Reevaluating the Electoral College
By Joshua Rabotnick February 22, 2019
With politicians beginning to announce their candidacies for the 2020 presidential race, the topic of the Electoral College is once again emerging to the forefront of American politics. Since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election with 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, and Al Gore lost the 2000 election despite outpacing George Bush by half a million votes, little has had a greater effect on the presidency in modern times than the institution of the Electoral College.
At the founding of the United States, there was plenty of controversy regarding the means by which the president would be elected. Many thought that Congress should elect the president directly, although others feared that such an establishment would give Congress a tyrannical degree of power. James Madison worried extensively about a true democratic election, fearing that the masses would vote to elect men who would encroach on the constitutional rights of other citizens in the name of the public good (an eerie thought in light of Senator Bernie Sanders’ recent announcement of his second presidential bid).
With a term later popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville as “tyranny of the majority,†the Founders sought to develop a system in which a small body of well-informed, educated, and passionate citizens would themselves elect the next president of the United States who would best represent the interests of the nation. In 1787, James Wilson created the Electoral College we know today which is enshrined in Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution; however, the college today is effectively just a shell of the founder’s original intent, with most electors being legally bound to vote in direct accordance with the popular vote.
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