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

by Jesse Wegman

The one person, one vote rulings didn’t just reshape the idea of what a democracy could be and who was represented in it; they also shined a new light on the most undemocratic elements of our political system—above all, the Electoral College. If “one person, one vote” was now the rule for congressional and state legislative elections, how was it fair to not hold the presidential election to the same standard? The justices had anticipated this challenge, and they had a legally correct if unsatisfying response. It was true, they wrote in Gray v. Sanders, that the Electoral College treated some votes as worth more than others, just as malapportioned districts did. In this case, however, there was nothing they could do about it. After all, “specific historical concerns validated the collegiate principle despite its inherent numerical inequality.” In other words, they were admitting that the Electoral College violates basic political equality, and yet it is constitutional … because it is literally in the Constitution.21 In a footnote to the ruling, the justices added an editorial aside. Whatever the original intent of the College, they suggested, there was no modern justification for it. The Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments showed that the framers’ “conception of political equality belongs to a bygone day.” But that was as far as the justices could go. The Supreme Court has the power to interpret what’s in the Constitution, but not to rewrite it. To do that, yo...

December 26, 2020. Page 141.