Electoral College Defender Warns of Grim Future That Sounds Much Better Than What We Have Now
Where do I sign up for this dystopian hellscape?
Whining about the Electoral College is one of the least effective things you can do in American politics. You’d be better off spending your time working for Joe Exotic’s presidential campaign, or lobbying to make August National Fingerblast Month. Nonetheless, I do hate the Electoral College. It’s an unfair anachronism, designed to keep the American people from doing something stupid, despite the fact that no law of man can keep Americans from doing as many stupid things as we like.
A constitutional amendment to end the Electoral College is as likely as Mitt Romney winning Best New Starlet at the Adult Video Awards. But there’s still an outside chance of reform: A thing called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has a small chance of going into effect by the end of the decade. This “plan” (if you like the idea) or “scheme” (if you don’t) pledges a compact state’s electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote once states with at least 270 electoral votes sign on. Basically: States are teaming up for an end-run around the Electoral College. But it might be a legal end-run, because states can allocate their Electoral College votes however they want. Live by the anachronistic federalist quirk, die by the anachronist federalist quirk, Electoral College.
Whether the compact would be constitutional is an interesting debate; personally, I see good arguments on both sides. But I find the philosophical question of whether the Electoral College is good completely uninteresting. Of course the Electoral College is idiotic; of course the candidate with the most votes should win. We have the Electoral College because small states like it and they won’t vote to get rid of it, end of story. I find people who try to summon a principled defense for the Electoral College to be a lot like the contrarians who argue that Freddy Got Fingered is an avant-garde cinematic masterpiece.
This week, Washington Post columnist Jason Willick wrote a column that — though not explicitly arguing for the Electoral College — certainly argued against the popular vote compact. Hilariously, every point Willick made warning against the “chaos” the compact could cause points to flaws in our current system that are at least as big as the ones Willick fears. The effect was like a plumber tut-tutting about the shortcomings of septic tank systems while standing neck deep in raw sewage from a burst pipe.
Willick’s stated goal is to reduce the likelihood of a “Jan. 6-style crisis” (the Post helpfully linked the words “Jan. 6” to coverage of the insurrection, just in case you thought the crisis they were referring to was Eddie Redmayne’s birthday). So, we’re starting with a point of agreement: Post-election chaos is bad. If I may suspend this blog’s trademark snark for exactly seven words: I assume that Willick’s intentions are sincere.
But I also think that his arguments are a pile of flaming garbage. Consider this:
“Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election ought to bring home the risks of monkeying around with states’ time-honored systems for assigning electors.”
Doesn’t the post-2020 election chaos suggest that our current system is, in fact, not a “time-honored” fail-safe against post-election chicanery? Why is it change that would introduce risk, when, in fact, recent events have demonstrated the vulnerabilities of a system that has gone largely unchanged for 235 years? It’s rare that an author introduces and refutes an argument within a single sentence, but Willick has achieved that feat here.
Willick continues:
“Trump wanted to prevent states such as Arizona and Georgia from delivering their electors to Joe Biden, even though Biden narrowly won those states. The compact has a nobler purpose, but it asks states to do the same thing: award their votes to a candidate other than the state’s winner.”
This is an argument that Electoral College fans often make: Voters want their state’s electors to go to the candidate who won that state. Of course, no voter I’m aware of actually thinks that way. Ask yourself: Would you rather…
A) Have your preferred candidate win your state but lose the election;
B) Have your preferred candidate lose your state but win the election.
Obviously, you’d prefer “B”. And so would everyone else. We don’t vote because we care about our state’s participation in the pageantry of the Electoral College; we vote because we want our candidate to win. The compact would require states to deliver votes to the election’s winner, not the state’s winner, which is what people actually care about.
In referencing Arizona and Georgia, Willick inadvertently points to a shortcoming of our current system. Because the Electoral College often comes down to narrow margins in a few states, there are more opportunities for small-bore challenges that could swing an election. That is: Trump could throw a bunch of bullshit lawsuits at the wall in Arizona and hope that one would stick, because he only needed about 10,000 votes to flip the state. Similarly, he could call the governor of Georgia and engage in some hilariously obvious election tampering because he only needed to “find” 11,780 votes. Of course, the nation-wide margin in 2020 was seven million votes, but Trump could sow chaos by focusing on the mere 42,921 votes that he needed to flip in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. 2016 followed a similar pattern: 79,316 votes in three states would have swung an election even though the popular vote margin was almost three million. The Electoral College often reduces the size of the completely laughable legal challenge that a losing candidate needs to pull out of his ass.
