Yes. By Jack Rakove

In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. So, let me make the case for its abolition and its replacement by a simple national popular vote, to be held in an entity we will call (what the heck) the United States of America.

There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. The first is easily dismissed. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch.

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No. By Michael W. McConnell

The Electoral College is not going to be changed, and there are far more urgent and promising topics for reform of our presidential selection system.

It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. We survived. Not one was a first-rank president, but their selection did not seriously injure the democratic character of our system.

The founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects. Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representation—the three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromise—and guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully!), and the big state-small state divide no longer animates our politics, if it ever did. The two-party system solves the fractured vote problem more effectively than the Electoral College ever did, and the electors never exercised genuine independence. The Electoral College thus presents democratic risks without serving any of its original purposes.

 

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