[Alessandra Seiter, host]
"For more than two centuries, "the United States has elected "its most powerful public
official through a complex process "that has been widely criticized "and sometimes condemned outright, "a process that does not
conform to democratic principles "the nation has publicly championed, "a process that is ill
understood by many Americans, "bewildering to nearly everyone abroad, "and never imitated by another country "or by any state of the United States." This process is the Electoral College and this confounding description of it comes from the latest
book by Alex Keyssar, Matthew W. Stirling,
Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at
Harvard Kennedy school. The book's focus and
title come from a question that has for years kept
Professor Keyssar up at night: Why do we still have
the Electoral College? On this episode of Behind the Book, we speak with Professor
Keyssar about this question and what it means for U.S. democracy. The Electoral College
refers to the process that has been used to
choose the U.S. president every four years since 1787. When American voters go to the polling place on election day, they aren't voting for
a specific candidate. Instead, they're voting
for a group of electors who have pledged to support
their candidate of choice. Generally, these electors
are picked by state parties. They tend to be individuals
who are active in their party, such as elected officials
and political activists. After the election, the electors in each state
meet and cast their votes for the nominee they've
pledged to support. These votes are counted in a joint session of the U.S. Congress and the nominee who wins a
majority of all electoral votes becomes president. Each state is allocated electors based on the size of its
congressional delegation, while the District of Columbia
is given three electors. Thus, the total number of electors is 538 with 270 needed to win the election. If no candidate receives
270 electoral votes, the election is decided by contingent vote with the House of Representatives
voting on the president and the Senate voting
on the vice president. There's already a ton of scholarship making the case either for or against maintaining this process, and Professor Keyssar didn't
intend to join their ranks. Instead he wanted to zoom out even further to make the case that the persistence of
the Electoral College is not self-evident and
requires explanation. To ask, in light of its distorting
effects on American democracy, why is it still around? But Professor Keyssar didn't expect that developing that explanation would require years of detective work. [Alex Keyssar] When I first
started working on this project, I did not imagine it to be
such a massive undertaking. I didn't realize when I started
out how little was known and the degree to which even
the basic evidentiary base was contested or unknown. It took me into more nuances
of American political history, more changes over time. From pursuing the nuances, I began to see patterns that had not really been discerned before. [Alessandra Seiter] After
years of working backwards from secondary sources, scouring the archives of local newspapers, and digging into the personal
papers of late politicians, Professor Keyssar has built
his explanation historically. He takes his readers through
the many efforts made to shape and reform the Electoral College from its origins as the
compromise-ridden solution to one of the most vexing questions of the Constitutional Convention: how to pick a chief executive. He covers the outcry against
the winner-take-all method of allocating state electors as well as more contemporary pushes to replace the whole system
with the national popular vote. By investigating the continual
failures of these efforts, Professor Keyssar illuminates
three overarching reasons why we still have the
Electoral College today. The first is the system's
sheer complexity. [Alex Keyssar] It's a very,
very Byzantine mechanism, and one of the things
they discovered was that it became extremely difficult to reform any feature of that mechanism without touching the rest of it. [Alessandra Seiter] This
political butterfly effect was first felt with the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which mandated that
electors cast separate votes for president and vice president. It fixed one problem, preventing
a tie between two nominees, but it encouraged the
development of political parties, which the framers had wanted to avoid when they wrote the Constitution. In their view, political
parties would alter the nature of electoral competition and
be destructive to the Republic. This brings us to the second reason why Professor Keyssar thinks we still have the Electoral College: political partisanship. As the two party system
became more firmly cemented in U.S. politics, and with states controlling
how electors would be elected, dominant parties within each state started to gauge how they
could maximize their influence. One of the most significant
strategies they developed was winner-take-all, where the candidate who wins a majority of the state's popular vote, also gains all of that state's electors. Today, 48 out of 50
