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

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.

A voter in Oregon can watch a speech made in Florida in real time. News travels instantly. Candidates campaign nationally. Americans think of themselves as citizens of one country first and residents of a state second.

The original reasons for creating the Electoral College have weakened or disappeared.

Yet replacing it raises legitimate concerns.

A pure popular vote could encourage candidates to focus heavily on large population centers. The current system encourages candidates to focus on a handful of swing states. Neither approach feels particularly representative.

Today, millions of Republicans in California and millions of Democrats in Texas know their presidential vote is unlikely to matter. At the same time, a relatively small number of voters in a few battleground states effectively decide the election.

That suggests the problem is not simply the Electoral College. The problem is that our current system leaves large numbers of Americans feeling their vote has little impact.

I don’t pretend to know the perfect answer.

Perhaps it is a modified Electoral College. Perhaps it is a national popular vote. Perhaps it is a system nobody has proposed yet.

What I do know is that institutions should be judged by whether they solve today’s problems, not yesterday’s.

The Electoral College was created to address concerns that were real in 1787.

If the Electoral College is broken, what replaces it?

A straight popular vote?

A proportional allocation of electoral votes instead of winner-take-all states?

A ranked-choice national election?

A system where states award electoral votes by congressional district?

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.