McKenna: Don’t expect a change to the Electoral College anytime soon

It looks as though one of the legacies of the 2016 Presidential election will be that America has, yet again, one candidate win the popular vote – Hillary Clinton is winning by more than 200,000 total votes – but the other candidate clearly dominating in the Electoral College. That has brought up a long-standing issue of whether the Electoral College has outlived its alleged usefulness.

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Former Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna told Seattle’s Morning News that this call for abolishment is nothing new and won’t likely be changing anytime soon.

“There has been a debate about the Electoral College pretty much since the ink dried on the constitution,” he said.

Trump’s win will mark the fifth time in US history that the president did not win the popular vote — John Quincy Adams in 1824; Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876; Benjamin Harrison in 1888; and George W. Bush in 2000. Critics of the Electoral College call the system a relic that devalues the vote of some individuals and pushes candidates to campaign in only the contested states.

“I think it is intolerable for democracy,” George C. Edwards III, a political-science professor at Texas A&M University and the author of a book on the Electoral College, told The New York Times. “I can’t think of any justification for it, and any justification that is offered doesn’t bear scrutiny.”

Even Donald Trump has railed against the system, tweeting prior to the 2012 election that “The electoral college is a disaster for democracy.”

McKenna explained that after every election when the loser wins the popular vote, there is a call for abolishing and electing the president directly. There are also routine calls to reform the Electoral College so that electoral votes are allocated proportionately in the state – e.g. if a candidate wins 60 percent of the state he or she gets 60 percent of the votes. States could move to what is called the “district plan,” that Maine and Nebraska do. In that case, the winner of each congressional district gets the electoral votes. In this cycle, Maine gave three votes to Clinton, one to Trump.

“Turns out, that dilutes the political importance or power of that state,” McKenna said.

Although other individual states could change their own rules, don’t expect Democrat controlled states like California or Washington to start giving away any of their votes to Republicans. Same goes for Texas.

“They’re not going to let Austin, which is democratic, send an electoral vote to the Democrat,” McKenna said.

Oh, so that’s the Twelfth Amendment

McKenna said that before America celebrated its first centennial in 1876, there had been more than 200 serious proposals to abolish or reform the Electoral College. In fact, McKenna said, the Twelfth Amendment is what created the current form of the system.

“When our country was founded, there was a lot of concern about New York and Virginia dominating. If you were from Rhode Island, this was a real concern,” he said. “So they put in a number of checks and balances to prevent big states from overwhelming small states. Remember, it’s the United States of America. It’s a federalist system; it’s what makes us unique. And in order to prevent some states from overwhelming other states, they set up a number of mechanisms, such as the Electoral College, the fact that all states get two representatives in the US Senate regardless of their population, and so forth.”

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Dave summed it up like this: The reason you have the Electoral College is not just because the Founders didn’t trust us to elect the president directly, but because the small states – which were needed to form the US in the first place – wanted to make sure they weren’t ignored by the presidential candidates. And, indeed they are not. It’s the big states that are ignored instead.

Dave said it could be argued that the system worked exactly as intended — that the vast swath of the Midwest was not ignored, which it would have been if we had gone with just the popular vote.

“That’s right, Hillary would be President-elect today because of high margins in states like California and New York,” McKenna said.

That’s why it appears the current setup is here to stay.

“I think it is because look, how do we amend the Constitution? It takes super-majorities in Congress, that’s not gonna happen with the current composition,” McKenna said. “It would be hard anytime, since neither party has had two-thirds since probably the New Deal and, secondly, then you have to get three-fifths of the state Legislatures to agree by majority votes in each chamber to approve it. Three-fifths, are you really going to get those smaller states, those Midwestern states? And, by the way, it’s not just the smaller states that worry about the effect of eliminating the Electoral College, medium-sized states do as well. So states like Tennessee, for example, or Arkansas or Nevada might be worried about being overwhelmed by big states.”

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