States use winner-take-all to choose their electors. In addition to this maneuvering, Professor Keyssar points to developments that intensified the antipathy between opposing party members. [Alex Keyssar] The election of 1824 and the decision of the
House of Representatives to make John Quincy Adams president, even though he had not won a plurality of either the electoral or popular votes created severe political
hostilities in the system and made people focus
on the contingent plan. [Alessandra Seiter] Perhaps
recognizing how difficult it would be to reform facets of the
Electoral College in isolation, especially after the partisan consequences of the Twelfth Amendment, in 1816 Senator Abner
Lacock of Pennsylvania, first introduced in congress
the idea of replacing the whole system with the
national popular vote, but the idea was quickly shut down. Why? Because of the third and final reason why we still have the
Electoral College today: the legacy of slavery. [Alex Keyssar] Senator Barbour
from Virginia weighed in and said, in effect, if you have
a national popular vote, then we do not get any
electoral votes or influence on behalf of our slaves. And thus, we will not stand for that. We will not only oppose it, but Barbour made clear
that he would oppose even appointing a
committee to consider it. [Alessandra Seiter] This
argument was powerful enough to keep the idea of a
national popular vote off the table for another 125 years, especially during the Jim Crow era. In the wake of the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments were added to the Constitution with the intent of
strengthening democratic rights for freed people in the South. Congress enacted several
laws meant to protect the franchise for black voters. But the end of Reconstruction, in 1877, and the reemergence of white
supremacists state governments reversed whatever progress had been made, and by the 1880s, most Black Southerners
had been disenfranchised. This created a situation
in which the South was given representation in Congress and the Electoral College disproportionate to the number of citizens who could actually vote. The national popular vote would eliminate the structural advantage, so Southern states had an incentive to retain the Electoral College system. A movement to reform the Electoral College emerged in the mid-twentieth century, when a more politically
progressive Congress was reinvigorated by democratic values during and after World War II. During this period, the issue
was largely nonpartisan. The idea of a national popular vote gained outspoken proponents, not only from expected organizations like labor unions and Americans
for Democratic Action, but also from small states, from the American Bar Association, and even from the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce. Supreme Court decisions of the early 1960s upheld the principle of
"One Person, One Vote," further strengthening support
for a national popular vote. By the 1970s, public opinion polls showed that as much as
82% of the U.S. population supported a national popular vote. In 1969, a bipartisan super majority in the House of Representatives actually passed legislation that would have replaced
the Electoral College with a national popular vote, but that legislation couldn't overcome a filibuster in the senate
by southern senators. The 2000 and 2016 elections in which the winners of
the popular vote lost in the Electoral College have renewed interest in
reforming or replacing the system. One proposal called the National Popular
Vote Interstate Compact, has been adopted by fifteen states. Members of the compact have pledged that their electoral votes
would go to the winner of a national popular vote. The compact would go into
effect if states representing a majority of electoral votes sign on, however, support for this
measure comes almost exclusively from Democratic-leaning states. The same can be said for
many other reform efforts. So here we are, over two
centuries since its invention and the Electoral College prevails, not because of popularity, but because, according
to Professor Keyssar, of its complexity, of partisanship, and of the legacy of slavery. But he doesn't necessarily think that we have another 200 years of the Electoral College
to look forward to. [Alex Keyssar] So one thing
to draw from this is that we have come pretty
close to electoral reform on more than one occasion. I also think it's the case that the salience of democratic values has increased over time, and even though we're in a very disputed and contentious era
about that right now -- I certainly can't deny it-- the long run trend has been towards respecting the will of majorities. [Alessandra Seiter] The book is "Why Do We Still Have
the Electoral College?" written by Alex Keyssar, Matthew W. Stirling, Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. It's published by
Harvard University Press. This has been Behind the Book, a production of Library
and Knowledge Services at Harvard Kennedy School. Find past and future
episodes of Behind the Book by subscribing to Harvard
Kennedy School on YouTube, following us on Twitter @HKSLibrary, and visiting our website.
