"But the genius of the founders!"
Please.
The Electoral College was compromise piled on top of compromise.
Keep in mind that the founders were not supporters of democracy. They did not believe that "the people" were capable of making decisions. They did want national policy to be determined by those who were already in power, and this decision-making included who would be the president. The participants at the Constitutional convention debated several different scenarios for selecting a president. One solution was to have the legislature choose the president, this, as well as a suggestion for direct election, was rejected. The former due to separation of powers considerations and the latter because they simply didn't trust "the people". Keep in mind that each state set its own standards for who would be able to vote, and that in general the franchise was limited to white male landowners. The legislatures of each state, often a self-selected collection of oligarchs that were representatives in name only, determined who the electors would be and who they would vote for.
So the one compromise was to set up a system where the will of the voters, even though they were a small percentage of the actual people, could be circumvented if those people made the "wrong choice".
The second compromise relates to how the legislature was set up. At the time of the writing of the Constitution the ruling class of each of the states viewed each state as a sovereign nation (what "state" used to mean) and were keen to maintain their own power and influence. The governments of the states with smaller populations did not want a legislature with membership based on population, since that would put them at a disadvantage. The leaders of the larger states did not want to give up the advantage that greater population gave them. The compromise was a two-chamber legislature, with one chamber's members elected according to population and the other, the Senate, with two senators from each state. Initially the senators were selected by each state's legislature, not elected.
This compromise made sense when each state viewed themselves as separate and unique, and only associated with the others in a glorified alliance, and not subdivisions of a federal nation. This is hardly the case anymore.
A compromise within a compromise was made in order to entice the slave states to enter the union. A huge percentage of the people in the salve states were enslaved people. The Southerners wanted to count them in the census, as this would give them more influence in Congress, the Northerners did not want to count enslaved people at all, since they could not vote. What we ended up with was the infamous 3/5 Compromise, whereby enslaved people, for the purposes of representation in Congress, were counted as 0.6 of a person.
The total number of members of Congress from each state would equal the number of electoral votes they would have.
How did we get to the point where we have had several recent elections where the candidate who won, received fewer votes?
The main reason is that early in hour history it became the norm for states to award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who received the most votes. If there were more than two candidates, this could mean that the winning candidate received less than 50%. A losing candidate with 49.9% would receive no electoral votes from that state. Another reason is that many states have become predominantly either rural or urban, and the two major parties appeal predominantly to one or the other. The predominantly rural states tend to be lower in population. Since every state most receive a minimum of 3 electoral votes, the smaller states have proportionally more influence than the larger, more urban states.
Advocates of the Electoral College will claim that this is exactly what the founders planned for, except that they didn't. For many years the size of the House of Representatives, and hence the Electoral College, increased as states were added and population grew. In 1929 the Permanent Apportionment Act was passed, limiting the size of the House of Representatives to 435. The US population increased from 123 million in 1930 to 309 million as of the 2020 census. Two states were added. The result was that not only were the number of people represented by each Congressman steadily increasing, but the relative clout of the smaller states was increasing as well.
Due to the above, we have a situation where, in any state where one party is dominant, those who vote for the minority party are effectively disenfranchised.
Supporters of continuing the Electoral College claim that if we switched to a popular vote system, California and New York (or sometimes a collection of big cities) would call all the shots and that the voters in the small states would be ignored. This is wrong for several reasons, and why I often say that if you're for the Electoral College, you're just bad at math. California and New York, combined, have around 18.9% of the US population as of the last census. That sounds like a lot and it is, but it's not so scary as it seems. In the Electoral College, the two states combined control 15.5% of the total. So there would be an increase, but they are already throwing their weight around, not too mention that the counterweight is Texas and Florida with a combined 12.4% of the Electoral votes (16.5% of the total population). EC cheerleading usually doesn't take into account that not everybody in California and New York votes for Democrats. There are substantial minorities of Republicans in both states (as there are Democrats in Texas and Florida) whose votes would count in a popular vote setup. The thinking that small states would lose their influence assumes that they have any influence now. How often do campaigns visit Vermont, or Wyoming or Alaska? Hardly ever, because they are each safely in the orbit of one political party. The states that get the most attention have two qualities: (1) They are medium-to-large and or (2) They are "swing" states, whose voters are close to equally divided between the two major parties or (3) Both.
The problem with discussing eliminating the Electoral College is that it is enshrined in the Constitution and it is difficult to change it, especially when one party owes much of their power to it.
So, how can we address the worst problems of the Electoral College while still keeping its shell?
1. Repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act and increase the size of the House of Representatives. Designate the population of the smallest state (currently Wyoming at around 500,000) as the size of a Congressional district. I recently calculated that this would increase the size of the House from 435 to 565. Smaller to medium states' delegations would remain the same while the larger ones would increase. This would make the House of Representatives more proportional to population and by extension, the Electoral College.
2. Require that electoral votes be awarded by each state proportionally. This would differ slightly from the system that Nebraska and Maine use (they award 2 electoral votes to the statewide winner and 1 vote each to the Congressional district winner). This system would require states that are now swing states, to award the relevant percentages to the second place candidate. For example in Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes, saw Trump and Biden almost equally divided. They would split the electoral votes 5-5 (or 6-4 if you wanted to give the winner an advantage). Nationwide the electoral votes would closely match the popular vote.
This system would eliminate the disproportionate influence of small, rural states, and enfranchise minority party voters in the "safe" states. Large population centers would probably have as much influence as they do now, but would be balanced by the rural populations in the smaller states. Urban areas in otherwise rural states would also be heard for the first time.
The Electoral College was not engraved in stone and handed down from on high. It was born of a series of compromises by people who didn't trust "the people" and disliked giving them any power. We have changed over the decades to a country that values our leaders being chosen by "the people"...at least that's what we say.
(Ranked choice voting deserves its own article...coming soon)
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