The Stubborn Persistence Of The Electoral College
We’ll hear a lot about the Electoral College tonight. If you know your history, you know that it emerged as a last-minute compromise during the writing of the Constitution in 1787. And since 1800, people have been trying (and failing) to either reform the Electoral College or get rid of it altogether.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party called for allocating electoral votes by congressional district — as Maine and Nebraska currently do, in part — to eliminate the winner-take-all aspect of the Electoral College. But Democratic-Republicans instead used their supermajority in Congress to pass the 12th Amendment, separating the votes for president and vice president, in order to help Jefferson’s reelection prospects in 1804. (Originally, electors’ two votes all went into the same tally, and the person with the second-most votes became VP.)
But as national parties began to develop, state legislatures began changing their allocation formulas to help their preferred candidate win (generally moving to more winner-take-all formats), sometimes even appointing electors to bypass the state’s voters altogether. Changing or eliminating the Electoral College was a perpetual topic of debate in Congress from 1813 to 1826, with several constitutional amendments getting close, and two passing one chamber but not the other.
Calls for reform continued to pop up intermittently, but the next big push came in 1950, when the Senate approved an amendment to allocate states’ electoral votes proportionally, according to the percentage of votes won by each candidate. That amendment failed to get the requisite two-thirds support in the House. A national popular vote amendment passed the House in 1969, with the support of President Richard Nixon, but failed in the Senate.
The Electoral College may be, as Hubert Humphrey once called it, like a “human appendix” (“useless, unpredictable and a possible center of inflammation”). But because it’s in the Constitution, and at least a third of the country always seems to benefit from it, it remains with us still — and probably will for a while longer. (If you want to read more about all this, check out this article I wrote for Washington Monthly.)