Jan 14, 2017 5 min read

In his defense of the Electoral College on last week’s Commentary page, Tom Flickinger raised a valuable point: How can minority interests be protected in a democracy, where the majority rules?

And he was right to point out that one of the greatest fears of the Founding Fathers, who were an educated, wealthy minority – the coastal elite of their day – was that under majority rule, the majority might pass laws that would hurt the interests of the minority, such as confiscating their property. While these concerns are valid, they are not addressed by the Electoral College, so they do not justify its retention.

The Electoral College does not protect minority rights. It changes the dynamics of power at the presidential level from one based solely on population, to one that has to consider geography. While the Electoral College does enhance the value of voters in small states, why is that a good thing? Are voters in West Virginia that much smarter than voters in Pennsylvania? When the Electoral College was set up, states were not nearly as different in size as they are now; the population of the largest state in 1790, Virginia, had about 10 times the population of the smallest state, Delaware. In 2010, the largest state, California, was 66 times bigger than the smallest, Wyoming. Besides, the small states are already over-represented at the federal level thanks to the U.S. Senate. California has two senators; if you add up the population of the smallest states to equal California’s, people in those states are represented by 44 senators. Using the Electoral College instead of the popular vote multiplies the small-state advantage unnecessarily.

The Electoral College does not even fully protect small states. The winner-take-all system employed by most states means that candidates have no reason to spend time in states where the outcome is not in doubt, other than to raise money that will then be spent in “battleground” states. The Electoral College also limits our choice of presidential candidates, because the importance of the electoral vote is an advantage for candidates from big states. Vice President Joe Biden, from Delaware, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, from Vermont, were both disadvantaged in their respective bids for the presidency because they came from small states, and couldn’t count on a many delegates from those states.

Flickinger suggests that Hillary Clinton’s “despotic character” was evidenced by the fact that she didn’t campaign much in “flyover country.” But if that’s the case, Donald Trump was equally despotic, since they both spent most of their time campaigning in the same states. And the reason they did so was not because they loved the residents of these states more, but because the Electoral College system meant that these were the states they needed to win in order to be elected president. And this is the greatest flaw in the Electoral College system. Voters in most states simply don’t matter. Only about 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in a state in which the difference in the percentage of votes won by Clinton and Trump was less than 5 percent.

Flickinger argues that the Electoral College is all that prevents the United States from being ruled by “the coasts.” But this characterization is illusory; the coasts did not uniformly support Clinton. California, one of the states in which Clinton received the most votes, had more than 4.8 million Trump voters. In West Virginia, 26 percent of voters chose Clinton. Voting preferences have changed over time, but a division based on states is misleading, so using the Electoral College to protect electoral minorities at the state level is generally futile. Historically, regions have had divergent interests, but interests evolve. Now, the greater divide is between metropolitan areas and rural areas, not between states.

The Electoral College does not even guarantee that a regional candidate cannot win. Abraham Lincoln became president without even being on the ballot in Southern states.

The issue of preserving minority rights is vital, and was of great concern for the Founding Fathers. It was also the reason many states required that the first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, be passed along with the Constitution.

Cherished by both conservatives and civil liberties advocates, these amendments primarily limited the power of the federal government. The Constitution, not the Electoral College, protects minority rights. And since the Electoral College operates on a winner-take-all system in most states, minority interests are overridden in every state; votes for someone other than the winner make no difference. If the president were elected by popular vote, those same votes would matter as much as the votes for the state winner.

Finally, Flickinger takes issue with the idea that the United States is a democracy. Without getting caught up in the semantics of contrasting a liberal democracy with a constitutional republic, I think it is fair to say that the United States is at least democratic to the point of the people choosing the president. Technically, since we choose electors who then vote for the president, we are not a democracy, as Flickinger argues. But since the electors are no longer supposed to use their judgment in deciding the presidency on our behalf, but simply rubberstamp our choices, we are a democracy. Just an awkwardly structured one.

Kent James is a resident of East Washington.