The Electoral College does not diminish democracy but structures it through states, preventing both simple majoritarian rule and the dominance of a few populous regions.
Every few years, we in the United States endure something like the sweats of malaria while certain people, devoted to “democracy,” call to abolish the Electoral College, now merely a counting system whereby each state is assigned an electoral weight based on its representation in Congress—the sum of its senators and representatives. There are two main lines of the argument.
The first is that because of the College, a president can be elected without a majority or a plurality of the vote. In elections involving two main candidates, this has happened three times: 1888 (Harrison over Cleveland), 2000 (Bush over Gore), and 2016 (Trump over Clinton). In two of those cases, the plurality held by the losing candidate (not a majority) was minuscule. In the third case, 2016, the 2.1 percent edge in Hillary Clinton’s plurality was more than covered by her popularity in California alone. I do not believe that most Americans wish to be governed by the woolly ways of that state, which have gone, in my lifetime, from an energetic experiment in self-rule to utter dysfunction.
But why should the winner of the popular vote not win the election, regardless of where the votes come from? Here I note that in winner-take-all systems, the winner will rarely possess a majority, since such systems favor a proliferation of parties and candidates, enabling a candidate—sometimes a madman—with strong support among a minority to win, while more conventional candidates split the rest of the vote. This sort of thing also happens when, as in Canada and the United Kingdom, the executive is the leader of the party that wins a majority of the seats in Parliament. Keir Starmer is the prime minister of the United Kingdom because he leads the Labour Party, which won 411 of the 650 seats in the 2024 election, a huge majority, yet the party received only 33.7 percent of the popular vote. Sometimes, as has happened in Italy, the executive emerges from an alliance of parties, none of them holding a majority of seats. In such situations, the facade of democracy is as thin as lingerie. Backroom deals become the order of the day, a brew of compromise, political imagination, treachery, blackmail, and bribery.
The second line of argument is that the College gives unfair weight to the less populous states, which are represented proportionally in the House of Representatives but equally in the Senate. Let us take the most extreme example of disproportion. In the 2020 census, California had a population of 39.54 million, the most of any state, while Wyoming had a population of 0.59 million, the least of any state. That is a factor of 67, but California has 54 electoral votes to Wyoming’s 3, a factor of 18. To be “just,” if gross numbers alone deliver justice, we should reduce Wyoming’s electoral weight to 1. That would, it is suggested, restore the proper power of Californians over Wyomingites. But let us tease the matter out. California already clobbers Wyoming in the House of Representatives, with 52 members to Wyoming’s mere 1, and what is the great difference, anyway, between the California Cougars going 56–1 against the Wyoming Wildcats and their going 54–3? That is but a slight difference in degrees of overwhelming dominance, a difference in winning percentage of .982 versus .947, or .035. No big deal.
But the real mathematical operation of an Electoral College consists not in ratios but in pathways to victory. To take a trivial case, if California possessed 60 percent of the population but only 51 percent of the electoral vote, it would alone determine the election 100 percent of the time. In our system of 51 elections and a range of values from 54 to 3, with the largest state possessing 20 percent of the 270 votes needed, the mathematics are exceedingly complicated, but, as you should suspect, the large states are not shortchanged. You can see how it may work by simplifying the system. Suppose a nation of states valued at 7–4–1–1–1–1. The large state enjoys 31 of 32 paths to victory, much better than the baseline of 16, exactly half—which is what you get if your state has no effect at all on the outcome. Each of the other states, the four no more than the others, enjoys 17 paths to victory. The influence of “7” is 15 times as great as the influence of any other state. So, where, all other things being equal, do we suppose candidates will spend most of their time, money, and attention?