“My biggest problem with the two major political parties is that every four years they seem to go on some kind of national scavenger hunt to see who can come up with the biggest goober to run for President.”—Dave Barry, circa 1990

It’s 1786, and America is pretty much a mess.  Just 10 years after declaring independence, and 3 years after a victory over the powerful British military, the 13 colonies-turned-states don’t seem capable of doing much of anything.  The central government is a joke.

Each of the states is primarily concerned with looking out for themselves.  Individual states can print their own money, sign treaties and trade agreements with foreign countries, and raise whatever taxes they choose.  Basically, it’s every state for themselves.

It’s likely that every other western nation is licking their chops, waiting for America to fail.

What passes for a federal government is only a quasi-legislative body modeled after a shaky Continental Congress.  There’s no President.  No judicial branch.  The government has no means to raise money, nor means to support legislation.

Not that it really matters.  Each state gets only one vote in the legislature.  And nine votes are needed to pass anything.  Not surprisingly, little moves forward.  The process makes our current-day constipated Congress look free-flowing by comparison.

All of this was set in motion when a loose set of guidelines called “The Articles of Confederation” was enacted in 1776. It called for forming a nation of sorts, with almost all power in the individual states.

America limped along for a while, but in in 1786 disaster struck.  An armed uprising in western Massachusetts threatened the state.  It was the first rebellion against the new country.  People were shocked.

There were no federal troops to restore order.  Instead, a group of wealthy businessmen paid for a private militia to put down the uprising.

George Washington and James Madison, among others, saw this as a harbinger of what might come next, and decided they’d had enough.  They concluded that, independent of any state, the federal government needed a stronger set of rules to replace the Articles of Confederation.

After much rancor, the U.S. Constitution was written and adopted.  It was not zapped down from on high.  Much arguing, gnashing of teeth, anger, and fatigue (and probably a fair amount of drinking) had to occur before the compromise document was adopted.  Parts of it are clear, and parts of it are clearly ambiguous.

But one question was always at the forefront of the wrangling—how much power should be in the hands of the federal government, and how much in the hands of the individual states?  Not surprisingly, big states with lots of power wanted to keep it, and smaller states with fewer resources were more willing to share.  70 years later, the question of state power versus federal power nearly tore the country apart.

Just like it threatens to do today.

Even the basic question of who gets to elect the President was angrily debated.  Some delegates wanted each state to have a vote, others said it should be the American people—with each person having one vote, no matter where they lived.  Count up the votes, and you’ll have your President.

No, the first group countered.  The average American doesn’t have the smarts to make such a decision.

A compromise was reached.  Instead of voting for President, the individual voters would select Electors—people they knew and trusted—to choose the next head of state.

But how many Electors should each state get?  Most felt that population should be a consideration; that is, unlike under the old Articles of Confederation where each state got one vote, the number of Electors allocated to each state would be determined by the state’s population.  This would mean states with larger populations would have more say in the government.

Then came the rub.  What counts as “the population?”  34% of those living in southern states were slaves (in Virginia and South Carolina, it was over 40%).  Even though slaves were denied the right to vote themselves, southern states still said they should be counted in the overall population, thus increasing the state’s number of Electors.

Northern states (especially Massachusetts and Vermont, which had outlawed slavery by this time) were furious. How can you use people who can’t even vote to increase your share of the electoral pie?

Once again, it was settled by compromise.  Slaves would be counted as 3/5’s of an actual person for purposes of determining electors.  No, I’m not making that up.  Southern states would thus have more electors than if slaves were not counted, but not as many as they wanted.

Any accurate portrayal of the early days of the Electoral College system in the U.S. must acknowledge that it was a triangulation of states’ rights, individual rights, and slavery. It set in motion a squirrely system that persists to this day.   

And it continues to leave us with a basic question—who should elect the President?  The people?  Or the states?

Most of the founding fathers had a low opinion of the concept of political “parties.”  They envisioned a future where individuals would run for President on their own, and there would be multiple candidates.

But in short order, that vision fell apart.  Political parties rose in power and influence, and for nearly two hundred years we’ve had only two basic parties to choose from.  Both have ruthlessly promoted their own interests, and determined their own candidates.  The American people, much to their dismay, have only two basic choices when a Presidential election occurs.

The focus of the electoral college likewise mutated.  Individual Electors became a perfunctory issue. Instead, States (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine) allocated all of their Electoral votes to whichever candidate won the vote in that state.  Win a state by a million votes, and you’ll get all of their Electoral votes.  Win a state by one vote, and you’ll get all of their Electoral votes.

The President is elected by the states, regardless of how the overall American people vote.

I first learned about this when I was in grade school.  I thought it sounded pretty dumb.

So I asked my teacher to explain it.  She really couldn’t, at least not to the satisfaction of a 6^th grader.  (Hint to all non-parents:  When kids don’t understand something a grown-up says, they’ll repeatedly ask “why?” or “how come?” until they either get a reasonable answer or the adult goes nuts).  So I persisted.

She did her best to explain, telling me about the importance of regional interests and state representation.  It still didn’t make any sense.

“But that’s not how we do student council elections,” I said.  “We just count up the votes.  We don’t let the first row count their votes, and they get one vote, and the second row counts all of theirs and gets two votes because they have more desks in the second row.  Why do we do it for President?”

My exasperated teacher hemmed and hawed for awhile and finally said, “Donnie, it doesn’t make any difference these days, because whoever wins the popular vote is going to when the Electoral vote anyway.  Winning one and not the other is all in the past.  It just doesn’t happen anymore.”

Some 40 years later, I found out how wrong she really was.

The Electoral College is just one more reason why government is becoming farther removed and further disconnected from the people it serves.  Are you a Republican who lives in Connecticut?  Sorry, you vote really won’t count.  The Democratic candidate is going to win the state and get all of the Electoral votes.  The same is true if you’re a Democrat and live in Wyoming.  The Republican will win, regardless.

For more and more people, the feeling is why bother to vote at all?  American voter turnout is one of the worst in the world.  It’s time we consider whether the Electoral College may be a part of the problem.

In every election, the focus is on “swing states,” states that could possibly go either way.  Those are the only places candidates focus their time, and the only ones that seem to matter.

And here’s yet another absurdity of the electoral system.  The vote of the “Electors” must be formally certified by the Vice-President.  In the past, this was no big deal.  But in 2020, a mob of insurrectionists, egged on by the President, descended on the Capitol and threatened to hang the Vice-President if he didn’t refuse to certify the election.  It didn’t work.

But what if it had?  What if the will of the people—as well as the will of the states—had been gutted?  Would we even have a democracy today?

When I was in grade school, I thought those things only happened in banana republics.  Is that where we are today in America?  

For the record, a state-by-state pushback against the Electoral College has emerged.  The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) consists of 17 states who’ve had enough of this nonsense.  They’ve pledged to give all of their Electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote, regardless of whether that candidate wins the state’s vote are not.  This move away from a slave-state-protecting, elitist Electoral voting process that favors states over individuals is long overdue.

Hopefully, this idea will take hold, but who knows?  In the meantime, vote.  Vote as if your life, your country, and your democracy depends on it.  Because it does.

I’ll be back next time with more thoughts on whether we are truly a unified nation, or just a collection of self-interested individual states.  In the meantime, feel free to comment.