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

by Jesse Wegman

By 1824, all but six states let their voters choose the electors directly. For reasons we will get to in a moment, the election that year provided the last big push in favor of popular voting for electors. By 1828 only two states resisted, and by 1832 there was only one—South Carolina, which refused to let its voters cast a presidential ballot until 1860. The last time a state denied its people the ability to vote for presidential electors was in 1876, when Colorado, which had been admitted to the union earlier that year, had the legislature appoint its three electors. As it turned out, those three votes would be crucial to the outcome of the election. The switch to popular voting for electors was an important step toward democracy because it gave the people—or the eligible voters of the time, at least—a more direct role in choosing their leader. At the same time, it made it hard to argue that the Electoral College was an essential element of the nation’s federal system. When state legislatures chose the electors themselves, they could claim that their decision represented their state’s political sovereignty—similar to the way they once chose senators, a power that was at the heart of the original federal scheme. That logic collapses as soon as you move to a popular vote. Average citizens don’t cast their presidential ballots (or even their Senate ballots) based on what state they live in; they vote based on their party preference. Democrats in 2016 voted for Hillary Clint...

December 25, 2020. Page 96.