The Accidental Elector

 I didn’t set out to become one of California’s 55 electors, but it happened anyway. As the highest vote-getter in the March primary, my old friend, former philosophy student and 50th congressional district candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar got to appoint an elector, and he called me.

“How’d you like to be an elector?” he said.

“You mean the Electoral College, that thing everybody hates?”

“Yes.”

“Sure!”

I had so many questions. Like most politics watchers, I have complained bitterly about the Electoral College. It is patently anti-democratic. But it is, after all, enshrined in the Constitution. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton thought it was a good idea. And those guys seemed pretty smart. But wasn’t it at best elitist, at worst racist? I needed to learn more.

In the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was rushing to finish framing the rules and processes of this fledgling confederacy of states. Months of debate compressed into the final weeks as a ratification deadline loomed. The states had existed for far longer than this nascent “nation” had, so everyone treaded lightly. 

At a moment’s notice, any of the state’s representatives could have packed up and gone home, shattering the whole thing. And no nation on earth had ever elected its chief executive by direct, popular vote, although there was some support in the room for that idea. And they sure didn’t want the legislature to do it — too much opportunity for cronyism. They had to come up with a way to elect a president that honored the sovereignty of each state while yielding the most rational outcome. This was, after all, a republic they were building, not a raw democracy, and it needed structural support. So they created the Senate, with two representatives per state regardless of population, and a tier of electors charged with choosing a chief executive.

The Electoral College was an inelegant compromise. Even the framers didn’t love it. But they disliked other proposals more. So it passed. Hamilton in particular tried to amend it immediately, but he died before any real changes could be made. Some minor amendments were passed in the 19th century. But the Electoral College we have today is largely the clumsy instrument Madison and Hamilton created in Philadelphia 233 years ago.

So how does it work? Each state gets one elector per congressional district, and one per senator. The rest they left up to the states. State legislatures, and today the political parties, establish and maintain the processes by which electors are chosen and for whom they vote. Forty-eight states have a winner-take-all approach, while Maine and Nebraska rely on their state’s overall popular vote and individual House district victories. And herein lies everyone’s biggest complaint — that in most states, the Electoral College is fundamentally undemocratic.

In 2016, 62 percent of California voters chose Hillary Clinton while 33 percent — vast regions of the north and the central valley — chose Donald Trump. When Clinton was awarded all 55 of California’s Electoral College electors it’s as if those Trump voters didn’t even exist. And it went the other way in other states — Trump won by a hair, but took 100 percent of that state’s Electoral College electors. Which is how Trump became president. 

If we had a simple popular vote, Electoral College critics argue, we’d have a more truly democratic government. But the founders feared raw democracy, which they likened to mob rule. And we all know mobs are far more dangerous than individuals. Allowing an uneducated, uninformed electorate to choose a president would spell disaster, they believed. In 1787, literacy was low and there was no compulsory education, and no widespread journalism, leading to the original “low information voters.” How could uninformed voters in far-flung territories know the candidates or the issues? They couldn’t. We needed a professional political class to make these decisions for us, or so Madison and Hamilton argued.

Conditions are obviously different now. Or are they?

After months of stay-at-home isolation and remote teaching, I was itching to get on a plane, any plane, and go somewhere. Even Sacramento. All I needed was a reason. So on Monday, Dec. 14, I’ll don my mask and walk into the state Capitol to cast my in-person vote for whoever wins California in November. 

Then on Dec. 15, let’s fix the Electoral College.

[This piece first appeared as an op-ed in the October 21, 2020 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune, and was edited by Matthew T. Hall, and is reproduced here with permission.]