The Framers of the U.S. Constitution designed a unique system to choose our president in 1787: the Electoral College. More than two centuries later, it remains an invaluable institution that helps safeguard us against the tyranny of the majority and vote fraud.

Back then, it was experimental. The notion of an elected chief executive was novel — unheard of, even. At first, the Framers didn’t agree on what to do. Some wanted Congress to pick the president. Others wanted to vest that power with the states by having state legislatures determine the nation’s chief executive. And still others favored a national popular vote. Making matters worse, the debate was embroiled in the politics of the terrible institution of slavery.

Yet, the men of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, representing their respective states, shared a distrust of executive power in the wake of a hard-fought war for independence from Great Britain. The Electoral College became the compromise that won ratification of the Constitution.

Every state is allotted electoral votes equivalent to the number of representatives it has in Congress. On Election Day, voters cast a vote for a slate of delegates affiliated with a corresponding candidate on the ballot. Whichever candidate wins a majority vote in that state, the corresponding delegates later cast all the state’s electoral votes for that candidate.

Citizens and lawmakers periodically call for scrapping the Electoral College (often just after they have lost an election) in favor of a popular vote. This change would require amending the Constitution. That would be a catastrophic mistake for our democratic republic because the complex Electoral College system is integral to safeguarding the voice of minority populations and deterring election fraud.

In elections, candidates campaign where the votes are. A national election decided by a national popular vote would encourage candidates to spend most of their time in densely packed population centers like New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago. Those candidates would steer clear of rural areas or other low-density locales, and the values and interests of those minority populations would go unheard. A president would be disproportionately beholden to the values and interests of the most populous regions of our republic.

Another strong argument favoring the Electoral College, perhaps unfamiliar to most citizens, is that it confines problems like contentious recounts or fraud within state boundaries. The notorious recount fiasco in Florida in 2000, for example, was indeed a lesser problem than the prospect of a nationwide recount would have been. For weeks, the news was dominated by political drama and litigation. The election results weren’t even determined until five weeks after Election Day. Imagine a national version of the Florida recount … every four years.

And consider that no matter how many fraudulent votes for president sprout up in one state, under the Electoral College system, that fraud cannot spill over into the vote results for other states.

The election of Lyndon B. Johnson to the Senate in 1948, understood as fraudulent today, illustrates this point. The decisive runoff election took a week to resolve as the Democratic State Central Committee counted votes. Somehow, day after day, new batches of votes in far-off counties emerged. Johnson was announced the winner by 87 votes out of 988,295.

Johnson’s margin lay in 200 additional ballots, reported six days after the election. All those ballots were associated with a list of voter signatures at the very end of the voter rolls. This list of 200 names, in alphabetical order, was all written with the same pen and all with the same handwriting.

Counting the votes is at the center of every election. The bigger the number of votes, the more possibilities for fraud. Imagine the dynamics of LBJ-style voter fraud in a national election.

Three Democratic senators — Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Peter Welch of Vermont — proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College system, touting the “simple” notion that “the person who gets the most votes should win.”

Simple? Yes. Fair, equitable and safe from fraud? No.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Dan Greenberg is general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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