States with
Proposals to Eliminate the Electoral College
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'A Government of Laws, and Not
of Men':
The Electoral College
Nancy Salvato, Director of
Constitutional Studies
In Federalist 51, James Madison writes,
“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the
great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to
control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A
dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the
government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary
precautions.”
Madison’s concern is that, even though the people are sovereign, hold the
ultimate authority over the government, there need be additional mechanisms
to assist in preventing the possibility of power becoming consolidated
within a particular faction of those charged with governing on our behalf.
Should power become consolidated under one entity, and the faction abuse its
authority, the people would be ruled through tyranny, denying them their
ultimate sovereignty unless they take drastic measures to remove the
authority from power.
Perhaps what Madison is saying here is better understood through an analogy
of what can happen when those charged with looking after our best interests
give greater concern to selfish motives. Until a child grows into an adult,
he or she cannot make all the decisions associated with being grown up. In
such a case, all power is vested in one or two parents who are expected to
make decisions in the best interest of the child. Sometimes one or both
parents make really bad decisions that can cause irreparable damage to a
child. This might require a drastic measure, such as a child protective
services agency stepping in to remove the child from the situation. James
Madison feared that those in a position of power may not always put our
rights first. This problem would become much worse, and more drastic
measures would need to be taken, when all authority is vested in one entity
that is in charge of all decision making, as in the situation of a child
with abusive parents.
The Framers built a number of checks and balances into the government to
prevent authority from being held by one entity where it could quickly
develop into tyranny; kind of like the fail safe systems we put in place to
protect ourselves and others from possible dangers. Did you ever wonder why
lawnmowers have a hand-closed lever that must be held down at all times?
When it’s released, the blade stops or the motor shuts off automatically.
There are many examples of fail safes, they shut down reactors in nuclear
plants, automatically brake some of the more expensive cars when they’re too
close to another object, prevent missile launches from deploying, prevent
children from being able to open cabinets with hazardous materials, prevent
surges of electricity from harming electronic equipment. All sorts of
mechanisms can be employed to help prevent something from going terribly
wrong, in a rapid progression.
In Federalist 51, Madison continues,
“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily
predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature
into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election
and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as
the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the
society will admit.”
What Madison is explaining here is that the House of Representatives would
be chosen by the people from their congressional district. As a result, they
would protect the people’s local interests. The Senate, on the other hand,
would be elected by state legislatures, thereby protecting state’s
interests. Authority and interests would be vested and represented in
different bodies. The 17th amendment, however, instituted direct popular
election of US Senators. It took state’s direct representation out. It took
away a very important check on the national government, on national power.
In
“Democracy” is not a Definitive Argument Against the 17th Amendment,
Todd Zywicki explains,
“Whereas House members were considered representatives of the people,
senators were considered ambassadors of their state governments to the
federal government and, like national ambassadors to foreign countries, were
subject to instruction by the parties they represented (although not to
recall if they refused to follow instructions). And they tended to act
accordingly, ceding to the national government only the power necessary to
perform its enumerated functions, such as fighting wars and building
interstate infrastructure.”
Senators elected by legislatures were to represent the interests of their
states, conducting negotiations on behalf of and between the states. They
then had to reconcile the interests of the states and the interests of the
people as a nation. When both branches are elected by the people, they are
representing the same interests and negotiating for federal laws and monies
to benefit their constituents’ special interests, instead of balancing state
interests against national interests.
Zywicki cites Federalist 62 to further explain bicameralism.
“Bicameralism – the division of the legislature into two houses elected
by different constituencies – was designed to frustrate special-interest
factions. Madison noted in Federalist 62 that basing the House and Senate on
different constituent foundations would provide an “additional
impediment...against improper acts of legislation” by requiring the
concurrence of a majority of the people with a majority of the state
governments before a law could [sic] enacted. By resting both houses of
Congress on the same constituency base – the people – the Seventeenth
Amendment substantially watered down bicameralism as a check on
interest-group
rent-seeking, laying the foundation for the modern special-interest
state.”
With passage of the 17th Amendment, one of the Founder’s fail safe
mechanisms was eliminated. Thomas Jefferson would have taken great concern
with the removal of such a failsafe. He believed,
“When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things,
shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render
powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become
as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
Zywicki explains that the Founders were dead set against any centralized
power, they feared concentration of power. “It [The U.S. Constitution]
promoted bicameralism and federalism. The goal [of a constitutional
republic] is the preservation of liberty and the frustration of special
interest faction, not the maximization of democracy.”
In
Democratizing the Constitution: The Failure of the Seventeenth Amendment,
C.H.Hoebeke writes, “The Constitution's framers saw the will of the people
as a force to be restrained and refined, not unleashed and encouraged.”
Furthermore,
“A system of government based solely on equality of political expression,
therefore, had the paradoxical result of creating another form of
inequality, because it gave the majority an absolute power over the rights
of the minority. ‘Who,’ asked Madison, ‘would rely on a fair decision from
three individuals if two had an interest opposed to the third?’ Whether it
was three or three hundred million, impartiality would not be increased,
‘nor any further security against injustice be obtained, than what may
result from the difficulty of uniting the wills of a greater number.’”
The video,
A Republic v A Democracy provides an excellent explanation as to why
the goal of a constitutional republic is not to maximize democracy. The flaw
in Democracy is that the majority isn’t restrained. In a republic, the power
of government is limited and the rights of the governed aren’t subject to
majority rule but to the law. The founders did everything they could to keep
us from having a democracy. They understood that democracy can lead to
tyranny.
