In 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump lost the popular election by several million votes. But in 2016, he won in the Electoral College with slim majorities in several toss-up states. That is the only way he can win the looming election, a contest all the polls show is too close to call. Once again, it is entirely possible that we will elect a president whom a majority of American voters reject.
The rest of the world finds this arrangement incomprehensible. Heads of government tend to be chosen by direct vote or by the party that wins the most votes in a parliamentary election.
How did the American founders, justifiably famous for their political wisdom, burden us with the strange contraption called the Electoral College?
The answer lies in the historical record of the debates at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787. As we travel back in time, there are a few features on the historical landscape unique to post-revolutionary America that will strike us as strange.
One is the ghost of Britain’s King George III. The one conviction the delegates could all agree on was that the president must not be a monarch who stood above the law. (The Supreme Court decision in Trump v. United States flagrantly defied that core conviction.)
The second strange-to-us feature, even more disturbing to our current political presumptions, is a deep suspicion of democracy. Throughout the American founding, the word “democracy” was an epithet. The watchword during the founding era was “republic,” from the Latin “ res publica” meaning “public things.” The public interest — for Madison, Jefferson, Washington and the others — was the long-term interest of the people, something the founders thought the bulk of voting Americans (white male landowners) would seldom comprehend because of their limited horizons and susceptibility to conspiracy theories, misinformation and demagogues. (Sound familiar?)
When the question of how to elect a president arrived on the agenda in August 1787, suggestions included election by the Senate, by state Legislatures and finally by popular vote in all the states. Multiple critics objected to the latter option on the grounds that popular opinion was notoriously unreliable.
These raw and misguided opinions needed to be filtered through more informed and educated minds. James Madison stepped forward to coin the term “filtration” and then “Electoral College” to describe state legislators capable of comprehending the long-term public interest and, if necessary, overruling the popular vote in the states.
The ironies of the Electoral College abound. The founders did not foresee the emergence of political parties and their winner-take-all slates of electors, which make a mockery of all presumptions of virtuous choosing by a select few. What’s left is indeed a filtration of the popular vote, but one that has morphed into a device whereby the minority defeats the majority.
As a result, the very outcome the founders most feared, election of a demagogue by a gullible cult of true believers, has been made possible.
Over the past century, no feature of the Constitution has generated more criticism and cries for reform than the Electoral College. All have failed, largely because it would require a constitutional amendment — a two-thirds vote in both branches of Congress and a three-fourths vote in the states.
So we are stuck with our electoral albatross. Perhaps the danger posed by a Trump presidency will generate the energy needed for long-overdue constitutional reform. If I have them right, a majority of the founders are up there cheering us on to that very end. The first item on their list of fixes would surely be killing the albatross.
Joseph J. Ellis is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
