The Electoral College Serves an Important Purpose | Opinion

Every time we go to the polls, the results remind us that America is a fractured, fragmented nation. The red-versus-blue divide is real, and grows by leaps and bounds every four years.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, 2024 is not the first time it’s been like this. The United States has always been a marvelous mélange of diverse interests and priorities, sometimes divided, and sometimes held together by one or two overarching themes that create an illusion of unanimity. For this reason, the Founders’ wisdom regarding the design of the American system remains relevant.
Consistent with enlightened (and Enlightenment) thinking, they created a government where power is checked, and the need for consensus is prioritized. Not only did they parcel out power between the different branches of government, they ensured power and authority is divided between the federal government and the states and, most importantly, left the people in charge.
This need for checks and balances is also manifest in the manner prescribed for choosing the president. Men as wise as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, whose like are not among us today, considered and rejected the idea that the people should choose the chief executive. Instead, they opted for a representative system which, in significant ways, maintained the sovereignty of the states as individual entities.
The most important of these is the Electoral College, which is supposed to, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 68, preserve the idea the president “should be independent for his continuance in office on all but the people themselves.”
To some, that might seem as though Hamilton were calling for the president to be the candidate who wins the most votes in a national election. If that were true, the Electoral College would be superfluous. Instead, it accounts for the Founders’ belief the opinions of all Americans mattered, even those in the minority, so the objective ought to be the selection of a chief executive with the broadest range of support.
That’s not necessarily the candidate who wins the most votes. No one state should be allowed to dominate the process, nor should the big states be allowed to oppress the small.
The Founders envisioned that the president’s concern be for the nation, not just parts of it. In the post-colonial period, that might have meant securing outcomes that did not favor the interests and attitudes present in big states over those in the small. In our times, it might mean being just as attentive to the needs of the population-poor rural parts of America as to the voter-rich urban and suburban areas.
It’s a system that works well. It is not democratic in the pure sense, but it works. Consider that in 2016, Donald J. Trump would have won the popular vote had California not gone so overwhelmingly for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some people argue that the outcome disenfranchises the California residents whose votes should have been determinative. Hamilton and Madison would likely have argued that the system, in fact, worked as intended, allowing the candidate who was not dependent on the votes of a single state to assume office contrary to the wishes of most of the people of most of the states.
If he or she were, Hamilton again says, the president “might otherwise be tempted to sacrifice his duty to his complaisance for those whose favor was necessary to the duration of his official consequence.”
In some places, a democracy of the kind some now envision when calling for the abolition of the Electoral College would work, and well. Not so in the United States, where the people’s interests are too diverse not to provide for ways to demonstrate a decent respect for the opinions of those who do not constitute the majority.
The alternative is mob rule under legal cover, kind of like an agreement between three wolves and two sheep on what to have for dinner: Fine for some, not so good for others, and probably fatal for at least one.
That view may not be popular today, but many unpopular ideas are woven into the laws of the land. That’s because America is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic, and should remain so. Our system allows for, and even demands, respect for the opinions and rights of the minority. As a nation, we have fallen short in that regard at least a time or two, but we are continually improving and constantly evolving.
Newsweek Contributing Editor Peter Roff is a veteran journalist who appears regularly on U.S. and international media platforms. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on social media @TheRoffDraft.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.