The Electoral College: A Solution Looking for the Right Problem? – Video

Most debates about the Electoral College start with people choosing sides. One side wants to keep it. The other wants to abolish it.

I think the more interesting question is: What problem was it designed to solve, and does that problem still exist?

In 1787, information traveled at the speed of a horse. Most citizens knew little about candidates from distant states. The United States was less a single nation than a collection of states agreeing to work together. The Electoral College was part compromise, part practical necessity, and part protection against direct democracy in a world where voters had limited information.

For its time, the system made sense.

Today, none of those conditions exist.

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A constitutional convention to redesign the whole thing?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that every system solves one problem by creating another.

A pure popular vote values every vote equally, but raises concerns about population concentration.

The Electoral College protects state influence, but leaves many voters feeling irrelevant.

Winner-take-all states simplify elections, but turn most states into spectators.

There may not be a perfect answer. There may only be better compromises.

Before we argue about which system to adopt, we should at least agree on which problem we’re trying to solve.

If we can’t answer that question, we’re just rearranging the furniture.

And unlike the spare toilet paper at my house, nobody seems to know where the solution is stored.

The Electoral College asks how states should be represented.

Ranked-choice voting asks how voters should be represented.

Maybe before we decide which system is best, we should decide whose voice we are trying to hear more clearly.