Origins and design
Peter Wallison dates the Electoral College to the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, when the United States held roughly three million people scattered along the East Coast and communication moved at the speed of a horse. Many farmers, separated from towns and cities, would not have known who should be president. The founders’ idea, in Wallison’s account, was to find people connected to one another across the thirteen colonies — people who kept in touch by writing and visiting — who could identify the best candidates. These were the electors. They were not designated by name; each state was told it could have a number of electors equal to its representatives in Congress plus two senators, and the electors would gather to select the people who would run for president and vice president. The system, Wallison says, narrowed the field of potential candidates and let voters choose among a limited group rather than a mass of unknown people Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).
Bob Zadek restates the theory in modern terms: the electors were what 21st-century jargon would call elites, the wise men, comparable to how the Senate was regarded in colonial times. Voters had the right to vote for president, but indirectly — they voted for people who would vote for the president. Direct election, Zadek says, was not seriously considered during the four and a half months of debate over the Constitution in 1787, and the Electoral College was, like most important provisions, a compromise. Zadek also emphasizes that the United States in 1787 invented the concept of president, which had not existed on Earth, so the founders had to invent the chief magistrate as well as the method of choosing one Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).
Wallison adds that the Electoral College drew no serious opposition during ratification. Many issues were controversial, but this was not one, largely because nobody conceived of what it meant to have a president: the powers, as people saw them in the drafted Constitution, would be held by Congress, so the presidency was important but not as important as the elected people making the laws Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).
Winner-takes-all and the battleground-state problem
Ray Haynes draws a distinction between the Electoral College itself and the method states use to implement the constitutional mandate to appoint electors. Article II, Section 1, he says, provides that each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors. The winner-takes-all law in effect in 48 of the 50 states has been the chosen method of almost all states since basically 1856, and Haynes says nobody has really taken a look at it. Under winner-takes-all, winning the vote within a state gets you all of that state’s electors. Haynes attributes the device to Virginia in the 1800 election, adopted for the specific purpose of helping Thomas Jefferson become president; in 1800 Virginia was the only state doing it, while other states used a congressional district system and some legislatures simply appointed electors. Winner-takes-all, he stresses, started in 1800, twelve years after the constitutional convention, and the problem is not the Electoral College but the method states chose to implement it What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020).
The consequence Haynes calls the problem of the battleground state has, he argues, real political and policy implications. Florida receives a blizzard of bureaucrats with checkbooks after every hurricane, he says, not because people love Florida but because it is a key battleground state: for Republicans, if they do not win Florida, they do not win the election. The ethanol mandate exists because Iowa has been a key battleground state over the years. Obama once said his favorite presidential pork allocation was to a cheese factory in Ohio, because Ohio is a battleground state. Forests burned in California and President Trump offered regret, Haynes says, but a kitchen fire in Pennsylvania produces a major disaster declaration. In that year’s map, 75% of presidential spending and campaign visits had been in five states What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020).
The case for stability
Wallison calls the strongest argument against the Electoral College the democratic one: if we really have a democracy, why not elect the president by a simple majority of the popular vote, rather than through what amounts to 50 separate presidential elections brought together in the Electoral College? He grants that the notion is powerful in a time when the importance of democracy is keenly felt. His own strongest argument in support is that the Electoral College has created a stability in American politics that exists nowhere else. Supporters of the National Popular Vote, he says, seem to believe two political parties would survive its adoption; he says that is not true. Two parties exist now because of the Electoral College, since a party must win a majority of electoral votes, and eliminating it would produce ten or twelve parties — a Right to Life party, a Choice party, an anti-immigrant party, a pro-immigrant party, pro-gun and anti-gun parties — plus wealthy people like Michael Bloomberg running their own campaigns. The winner in such elections would probably have 20% of the vote, which Wallison says is worse than less than 50%, and that winner could not speak for the American people the way an Electoral College winner can. He notes that Bill Clinton in 1992 won with 43% of the vote, well below 50%, and yet was never questioned as validly elected, because Americans accept that a majority in the Electoral College is something very close to the popular vote and is the process the Constitution set up Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).
Wallison also argues that the Electoral College encourages candidates to go to all the states, or as many as they think they can win, because smaller states have a fair amount of power in the system that they would not have in a popular vote. Under a national popular vote, he says, the easiest campaign is to go into the cities of the largest states and harvest votes there, since that is least costly in advertising and travel, and smaller states with fewer people would mostly be ignored Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).
Zadek’s own framing of the modern debate dates its seriousness to the Bush v. Gore election in 2000 and elections before it. He counts five instances in which the president elected through the Electoral College received less than a majority of the popular vote, the first being John Quincy Adams in 1824, elected by the House of Representatives without an electoral majority. After Bush v. Gore, Zadek says, thoughtful people began examining whether the Electoral College was anachronistic, anti-small-d democratic, and a vestige of entitled white men’s vision of government 240 years ago Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).
The National Popular Vote movement
Wallison describes the National Popular Vote as a partisan issue: only Democrats have pushed for it, and no state controlled by Republicans has voted to participate. States with 196 electoral votes, he says, have voted through their state legislatures to send all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, even if their own state did not vote for that person Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020).
Zadek, introducing Haynes about a month after the Wallison episode, recalls that Wallison spoke positively about the Electoral College as an intelligently designed system, though done at the last minute, and that the two discussed its history and the constitutional convention. Zadek says the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a plan, well along in being carried out, to fix what are perceived as the College’s weaknesses. He asks Haynes what weaknesses in the present system the compact’s promoters hope to cure What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020).
Across episodes
The topic recurs across three episodes, and the treatment shifts with the guest. Wallison, in September 2020, defends the Electoral College as a stabilizing force and treats the National Popular Vote as a partisan threat that would multiply parties; Haynes, in October 2020, accepts the College and instead indicts winner-takes-all as the defect, tracing it to Virginia in 1800 and to policy distortions in Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania; William Howell, in January 2021, says he would support a national popular vote, calling the Electoral College a relic inherited from the Constitution that no other country has seen fit to replicate. Zadek’s own position, stated at the close of the Howell episode, is that electors should be distributed proportionately based on the popular vote in each state rather than winner-takes-all, which he says would fix the problem Populism After Trump (2021).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state which amendment governs presidential succession or how electors are selected under current state law beyond the winner-takes-all description. They do not give the full text or operative provisions of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, nor the names of the state legislatures that have voted for it. The excerpts also break off mid-sentence in several places, including Wallison’s discussion of what happens after a winner takes office and Zadek’s remarks on disenfranchisement in small-population states, so those arguments are left incomplete.