How big of a vote gap would it take for you to drop the Electoral College?

[Dill]

(04-04-2019, 08:41 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: At the time, there was a split in the Convention over the election of president. Some wanted a national popular vote, some were skeptical of the abilities of the average citizen to make an informed vote and so it should be left to Congress. The Electoral College was a compromise. It wasn't ever about the states making the choice or allowing smaller states to have a say or anything like that. Federalist No. 68, Hamilton's defense of the system, doesn't talk about that. It was because they didn't trust the American people to make a good choice due to lack of information.

I believe this is incorrect.  In fact, I would say the EC debate was driven by the tension between large (population-wise) and small states every step of the way.

Here I follow the overview of the debate provided in Chapter 2 of The Electoral College Primer 2000, a book with no polemical intent, which schematically outlines the process. The "split" in Congress was initially between 1) those who wanted a popular election of the president and 2) those who wanted Congress to elect him--which would favor smaller states.  The latter option bothered those who felt congressional election compromised the independence of the executive. Those who disliked the former (only three?) were worried that "the masses" might not choose well, but also that it gave more power to the larger states.  Concerned about the debate over proportional representation which had earlier divided Congress, the Committee of Eleven tasked with working out a compromise followed the model of the Connecticut Compromise which had saved the Republic by creating two houses of Congress, one apportioning equal power to states, the other proportional representation to the electorate. The Committee of Eleven then created a two-stage system involving electors and then, in case of a tie, a contingency plan where by the election would be thrown to the House, and the representatives of each state would collectively have 1 vote for their state--13 equally weighted votes in all.

The authors conclude:

The key to acceptance of this two-­stage plan for presidential selection lay in the different character of electoral college and House contingent voting. The electoral college, reflecting in a rough way the population of states, would favor the large states at the cost of the small states—or more accurately, populations rather than equally­weighted states. When the contingent House procedure went into effect—as it most often would—the voting would be one vote per state delegation, thus representing equally weighed individual states regardless of population. This mechanism was a compromise between the principle of population and that of equal state interest. As James Madison later described the electoral college, it was "the result of compromise between the larger and smaller states, giving to the latter the advantage of selecting a President from the candidates, in consideration of the former in selecting the candidates from the people" (Langley and Peirce 22).

Anyway, I would just like to get that point out there. I am neither a Constitutional lawyer nor a Congressional historian, so I cannot tell with certainly what the current legal/historical consensus really is about this. But I have recently read several journal and newspaper articles disputing claims that the EC was about protecting slavery (as opposed to preserving the Republic), such as Gregg L. Gary's"No! The Electoral College Was Not Created to Protect Slavery." 

I am not here trying to establish Framer intent as a criterion of acceptability, but setting forth the record of the debate to re-affirm that, from the get go, the EC was part of the needed compromise between large and small states over proportional representation needed to make the nation work. (In any case, Framer intent was soon out the window, as the logic of the system itself soon required states to vote in blocks to preserve their power.) Whatever the Framers "intended," and whatever changes followed, the EC remains structurally integral to the balance between larger and smaller states, struck to keep the union together.

These accounts jive well with what I would call the logic of the "Madisonian system" which, as discussed in Federalist No. 51, sees a DOUBLE SECURITY in a Republic compounded of TWO DISTINCT GOVERNMENTS which serve as a check on one another.  In the arguments against the EC so far proffered on this thread, I have seen little recognition of the importance of state governments to this security. The problem inherent in ignoring states might become more apparent if the EC were abolished and attempts began to jerry-rig a compensating system. Don't see how that could happen without the Federal gov. usurping a range of rights formerly accorded states (e.g., defining who is eligible to vote).


                                                                        Works Cited
Gary, Gregg L. " [/url]No! The Electoral College Was Not Created to Protect Slavery." The Epoch Times, Nov 15, 2018, Issue 318, p.A17 

Longley, Lawrence D., and Neal R. Peirce. The Electoral College Primer 2000. (1999)
http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzUyODk3X19BTg2?sid=afda7347-10df-486b-b216-1c9fe70f58a1@sessionmgr102&vid=0&format=EB&rid=1