The presidential election is today.
I have a hunch that Donald Trump will win.
If you voted in last month’s election (and 25% of Virginia’s registered voters did not), you technically weren’t voting for Trump or Kamala Harris or any of the other four candidates on the ballot. Instead, you were voting for a slate of electors pledged to support that candidate. You know, the whole Electoral College thing.
Today, that part of the constitutional machinery starts operating, as electors gather in 50 state capitals across the country to cast their votes. The Virginia meeting is at noon and you can watch it on this livestream from the state Department of Elections.
If you’re really into that sort of thing, you can watch the 2016 meeting here:
There will be ceremony (and paperwork), but don’t expect drama. Because Harris (or, technically, that Harris slate) won Virginia, all 13 of the state’s electoral votes will go to her. The only drama will be if someone “goes rogue” and casts a ballot for someone else.
It’s not unheard of for a few electors to vote for someone unexpected. In 2016, five Democratic electors voted for someone other than Hillary Clinton — three Washington state electors cast ballots for Colin Powell, one Washington state elector voted for environmental activist Faith Spotted Eagle and one Hawaii elector voted for Bernie Sanders. Since Clinton was going to lose anyway, those defections didn’t matter, except for symbolic purposes. More surprising were two Republican electors from Texas who didn’t vote for Trump — one went for John Kasich, another for Ron Paul. Given Trump’s margin, those didn’t make a difference, either.
The most famous “faithless elector” from Virginia was Roger MacBride, a Republican from Charlottesville who, in 1972, voted for Libertarian John Hospers, and four years later became the Libertarian Party nominee himself.
In theory, these “faithless electors,” as they’re called, are acting exactly the way the founders intended by exercising their independent judgment over who the next president should be. In reality, electors are party activists who are being rewarded for their service and aren’t likely to depart from the party line. One of Virginia’s electors today is Susan Swecker of Highland County, the state’s Democratic Party chair.
Every four years we go through the same ritual of explaining, once again, what the Electoral College is and why it exists. I’ll give the short version but have a different angle I want to explore today. The short version: The Electoral College is a relic of slavery, 18th-century communications and inevitable political compromises.
The very idea of selecting a national chief executive was a new one for people who had grown up under a monarchy. The delegates who met in the Constitutional Convention had many different ideas on how to pick such a person. Some wanted Congress to elect the president — but that would run afoul of the “separation of powers” concept they were trying to carry out. Alexander Hamilton of future Broadway musical fame was among those who wanted to elect the president through a national popular vote. The slave states in the South didn’t like that; they feared they’d be outvoted. In the end, we wound up with the Electoral College.
James Madison later admitted that the decision was rushed (much like the final season of “Game of Thrones,” which wound up with a new monarch on the Iron Throne of Westeros, but I digress). “As the final arrangement of it took place in the latter stage of the Session, it was not exempt from a degree of the hurrying influence produced by fatigue & impatience in all such bodies,” he wrote.
The framers got a lot of things right. They understood human nature and took pains to craft a government that would mitigate some of the worst instincts of that human nature. If we sometimes think the federal government is slow to act, it’s because the framers intentionally designed it that way — they were wary of a government that could rush things through based simply on the popular mood at the moment.
The Electoral College is one thing they got very wrong, though. The problem isn’t that we don’t elect a president by popular vote or that we sometimes wind up in situations where the electoral vote winner doesn’t win the popular vote. Those may well be problems, but that’s not the point today. (In parliamentary systems, the party with the most seats didn’t always get the most votes. The closest example is just to our north. In the last Canadian election, the Conservative Party won the most votes, but the Liberal Party won the most seats, which is why Justin Trudeau, and not Erin O’Toole, is scurrying off to Mar-a-Lago to talk with Trump about tariffs.)
No, the problem the framers made with the Electoral College is they thought it would be insulated from party politics. They envisioned a deliberative body, sort of a national hiring committee of the sort that a company might form today to pick a new CEO.
In Federalist Paper No. 68, Alexander Hamilton touted how the Electoral College would exclude federal officeholders from being electors. He felt this meant electors “will at least enter upon the task free from any sinister bias” because of “their transient existence and their detached situation.” Being elected for a single purpose, to find the best president, meant that the electors would be immune to corruption. “The business of corruption,” he wrote, “requires time as well as means.” Having electors dispersed in each state meant that it wouldn’t be easy to corrupt all of them, Hamilton wrote.
Further, Hamilton wrote, these single-purpose electors would be able to evaluate candidates fairly. “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” Hamilton wrote. “It will not be too strong to say that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”
What a silly fellow.
Thought experiment: If electors really did operate in an independent, deliberative fashion in the form of a national hiring committee, how many of our presidents would have been chosen for that station? Not many, I suspect. Instead, those “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity” have elevated virtually all of our presidents, save for those who ascended to the office through death or resignation.
The founders foresaw many things with remarkable clarity; how could they not foresee that electors would be bound to political parties? It’s not that political parties were unknown to them. Great Britain at the time was divided between the Tories, the conservative party, and the Whigs, the liberal party. They may not have been as well-organized as political parties today, but there were clearly opposing factions in parliament.
Instead, the founders simply disliked political parties — which they associated with the violent tumults that had led to the English Civil War — and hoped to avoid them altogether. That was a fanciful notion, as both Hamilton and Madison later came to acknowledge.
“Party-Spirit is an inseparable appendage of human nature,” Hamilton wrote in 1792, four years after the Constitution was ratified. “It grows naturally out of the rival passions of Men, and is therefore to be found in all Governments.” He also went on to call political parties “their most common and fatal disease.”
In retirement, Madison likewise concluded: “No free Country has ever been without parties, which are a natural offspring of Freedom.”
George Washington won the first two presidential elections unanimously because, well, he was George Washington. However, the first Congress that was elected immediately divided into two factions — a pro-administration majority that came to be called Federalists, and an anti-administration minority that came to be called Anti-Federalists, or, in time, Democratic-Republicans. Yes, even Washington had his detractors. They may have liked the man, but they criticized many of his policies.
By the time Washington retired after two terms, political parties were well-established, and that 1796 election was a contentious one between the Federalist John Adams and the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson. By then, it was clear that electors were not going to be independent actors but rather party operatives. Adams won that round, but they’d go at each other again in 1800 with different results.
The notion of an independent body sifting through potential candidates may be a noble one, just not one that’s particularly democratic in spirit. In any case, this is the system we have, and it’s unlikely to change. Among major Western democracies, only France directly elects its chief executive.
Most countries operate on a parliamentary system where the leader of the party with the most seats becomes prime minister. That also leads to situations like the one in Great Britain where two of the last three prime ministers took office in No. 10 Downing Street without ever having to face the voters. I’m guessing Americans wouldn’t like that very much.
Even if the Electoral College had worked out the way founders intended, there’s no guarantee we’d have always gotten better presidents. Consider the case of Herbert Hoover. He had been regarded as an administrative mastermind for his relief work in Europe during and after World War I. He was also highly regarded for his work as secretary of commerce. He might have been the best-prepared president we ever had; his resume would have surely risen to the top of any hiring committee. You also see how that worked out.
Want more history? You’re in luck!
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