When Americans go to the polls to vote for the president, they’re not actually voting
for the president.
Instead, their votes are tallied up, and go to delegates called “electors,” who supposedly
cast votes on behalf of the American people.
Each state is given a set amount of electoral votes, based on the number of each state’s
representatives, plus two for the senators who represent them in Congress.
Montana has three.
Florida has 29.
California has 55.
And in all but two states – Nebraska and Maine – the candidate who gets the most
votes in each state gets all of the electors.
So, if a candidate wins the popular vote in a state like say, Georgia, by only a few thousand
votes, they’ll get all of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes.
Now, of the entire Electoral College, you only need 270 electoral votes to win.
This means that candidates can win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college – and
therefore the election.
It’s already happened five times.
For a democracy, this sounds kind of…undemocratic, right?
Yes.
And make no mistake: it was intended to be anti-democratic.
Even its defenders accept that.
The Founders were mostly merchants, bankers, slave traders, and wealthy planters.
Their goal was to preserve elite rule, and prevent mass democratic movements – such
as the abolition of slavery – from taking hold.
Throughout the history of the U.S., it’s mostly worked.
For decades, the Electoral College helped guarantee the dominance of slaveholding elites,
and then afterward of Jim Crow-era planters in the South.
And in the last 20 years, it has allowed candidates who have lost the popular vote to claim the
presidency twice.
It consistently serves to entrench the rule of a minority.
In some ways, our country is even less democratic than many of its designers envisioned.
Even James Madison, the chief framer of the Constitution, wanted a constitutional amendment
to ban the winner-take-all rules that decide the Electoral College today.
So while the Electoral College’s defenders CLAIM that it protects against a hypothetical
“tyranny of the majority, the fact is that it enshrines something much worse.
A tyranny of the minority.
This happens in two big ways.
First, because of how electoral votes are apportioned, a voter in a small state like
Wyoming or Vermont is weighted heavier than one in California or Texas.
Your vote just means more there.
Second, because of how polarized presidential elections typically are, the vast majority
of voters – as much as 75 percent of them – have basically NO VOICE in the presidential
race.
If you’re a Republican in a Democratic state like New York, or a Democrat in a Republican
state like Mississippi, your vote for president can feel practically worthless.
In fact, unless you live in one of the five or six states that tend to decide every election,
you get no attention at all in a presidential campaign that’s allegedly supposed to represent
you.
The Electoral College incentivizes most people not to vote: why should they, when they live
in a state that doesn’t decide anything?
The system means that you can safely ignore the vast majority of the population to focus
on a few heavily courted voters.
And that skews how politicians campaign, as well as how they govern.
Tens of millions of Americans live in cities facing severe economic and social problems.
But national politicians never talk about urban policy.
And they rarely talk about the deep poverty in places like Arkansas or West Virginia.
Instead of the very serious problems facing our country, which affect both swing states
and safe states, presidential elections tend to focus on boutique issues that might sway
a few thousand people in key areas.
And there’s no evidence that the Electoral College helps us.
Countries like Finland or Portugal elect their heads of state directly and are more vibrant
and participatory democracies as a result.
And the Electoral College is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how undemocratic
our system is.
In 2018, Democrats led Republicans in Senate races by 12 million votes, yet they still
managed to lose the chamber.
From a grossly unrepresentative Senate to widespread voter disenfranchisement to the
unshakable grip of elite donor money over every branch of our government, our entire
system is designed to serve the people in power.
It is designed to breed apathy among the working class while cementing the rule of a few people
at the very top.
And the origin of that is the Constitution.
There is no reason to treat a document written 200 years ago as sacred.
The Constitution intended to secure elite rule and prevent democratic movements from
forming.
Because of it, every four years we have to worry about undemocratic elections in a country
ostensibly founded on liberty and equality.
There are simply better ways to run a government.
I’m Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin Magazine, for the Gravel Institute.
Thank you for watching!
If you enjoyed this video, please consider becoming a patron of the Institute or making
a one-time contribution.