specifically in the 12th Amendment. The 12th Amendment states, “Each State shall appoint … a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”
In other words, a state’s entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its congressional delegation: one for each member of the House of Representatives plus two for the senators. Today, the Electoral College consists of 538 electors. As a result, a majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the president.
Without the Electoral College, a candidate for president would only have to win a handful of large states to attain the votes necessary to win the highest office of the land. The Electoral College, however, safeguards this great country by allowing each candidate to build a national coalition of individuals who have the same aspirations.
The Electoral College ensures that every state has a voice no matter the population. This means, for example, Iowans though their economy and livelihoods are different than that of Californians, yet are still represented and protected regardless of the size of the state. Just because a voter doesn’t agree with the majority population does not mean their voice should be drowned out by the will of the masses.
During campaign season, a national popular vote would cause presidential candidates to focus on just a handful of states while disregarding others, even though the president would represent the entire country.
Currently, 17 states and Washington, D.C. have joined what is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. These jurisdictions, all left-leaning, include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. In 2023, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) signed the compact.
When a state passes legislation to join the National Popular Vote Compact, it pledges that all of its electoral votes will be given to whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote nationwide, rather than the candidate who actually won the state. These laws will take effect only when states with a majority of the electoral votes pass similar legislation and join the compact. These governors are willingly giving up their state’s 12th Amendment rights, the rights that the people were constitutionally placed to protect and represent.
The essence of being an American is the ability to think freely and pursue the American Dream. A warning for the free people of this nation is this: One’s voice will be drowned out if the Electoral College is dismantled, because America will no longer protect every citizen’s freedoms, but only the majority’s.
Amelia Koehn-Prout earned her B.A. in political science and minored in history. She works as the public affairs coordinator and correspondent at Judicial Watch.
