Electoral Mechanics, Popular Vote Divergence, and the Quadrennial Exercise in Controlled National Anxiety
Electoral Mechanics, Popular Vote Divergence, and the Quadrennial Exercise in Controlled National Anxiety
The System Designed to Prevent Democracy From Moving Too Fast
The United States does not hold a direct national election for President. Americans vote in 50 separate state elections, plus the District of Columbia, and the winner of each state (in most cases) receives all of that state’s electoral votes, and the candidate who receives 270 of the 538 total electoral votes becomes President. This system was designed in 1787. It was designed in 1787 because the founders did not trust direct democracy, did not have the technology for a national popular vote, and needed to give small states enough electoral weight to join the union. Two of these reasons remain operationally relevant. One does not. The system has not been adjusted accordingly, and 47 attempts to reform or abolish it have failed in Congress, which may itself be a testament to the small states’ continued ability to block constitutional amendments they dislike.
The Electoral College has produced five presidents who lost the popular vote: John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000), and Donald Trump (2016). This is either a feature (ensuring presidents must win geographically distributed coalitions rather than simply maximizing votes in large population centers) or a bug (allowing presidents to govern 330 million people despite being rejected by a majority of those people), depending on your constitutional philosophy and whether your candidate won.
Electors: The Human Layer Nobody Thinks About Until December
When Americans vote for President, they are technically voting for a slate of electors – party loyalists pledged to vote for their candidate in the Electoral College. The electors meet in their state capitals in December, after the election, and cast the actual presidential votes. In normal elections, this is a ministerial formality. Electors cast their votes, the votes are counted by Congress in January, and the winner is confirmed. In abnormal elections – which have become more frequent – the electors become the subject of intense political attention, legal challenges, and, in at least one recent instance, alternative slates of electors claiming to represent states their candidate did not win.
The 2020 election produced a genuinely unprecedented situation in which organized efforts were made to persuade or pressure electors and vice-presidential officials to substitute alternate electoral slates for certified results. This effort failed. It failed because enough people at enough points in the process declined to participate in it. The system held not because of its structural design – the structural design turned out to have gaps – but because of individual decisions by individual officials in specific states. This is either reassuring (the system worked) or alarming (the system worked this time), depending on your tolerance for institutional stress-testing.
Battleground States: Where the President Is Actually Elected
Because most states reliably vote for one party, the presidential election is effectively contested in approximately six to ten states where the outcome is genuinely uncertain. These states – historically Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and a rotating cast of others – receive the overwhelming majority of campaign attention, advertising spending, candidate visits, and get-out-the-vote resources. The other 40-plus states are largely ignored by presidential campaigns, because winning 60% instead of 55% in a state you’re already going to win is worth exactly zero additional electoral votes.
This means that presidential campaigns are optimized to appeal to median voters in swing states, who may not be representative of the median American voter generally, which means that the most powerful office in the world is selected by a process that gives disproportionate influence to a few million people in a handful of states whose local concerns – manufacturing jobs in Michigan, immigration in Arizona, retiree concerns in Florida – shape national policy accordingly. Voters in California and Texas, whatever their preferences, know their states’ electoral votes are predetermined. Their turnout decisions have limited effect on presidential outcomes. The Electoral College thus simultaneously creates a system in which some voters’ choices matter enormously and other voters’ choices matter very little, distributed by geography in ways that have nothing to do with the merits of individual votes. This is called the “”winner-take-all”” system and it is the choice of 48 of 50 states, because states that benefit from the current distribution of electoral influence have shown consistent reluctance to change it. The surprise here is zero.
Legitimacy: The Question the System Keeps Asking
Democratic legitimacy – the belief by the governed that their government has the right to govern – is the foundation of everything. Without it, laws are just suggestions backed by force, elections are rituals without meaning, and the entire elaborate machinery of constitutional governance becomes theater. The founders understood this. They built legitimacy into the system through transparency, competitive elections, rule of law, and peaceful transfer of power. For most of American history, these mechanisms held, and legitimacy was maintained not because everyone agreed with the outcome but because everyone agreed with the process.
The challenge of the 21st century American election is that process legitimacy is harder to maintain when the process itself is contested. When one major party’s supporters believe – based on information their leaders have provided – that elections are systematically fraudulent, no outcome is legitimately decided. The mechanism for creating legitimate outcomes cannot function if participants reject the mechanism. This is not a problem the Electoral College can solve, or that any procedural reform can solve. It is a problem of political will and epistemic reality that constitutional design cannot reach. The founders built an extraordinary system for managing disagreement among people who shared basic premises about how reality works. Managing disagreement among people who do not share those premises is a different problem, and one for which the Constitution offers limited guidance.
The system, however, continues. Elections are held. Votes are counted. Winners are certified. Power is transferred. Mostly. The fact that this process continues in conditions of significant institutional stress is either evidence of the system’s resilience or evidence that it has not yet faced the stress it cannot survive. Both interpretations are available. The experiment continues.
SOURCE: The London Prat