In this week’s “It’s Debatable” segment, Rick Rosen and Charles Moster debate whether the Electoral College should be abolished. Rosen retired as a professor from the Texas Tech University School of Law and is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Moster is founder of the Moster Law Firm based in Lubbock with seven offices including Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
Rick Rosen
Rosen – 1
The election of the President and Vice President is not based upon which candidates get the most votes. Instead, they are chosen by state electors. The number of electors a state has is equal to the number of its Senators and Representatives. Candidates receiving the most votes in a state generally get the votes of the state’s electors. Nationally, there are 538 electors, meaning candidates who win a majority of state electors (270) win the election.
I recognize the argument that candidates who receive the most votes should win the election. As Princeton Professor Allen Guelzo wrote: “[W]hen a presidential election hands the palm to a candidate who comes in second in the popular vote but first in the Electoral College tally, something deep in our democratic viscera balks and asks why.” Since 1788, however, only a handful of candidates winning the Electoral College failed to receive the most popular votes. Moreover, the Electoral College serves important purposes.
First, the United States is not a democracy—it is a constitutional republic in which states are more than mere administrative subdivisions of the federal government. Subject to constitutional limits, the states are independent sovereigns governing most aspects of their citizens’ lives. And the states are unique, acting according to their citizens’ dictates. The Electoral College preserves principles of federalism by giving voice to the individual states.
Second, as the Heritage Foundation notes, the Electoral College prevents “high-population urban areas” from having a disproportionate impact on presidential elections. Without the Electoral College, candidates would all but ignore rural and remote areas of the country and focus on the large cities. Cities like New York and Los Angeles would dictate policies affecting rural states, which have very different needs and whose values still matter.
Third, candidates who get the most popular votes do not always win a majority of voters. Today, 40% of voters identify as Independents, 29% as Democrats, and 30% as Republicans. What happens if multiple third-party candidates enter a race? Would a 25% or 33% popular vote victory be sufficient to push a candidate over the top? After all, in 1992 Bill Clinton “won” the popular vote with only 43% of total voters and Abraham Lincoln received only 39.9% in 1860. An electoral system governed solely by popular vote could very well result in candidates receiving a small plurality of votes winning the presidential election. The Electoral College averts such a calamity.
Moster – 1
The Electoral College is fundamentally flawed and must be abolished. Rick argues that the Electoral College prevents “high population areas” from having a disproportionate impact on presidential elections. Unfortunately, its application results in even more disparate effects. As amply demonstrated in the 2024 presidential election, the entire focus was not on the high population areas but the disposition of meager populations in the so-called “battleground states”.
Consequently, the entire focus of candidate attention was devoted to a minority of states which contradicts Rick’s basic argument in support of the Electoral College. Notably, Rick framed the issue as follows: “Without the Electoral College, candidates would all but ignore rural and remote areas of the country and focus on the large cities. Cities like New York and Los Angeles would dictate policies affecting rural states, which have very different needs and whose values still matter.” I would dare say that that Rick’s admonition materialized in reverse. The myopic focus on battleground states allowed rural populations to dictate policies affecting urban areas. Simply put, the electoral college does not work whether running in forward or reverse.
The very existence of the Electoral College promotes factionalism, which was most feared by the Founding Fathers of the Constitution where one part of the country is pitted against the other. As the ubiquitous TV network electoral maps pronounced, the election was not based on a plurality of U.S. votes but a battle between the red states and blue with their respective electoral votes to reach the magic number of 270. The effect of this factional display is to create antagonism and polarization within the U.S. electorate. I am not the first commentator to note that the red/blue dichotomy almost correlates exactly with those deadly state colors which led to the Civil War – blue and gray. The Electoral College is a dangerous institution with its tentacles reaching back into a dark period of our history.
Critically, the key Founding Fathers were adamantly opposed to the Electoral College but lost the battle in the drafting of the Constitution wherein the current system was adopted as a compromise to keep the Convention from crashing.
None other than Thomas Jefferson found the very idea of the Electoral College repulsive and maintained that the “people” had the right to serve as their own sovereign and directly elect the President. You can add to the list the primary drafter of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris, who believed that the Electoral College was “fundamentally undemocratic” and would be used by elites to manipulate electoral results.
