Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

by Jesse Wegman

The conservative narrative says, in brief, that the founding fathers got it mostly right. They didn’t trust unfettered democracy, and believed it was necessary to channel and constrain the people’s voice in order to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of minorities. Some of these constraints were good, like a two-tiered system of government with checks on majorities and filters of the popular will. Others were not good, like the denial of voting rights to nearly everyone but white male property owners. Many of these restrictions have been lifted, and while most modern conservatives agree with those changes, they were nearly all controversial at the time that they were made. Since the tendency of these reforms has been to remove checks against direct popular rule, any new reforms, like abolishing the Electoral College, are best approached with caution and skepticism. The liberal narrative, on the other hand, emphasizes the egalitarian ideal at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. We are all created equal, and we should govern ourselves that way. Yet for most of our history, those were just words on parchment—the founders erected barriers to democracy not because of legitimate constitutional principles but because of immoral prejudices. When those barriers have been eliminated, as has happened in various spurts of moral progress throughout our history, it is cause for celebration. Democratic legitimacy depends, at its core, on all votes being tre...

December 24, 2020. Page 15.