Proponents of the popular vote say that an individual’s vote in Wyoming shouldn’t have more weight than someone’s in California. They would say for example, “Each delegate in California represents approximately 361,800 eligible voters while each delegate in Wyoming represents approximately 95,000 voters, giving Wyoming a disproportionate voting power.” What would you say to that? ROSS: Well, a couple of things. One is, by that logic, we should also get rid of the Senate. That’s the next logical step. Our system takes into consideration both the elements of one state-one vote, and one person-one vote. That was the compromise, the fundamental compromise that was made at the Constitutional Convention, and it was made so that the small States would not be left out of the process entirely.
The Electoral College was created because the Founders knew that people are imperfect; they knew that power corrupts; they knew that if you concentrate too much power in the hands of a few people, the whole country will pay for that. They wanted checks and balances, and they wanted devices in their new Constitution to make it harder for power to be abused.
So why would a direct popular vote system be a worse way to elect a president? ROSS: There are many reasons why it would be worse. First, it would get rid of the coalition-building incentives that are in our system now. There'd be no reason for candidates to learn or care about the concerns of the less densely populated areas of our country. As a strategic matter, it would be easier to go to the big cities or the big states, and rack up as many friendly votes as they can, as fast as they can, because that's just easy. If we were to eliminate the Electoral College, the second thing we'd notice is how much easier it would be to steal elections. As it stands now, you have to know exactly where to steal an election - which state is close, which state is going to make a difference - then you need to steal votes in that one particular spot so you can swing the national outcome. Even that doesn't work well, by the way, unless the overall national election is close enough that one or two states are going to swing the whole thing. That doesn't usually happen. If you have a national popular vote, by contrast, any stolen vote in any precinct in the country will make a difference. Votes can be stolen in the bluest blue California precinct or the reddest red Texas one, and you could affect the entire national outcome. A national popular vote system requires us to be on defense in every single precinct of the country at all times, and that's impossible. We simply don't have the resources for that. A third thing that people don't really think about when they think about a switch to a national popular vote is that it would undermine the two party system. Some people might think, 'That sounds great! We're tired of being stuck with two choices.' But you have to also think about the other ramifications of that: You'd allow extremist third parties to come in and have an influence on the election. Look at the French election system. It's not unusual to have ten or twelve candidates vying to get into a runoff. Two candidates finally make it with something like 18% or 19% of the vote. More extremist types of candidates often end up in the runoff in the French system. They have no incentive to build coalitions and to come together, and that's the kind of world that we would be looking at if we got rid of the Electoral College.
ROSS: Absolutely. The Founders created the Electoral College because they thought a nation of 13 states was huge and diverse and that something special was needed. If anything, I would say we need the Electoral College even more now then we did back then. They had only 13 states, but we have 50. We have become more diverse. We have more concerns, more subcultures, more interests that need to be represented, and the President of the United States is the only elected official in this whole country who is expected to represent all of us. It’s a unique position and it deserves a unique process.
The other thing that I would offer as reminder is that, what you said is kind of true, but also kind of not true, and the reason is because there is no national election in this country. There is no real national tally. That is an informal number that is generated by the press, or whomever, because we like to hear it. What really happens is we conduct 51 purely democratic elections in this country; there are 51 separate elections that are held within each state, plus D.C. We vote for electors, just like we would vote for our state governor or any other statewide office. This is a statewide election in which each person in that state is treated equally with every other person in that state, and they cast their ballots to decide who the electors will be who will represent that state. It is a purely democratic, one person-one vote election, but it’s conducted at the state level rather than the national level.
There’s no such thing as a permanently safe or swing state. This is always fluctuating, always changing. It can never be taken for granted.
They didn’t trust anybody. They didn’t trust the national government; they didn’t trust the states; they didn’t trust the people; they didn’t trust the government officials. They literally trusted nobody. They knew that everyone is imperfect and anyone can be corrupted by power. So we need to set ambition against ambition, and we need to have so many checks and balances in the system that it will protect our liberty in the end. The Electoral College is just one of these devices intended to ensure that a tyrannical majority or a bare majority can’t run over everybody else.