Willick’s errant belief that people care about state electors and not election results is also present in this statement:
“Would swing-state Democratic governors certify a Republican presidential candidate as the winner of their state’s electoral votes if most voters in their states voted for the Democratic candidate?”
Sure they would; Democratic governors certify results that put a Republican in the White House all the time. And, to be fair, Republican governors also regularly put Democrats in the White House; only in this post-truth Bizarro World that Trump has forced upon us do we worry about governors going rogue. The compact would also explicitly codify how a state’s electors must be allocated and would obviously be challenged in court before going into effect, so that would seem to give governors less wiggle room, not more.
The scenario Willick describes is also so implausible that it makes me wish I hadn’t already used that Mitt Romney-winning-a-porn-award joke, because it would fit here. Let’s imagine Willick’s scenario: It’s the near future, and the compact has gone into effect. Compact states have just over 270 electoral votes, which has to be true for Willick’s scenario to make any sense, because if compact states have a huge majority, then a few rogue governors wouldn’t matter. We know which states would be in the compact: The very blue states that have already signed on. So, we have an election, and Tucker Carlson defeats AOC in the popular vote (by the way, I have thrown myself in front of a train in this scenario). But AOC has a narrow edge in the old electoral map, so a few Democratic governors consider a blatantly illegal coup. That coup wouldn’t do any good, because obviously Carlson has cleaned up in the mostly red, non-compact states. So, even if, say, California and New York threw their 84 electoral votes to AOC, Carlson surely would have done well enough in the non-compact states to combine those votes with the faithful compact states and win by a comfortable margin. We can’t say that Willick’s scenario is impossible only because nothing is literally impossible, but I can say that I consider it about as probable as Otto von Bismarck returning from the dead and recording a Tik Tok to Khia’s “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)”.
Willick returns to the “state results are what matter” well for another ridiculous fantasy:
“…members of Congress could balk at accepting slates of electors that don’t reflect state-level results. Under the Electoral Count Act, a majority in both houses of Congress can reject a state’s electors. Unlike on Jan. 6, 2021, lawmakers could have a plausible constitutional argument for doing so.”
Once again, I feel the need to point out that it is under our current system that Members of Congress — 147 of them — voted to reject electors. And they did not give a rat’s ass about having a plausible constitutional argument.
Willick’s federal-level nightmare scenario is as far-fetched as his state-level nightmare, and for essentially the same reasons. As before, Willick’s scenario must assume that the compact has barely 270 votes coming overwhelmingly from blue states (because that’s the only scenario that makes any sense at all). Willick must also be imagining Democratic states sending electors to Congress supporting the Republican candidate, and obviously, Congressional Republicans wouldn’t reject those electors. So, he must be thinking that Democrats might say “we won’t accept these (Republican) electors because their state voted for a different (Democratic) candidate.”
Set aside what a gobsmacking ideological U-turn that would be for a party that — in Willick’s own words — expresses “near universal” opposition to the Electoral College. Just consider what it would take, in practical terms, for Democrats to overturn the election. First, they’d need majorities in both houses of Congress, and, in fact, majorities big enough to push through this coup entirely with votes from their own caucus. They would then need to reject electors from nearly every compact state — not just one or two — because the Republican candidate presumably did well in the mostly-red non-compact states. Democrats would have to reject electors from about half the country — mostly from states that they represent — until neither candidate could reach 270 electoral votes. At that point, Democrats — who would also need to hold a majority in House state delegations, which they haven’t had since 2008 — would elect the president from the House for the first time since 1824. All of this would happen in spite of the fact that a Republican won the popular vote that Democrats would have championed throughout what must have been a pitch battle to implement the popular vote compact.
In that scenario, would “we wanted to be consistent with state-level results” be a sufficient fig leaf for this coup d'état? No; you would have to be the dumbest person alive to buy that argument, and the dumbest person alive is usually the Republican nominee. If Democrats were willing to act that brazenly, they could simply act that way now, because the scenario Willick describes is not some cheeky semantic dodge; it’s a brass-balled, double-middle-fingers up, “come at me bro” power grab. It would be the most laughable “fuck you” since Oliver Cromwell dissolved a hated Parliament by declaring that their five-month sitting period was over because five lunar months had passed, a move so baller that I’m referencing it 368 years after it happened.