The Electoral College is a dangerous relic of the past which continues to cast a long shadow over our democratic institutions. It needs to be eliminated.
Rosen – 2
I agree that the Electoral College is flawed, but it is the least-worst method of choosing an American President. True, some Founding Fathers opposed the Electoral College; however, the principle alternative was not election by popular vote, but selection by the national legislature.
Thomas Jefferson’s disenchantment with the Electoral College is understandable since he was nearly snookered out of the presidency by his vice-presidential running mate Aaron Burr under a then-existing constitutional provision directing electors to cast two votes for President—the candidate with the most votes became President and the runner-up Vice President. Jefferson’s electors cast their votes equally for Jefferson and Burr creating a tie, Burr would not step aside, and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment rectified this “defect” by directing electors to submit one vote for President and one for Vice President.
Since 1800, over 700 proposals to reform or abolish the Electoral College have been introduced in Congress, yet in only five elections over 236 years has the winner of the Electoral College received fewer popular votes than his opponent. As the Heritage Foundation notes: “the nation conducts democratic, popular elections—but they are conducted at the state level, rather than the national level.”
Consider the alternative—a purely popular vote. Heritage points out that if history and comparative systems are any indication, elections could easily turn into multi-party races, meaning that a winning candidate is unlikely to receive a majority of votes. What kind of plurality would Charles be willing to accept—40%? 33%? 25%? A candidate elected President when a vast majority citizens voted against him or her is hardly democratic.
Finally, if the Electoral College is inadvisably eliminated, a national election by popular vote makes states utterly superfluous—such an election must be an exclusively national affair in which states play no role at all. In other words, the election must be conducted by apolitical federal officers and employees. And the country cannot have a fair national election with a patchwork of inconsistent state laws over matters ranging from voter qualifications to election security. Before states consider ratifying such a constitutional amendment, they should insist that the amendment clearly define voter qualifications and the means of ensuring that only those qualified vote. Thus, qualified voters could be described “all natural born and naturalized citizens 18 years of age or older who establish their qualification at the time of the election.” The American people must have confidence that the presidential election is fair, secure, and free from intermeddling by state and local political officials.
Moster – 2
Rick seems to be persuaded that the Electoral College is a valid institution because “in only five elections over 236 years has the winner of the Electoral College received fewer popular votes than his opponent”. Quantity, of course, is not always quality as exemplified by the highly disputed 2000 Presidential election of George W. Bush. Recall that Al Gore did win the popular vote by 543,845 but lost the Electoral College due to an adverse and highly suspect election result in Florida. The issue was that 61,000 votes were disputed as they were not counted by the tabulation machines, which would have potentially affirmed the decision in favor Gore. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that a recount should take place, but the Bush legal team was successful in getting an injunction to stop the recount which was decided by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision of Bush v. Gore (2000). Incredulously, the conservative members of the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Florida Supreme Court, thus killing the recount and validating the election of George W. Bush.
I would submit this grave injustice as Exhibit A in justifying the abolition of the Electoral College, which clearly results in decisions countermanding the popular vote of the people.
I am also unpersuaded by Rick’s argument that electoral plurality would be undermined by multiple candidates dividing the vote in such a way that no one got a majority. This is very common throughout the world and particularly in Europe and is not in a legitimate argument for overriding the electoral result as reflected in the ultimate vote. The point is that the candidate who gets the most votes, regardless of the percentage split, can claim a victory.
Finally, Rick appears troubled by the very notion of conducting a national vote for President which is quite curious since such a concept is the very embodiment of our democratic system. Rick points to the disparate qualifications for voting imposed by state governments which actually supports the critical necessity of formulating universal and national voting guidelines that apply to all and eliminate any potential for manipulation or discrimination. Although a potential topic for a later debate, I would advocate for the use of Internet voting, which has now been adopted throughout Europe and can easily be effectuated through software embedded with encryption protection, would actually add an additional level of security against voter fraud.
The Electoral College is a vestige of the very early days of our Republic and needs to be eliminated. It is inconsistent with the most basic democratic principles.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: It’s Debatable: Should the Electoral College be abolished?
