Lots of friends have been pointing out that the Electoral College is broken, and I will agree. But the reason is not as simple and the solution clear-cut as it seems. As such, eliminating it via a Constitutional Amendment may be a worse solution than the problem. Consider the following: Among other things, when we read the writings of the Founding Fathers, such as the Federalist Papers or their private letters, we see that one reason they put the Electoral College (I will use EC for short) in place was to allow for preventing a demagogue into the position as our surpreme executive. It was, in their thinking not only a way of balancing between the farms/plantations and cities, but as a type of circuit breaker of last resort, to in their time, prevent the likes of a Benedict Arnold from gaining the office.
So what is wrong with the EC? The problem goes back to the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (the CAA), sometimes referred to as the “Article the First”. In the original set of amendments to the Constitution, before freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, or the right to bear arms, we had an amendment which was intended to tell us how to divvy up the House of Representatives, and thorough that, the EC itself. But, it barely missed being ratified, with just one state at one point being needed to ratify the amendment and become a part of our Constitution. This amendment would have required an additional member of the House for every 50,000 in population for a state. Think about this for a moment… the Founding Father’s wanted a member in the House representing his “neighbors”, which would know him and which the representative would be more like.
Compounding that problem is that the Congressional Apportionment Act of 1929 was a direct opposite of the CAA. Passed by a GOP controlled Congress and POTUS, this act limited the number of representatives to a fixed 435, with states guaranteed at least one. Because of this, there are some states which have one representative for 527,624 constituents (Rhode Island, 2010 Census) [1], and others which are nearly one million constituents per representative (994,416 – Montana). This is roughly a 2:1 ratio. For electors, the spread is even worse. Wyoming has 189,433 constituents per elector, while California has 678,945, for a ratio of 3.6:1. Think about those facts for a second… there is where our problem is.
Another problem which would be addressed by doing away with the 1929 act and going with the amendment would be gerrymandering. When a district shrinks down to a town, or sometimes even just a few city blocks, it becomes far more difficult to gerrymander a district. And right along with this, imagine the effects on the cost of running as opposed to the cost to buy a significant chunk of legislators. While the cost would be far lower for the house seat, the numbers required for lobbyists or corporations to buy influence would increase.
So with this, it would be far better IMO to give the CAA a try.
– End of part 1