Democracy >> Mob Rule >> Anarchy >> Tyranny, under an Oligarchy
This always brings to mind the novel, Lord of the Flies, in which the
boys who are trapped on an island, begin by democratically voting for a
leader, one faction of the group foments anarchy, and in the end, the group
is ruled through tyranny instigated by the scariest, strongest boy. At no
time is there any law under which all are pledged to uphold.
Most salient, in Zywicki’s defense of the Founders methods for selecting the
members of each branch of government, is his understanding that, “What
matters is not whether a given method of selecting governmental officials is
more or less democratic, but whether it will safeguard the constitutional
functions bestowed upon each branch and conduce to their competent
execution.”
By changing the method of selection for senators, through passage of the
17th Amendment, we’ve undermined the authority of the states. Federalism was
instituted to safeguard our republic. Madison elaborates in Federalist 51:
“In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is
submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations
are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and
separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power
surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments,
and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate
departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The
different governments will control each other, at the same time that each
will be controlled by itself.”
While most citizens in this country are required to pass a test on the U.S.
Constitution, sadly, a tremendous importance is not placed on learning with
comprehension the collective experience and knowledge influencing the
deliberations of the 55 delegates enjoined in the Constitutional Convention
that long, hot summer in Philadelphia in the year 1787. Yet the context from
which they debated and compromised over each section of each article to
reach consensus on what would be included in the final document is critical
to being able to understand the reasoning behind and justification for the
fundamental law of our land.
As Zywicki so succinctly describes,
“The Framers provided that the power of various political actors would
derive from different sources. While House members were to be elected
directly by the people, the president would be elected by the Electoral
College. The people would have no direct influence on the selection of
judges, who would be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate
to serve for life or ‘during good behavior.’ And senators would be elected
by state legislatures.”
One cannot help but notice, as James R Whitson explains in
President
Elect, “only the House of Representatives was voted on by the
people.”
What becomes clear, when one studies the Founders deliberations, is that
every method of selection was to protect the rule of law and to prevent rule
by majority, democracy. So a movement to elect the president through popular
vote, rather than through the Electoral College, is extremely disconcerting.
As Whitson points out,
“The 17th Amendment took the states out of the federal legislature and
indirectly out of the federal judiciary (they had a vote in the Senate on
judicial appointments). By getting rid of the Electoral College, the states
would lose their power over the third branch of the government, the
executive branch.”
How does the Electoral College work on behalf of the states’ rights? Whitson
explains:
“The Electoral College helps prevent a candidate from pandering to one
region, or running up their votes in certain states. In the Electoral
College system, once you win a majority of the votes in a state there is no
need to get more. In a direct election, the more votes in a state the
better. Here's an example why this can be a bad thing. Massachusetts is very
Democratic. The Democrats will almost always easily win 50% of the vote. In
the Electoral College system, the Democratic candidate visits a few times to
make sure he'll win and then moves on to other states. In a direct election,
the Democratic candidate would spend a lot more time in Massachusetts trying
to push his vote total to 70-80%. In a close election, why visit a state
where the polls say it's 50-50%, spend a bunch of money and time, and maybe
get 1-5% more votes when you can go to a safe state that says you're leading
60-40%, spend less money and effort, and maybe get 5-10% more votes. In
direct election, candidates would spend more time in states they're easily
going to win in order to run up their vote total. With the Electoral
College, candidates have to actually fight the close states.”
The Electoral College prevents candidates from ignoring smaller states in
favor of big metropolitan areas. In a direct election, Chicago IL has twice
as much voting power as the entire state of New Hampshire.
If there were direct election, Ken Burnside explains in
Should the Electoral College Be Abolished?,
“A political candidate need only appeal to the 91 percent of the
population that lives in five metropolitan areas: Los Angeles/Orange
County/San Diego County (78 million people), the Boston-Washington Corridor
(106 million people), Chicago and surrounding areas (38 million people) and
Houston, Texas (33 million people). In a direct election, only the residents
of those cities matter in choosing the Presidency. The person who carries
those precincts carries the country. While the current system is still
heavily weighted towards certain states (New York, California, Florida and
Texas chief among them), the disparity of electoral college votes is merely
27 percent of the total. A candidate, as a result, has to appeal to a
broader range of constituents, and cannot simply be beholden to the larger
urban areas. This results (in theory) in a President who represents all of
America.”
The Framers had compelling reasons for dividing political power, reasons
which are still applicable today. As Hoebeke explains, “While all political
power ultimately derived from the people, each branch answered in an
immediate way to an essentially different constituency from that of the
others, and was thus considered less liable to fall victim to the same
errors, the same impulses, or the same corrupting influences.”
In other words, as Hoebeke correctly points out, the U.S. Constitution
fragments…
“...the power of the majority, deliberately supplying ‘opposite and rival
interests’ as a more reliable guarantee of individual freedom and minority
rights than could reasonably be expected from merely relying on the good
will of the superior number of citizens.”
When citizens understand the reasons for the Electoral College, they can
understand why direct election would undermine a Constitutional Republic.
Enactment of such legislation might sound like a good idea, but, in the end
it would lead to majority rule and our rule of law would no longer protect
the rights of our citizenry. This is because majority rule inevitably leads
to tyranny. To borrow the words of the rock band R.E.M., it would be, “the
the end of our world as we know it.” |
