Should we do away with the Electoral College?

In recent weeks following the election of Mr. Donald Trump to the Presidency, accompanied by his loss in the popular vote, many commentators have called for the abolition of the Electoral College and moving to a national popular vote. Here is one column from E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post advocating just such a position. (http://tinyurl.com/hlwg9y7) I have often been tempted to write about this issue but there was something in the op-ed which irritated me enough that I decided to respond with a letter to Mr. Dionne. 

Before getting into the letter itself, let me finally note one other thing: we never talk of changing the rules of the game after the game has been played and a winner has been chosen. The participants in a game take the rules of the game as a given and then decide how to play the game. In the case of this 2016 presidential election cycle, if we had decided that the winner of the national vote would be elected President, it is clear that electoral strategies would have been different. Democratic volunteers from the state of Massachusetts would have less time on their hands to go campaign in neighboring battleground New Hampshire and parties and PACs would have run ads and focused their ground games very differently. One could also make the case that Mr. Trump's persona and strategy of addressing big crowds in large rallies would have been more useful rather than the nuts-and-bolts strategy of Mrs. Clinton's campaign which, in my view, rested on trying to reassemble the Obama coalition of 2012 block by block. The point is I don't know who would have won the popular vote if we had agreed that the winner of the popular vote would be elected President but what I do know is that the outcome may have been different than the current outcome. What I also know is that criticizing the outcome of a game when evaluated under a hypothetical set of rules different from the rules that the game was played under is hypocritical and shows the person holding such views in very poor light. With that being said, here is my letter to Mr. Dionne.

Hello Mr. Dionne,

I would like to share three of my observations re: your article in the Washington Post on the Electoral College:

1. Would you have written this op-ed if the winner of the Electoral College and the popular vote had been flipped? I can’t answer this question convincingly for you but as of now if you told me that you would have written that op-ed regardless, I am afraid I could only doubt your credibility and honesty. J

2.  If the Electoral College goes today, shouldn’t the Senate follow simply based on consistency of logic? After all, California with its 39 million+ people (http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/06) still gets the same two Senate seats as Wyoming does with ~600,000 people (http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/56)?  Either you believe in doing away with equal representation of the States in the Senate (which is consistent with your views on the Electoral College but inconsistent with the history of this country) or you believe in retaining the equal representation of States in the Senate (which is inconsistent with your views on the Electoral College); which one is it? If you advocate doing away with the equal representation of the States in the Senate, something that is plausible if after the 2018 cycle New York and California end up being represented by Democrats, who nevertheless find themselves in a hopeless minority, then you are asking us to violate the most basic tenet under which States agreed to become a part of this federation. Would you agree?

3. Finally, in case you do think that abolishing the Electoral College as we know it is a good idea, it is unclear how you plan on accomplishing that. This is not something that could be passed through an executive order (thank Heavens for small mercies), the only way to enact this would be through a Constitutional Amendment and one knows how hard that is. But that is a feature of the system – not a bug. Moreover, think about this for a moment – Republicans will hold the levers of power from Jan. 20 onwards in both the executive and legislative branches of federal government and they would hold unified control in about half of all states (http://www.governing.com/topics/elections/gov-republicans-add-dominance-state-legislatures.html)! I don’t need to remind you of what’s necessary for a constitutional amendment to pass but boy, are things looking precarious for the Democrats! In that environment (and in an environment of hyper-partisanship), I hope you would recognize  that passing constitutional amendments should be hard – really really really hard but that would also mean that your ideas of doing away with the Electoral College has exactly a zero chance of passage. Which is exactly how I would like it – because I respect the Constitution more than I care about the  vagaries of any political party or the outcome from one electoral cycle and because I also believe that Constitutional Amendments should pass only where there is an overwhelming national consensus on a topic and we are very far from such a consensus on what to do with the Electoral college. I for one (and I speak as a registered Republican) would be opposed tooth and nail to doing away with the Electoral College.

Responses are always appreciated but what’s even more appreciated is to see some of what I have said be reflected in your subsequent writings – maybe with the implicit or explicit acknowledgment that other reasonable people may hold points of view that differ from your own.

Sincerely,

Sutirtha Bagchi