Willick road tests a few more weak, hand-waving arguments:
“The winner-take-all electoral college has limited the number of viable candidates to two in most elections; a popular-vote free-for-all could invite five or six or more.”
So what? I happen to think that third party candidacies are the province of narcissists and cranks — I’m looking at you, Cornel West — but even I admit that the two-party system has pros and cons. I shouldn’t favor an electoral system because it marginalizes viewpoints that I think are bad. Also, we’ve had many elections in which more than two candidates win states, and I’d argue that if no candidate wins 50 percent, a system that elects the candidate who won a plurality is better than a system that shit-cans the vote and lets the House pick some rando.
“Larger candidate fields would lower presidential vote shares and weaken presidential mandates.”
I can’t fucking believe that Willick mentioned mandates; mandates don’t exist in the United States any more, if they ever did. When Barack Obama won in a landslide in 2008, Republicans did not give him a mandate; they gave him a level of shit known only to step moms and substitute teachers. In 2023, the word “mandate” is a Scrabble word and nothing more.
“Under the compact, the national popular vote would be calculated as the sum of the popular vote in each state, even though states run elections under different rules. Officials in red states could complain that blue states were juicing Democrats’ national popular-vote numbers with extended voting windows.”
Wouldn’t it be terrible if our system encouraged states to make it easy to vote?! I cannot think of a bigger tragedy than incentivizing the removal of arbitrary barriers to the franchise!
“States would be at one another’s throats over their internal election policies.”
Someone should really get Washington Post columnist Jason Willick a subscription to the Washington Post, because the exact scenario he’s worried about has been major news for decades. Did Willick somehow miss the pitch battles over voter access is places like Georgia and Michigan, not to mention the entire 2000 Florida recount? I’d argue that the Electoral College intensifies these fights, because the election often comes down to a few thousand votes in battleground states.
Fans of the Electoral College should really just say “I like the Electoral College because it gives small states disproportionate power,” or “I like the Electoral College because it currently skews Republican.” That would make for an honest debate. These bullshit, hand-waving arguments in defense of our Rube Goldberg contraption of an election system are getting tiring. I’m especially annoyed that people like Willick act as if popular vote is an unwieldy, experimental system, when the Electoral College is actually the goofy outlier, and popular vote is the system used by virtually every democracy in the world and also in every federal, state, and local office in the United States except for the presidency.
If Willick is truly worried about how our Byzantine method for choosing electors creates opportunities for mischief, then he could join those of us who would like to scrap the Electoral College. Because there are, indeed, too many opportunities for chaos. And therefore, we should switch to a simple, widely-used system and ditch the system that’s as poorly designed as Homer Simpson’s dream car. We could also expunge Trumpist nihilism from our politics instead of just hoping that our system can weather the storm. We could do that, but instead, we’ll probably continue to get weak, hyperventilating arguments from defenders of the deeply silly status quo.
Yeah... No.
This is the constitution we have, because that is the compromise that was struck to get the deal done. Otherwise CT and RI would have said “fuck it, King George is better than you assholes from the gigantic state of VA” and there goes the Union.
Convince people you have better ideas. You know, liberalism? CA is big. CA is also TOTALLY DYSFUNCTIONAL. So maybe it is a good thing they have Diane “99 is the new 29” Feinstein. They get to influence using Hollywood to ram things down the throat of KS instead of the electoral college.
I’ll take this system that stops people from trying to change shit too fast any day, even if we have to get a Trump every 50 presidents.
Jeff, I'm usually with you on this stuff, but not here. First off, I echo Grape's comment below about the big population centers. People who live different lives than they need a voice, or at least the ability not to be ignored. Second, the people who support the Compact don't care about it because of the popular vote, they care about it because by-and-large it would benefit Democrats, which is why the vast majority of the states that have signed up are uncontestedly blue. Third, the Interstate Compact is just that -- a compact, an agreement. It has no force of law unless its participants decide it does. The states involved can agree to change it whenever and however they wish. In the (agreed, unlikely) scenario you described, do you really believe there would be "faithful Compact states" as you describe? Hell no -- states like CA and NY and IL (where I live) would send their "standard" delegates instead of the "Compact" delegates, and when the inevitable howling began, they'd hide behind the until-then-despised Constitution and its Electoral College provisions.