I have often mused about the belief that the American Constitution is the best of all possible worlds, as least as it was taught when I was in school many moons ago.The Bill of Rights (with one notable exception) is great, laying out the ideals the country was founded on even if we’ve rarely fully lived up to them.
The structure of our system, however, isn’t all that great. I’m not sure federalism was such a fabulous idea although I certainly understand why it happened. But there’s a reason no democracy in the world has adopted our system and that most of them have instead a parliamentary system which, frankly, just works better.
The Senate was a mistake and the electoral college has turned out to be the train wreck quite a few of the founders predicted it would be. Other countries that once used such a system have gotten rid of it. We should too:
The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College.
The Founding Fathers did not invent the idea of an electoral college. Rather, they borrowed the concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick emperors for hundreds of years.
As a scholar of presidential democracies around the world, I have studied how countries have used electoral colleges. None have been satisfied with the results. And except for the U.S., all have found other ways to choose their leaders.
There is an alternative but it’s really been hard for it to pick up steam. And it’s imperfect too:
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, currently agreed to by 17 U.S. states, including small states such as Delaware and big ones such as California, as well as the District of Columbia, is an agreement to award all of their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate gets the most votes nationwide. It would take effect once enough states sign on that they would represent the 270-vote majority of electoral votes. The current list reaches 209 electoral votes.
A key problem with the interstate compact is that in races with more than two candidates, it could lead to situations where the winner of the election did not get a majority of the popular vote, but rather more than half of all voters chose someone else.
When Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Finland and France got rid of their electoral colleges, they did not replace them with a direct popular vote in which the person with the most votes wins. Instead, they all adopted a version of runoff voting. In those systems, winners are declared only when they receive support from more than half of those who cast ballots.
Notably, neither the U.S. Electoral College nor the interstate compact that seeks to replace it are systems that ensure that presidents are supported by a majority of voters.
Why not just elect presidents by popular vote? We’re supposed to be one nation so we should elect national leaders …nationally.
Sadly, until the Republicans start losing elections via the electoral college, I doubt we’ll ever be able to change the Constitution to get rid of it. And that’s not likely to happen any time soon, if ever.