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At the beginning of December, Asbury University hosted a debate with two area experts on the Electoral College, which plays a large part in our country’s presidential selection process. 

Dr. Carolyn R. Dupont is a professor of history at Eastern University of Kentucky. She specializes in American religious history and African American history. Her most recent book, Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College–And Why it Matters Today, was written after a conversation about the Electoral College with Jessamine County Magistrate Tim Vaughan and another connection. She is also the state coordinator for Braver Angels, a national grass-roots organization that works on depolarization, and she co-leads a local chapter of that group in Jessamine County. In the discussion, she took the stance of being against the Electoral College and for reforming it. Before starting the event, Dupont thanked Larry Prinssen, an active community member, for organizing the event.

Dr. Stephen Voss is an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His work focuses on American politics, and he has researched elections in terms of voting behavior (how people make their choices) and electoral outcomes (how those votes determine election outcomes). He has served as a consultant and expert witness in numerous redistricting and voting rights cases and also frequently serves as a political analyst and commentator for several area media organizations. In the discussion, Voss served as the side of the debate, which is critical to electoral college reformers.

Moderating the event was Asbury University Political Science Professor Stephen Clements, who assisted Dr. Dupont in researching for her book on the Electoral College. 

To begin the discussion, Dupont brought several points to support the central conclusions of her book: that the electoral college system has “nothing to recommend it. In my view, any test that you want to put an electoral system to, the electoral college fails that test,” Dupont said. 

Dupont said that the Electoral College fails the test of principals. “In other words, being founded on a high-minded or important principle,” she said. In her extensive research as a historian, she spent much of her time looking at why the framers created the Electoral College. She answers, “The real reason is they were out of time and needed to settle on something, but there were objections to the other methods that they proposed, and in the last 11 days of the constitutional convention, James Madison came up with his plan, and they approved it.” She added that Madison was quoted as saying that the Electoral College was the most expedient solution until a better one could be found. 

She also said it fails the test of history, that the system has not withstood the test of time, and bears very little resemblance to Article 2 of the United States Constitution. The system has since been changed by constitutional amendment, some by state law, some by practice, and some by “political massaging.” 

“It has not really stood the test of time because it’s created problematic outcomes. I would argue that sometimes, there are even dangerous situations in our presidential elections. I would argue that what happened on January 6, 2021, has in some part to do with the Electoral College because it is much easier to manipulate an elector slate or to change the outcome in a few precincts and, therefore, change the whole outcome in the election than it is to change millions of votes across thousands of precincts,” Dupont said. 

She adds that the system fails the test of rationality and simplicity, citing the unequal distribution of electors by state: “By what rationale do Wyomingans get one elector for every 190,000 people, but Californians get one elector for every 700,000 people?” Dupont said.

The system also fails the test of transparency and values. We are not aware of our Electoral College electors, and they do not appear on our ballots. This is a lack of transparency. 

“We should all have an equal opportunity to influence the outcome of an election. My essential concern with the Electoral College is that it makes us profoundly unequal when we vote for president. Some people have a greater chance of influencing that election than others; some have a virtually zero chance of influencing that outcome. So, the Electoral College violates the basic American principle of political equality. Yet this is how we choose our presidents, and I think it is long past time for a discussion about a system that would do better by us,” Dupont said.

Voss’s principal arguments were against reformer arguments such as those of Dupont. “I do want to play a role that political scientists often find themselves in, one of my mentors, Dr. Paul Peterson, said we often find ourselves as political scientists being the shield bearers of the establishment, the reason is because the attacks of the reformers on institutions, usually we’ve got a lot of evidence that they’re two simple, and things aren’t behaving as badly as the critiques that you’d see in a newspaper editorials suggest. So, not trying to defend the electoral college, I want to offer rebuttals of people’s common perceptions with [it].”

First, he said the idea the Electoral College favors the republican party is false. “The bias in the electoral college has been almost 50/50. The two most recent cases where the system favored the Democrats were Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012. The electoral college favored the Democratic party. Now, of the roughly half of the modern presidential elections when the electoral college’s arrangement of votes did favor the republican party, the two biggest observed biases in favor of the republican parties were 1948 and 2020, when the Republicans lost. So, yes, it was biased towards them but not enough to make a difference in the election outcome,” Voss said.

He responded to Dupont’s issue of the Electoral College lacking transparency. He agreed that transparency is an issue but a separate one. He said keeping electors who are voting for the president for us “was a decision made by secretaries of state, how they drew up the ballots. To save money, stick it in a machine instead of on paper. We hide that information about who’s being sent to make this decision. And you can say it doesn’t matter these days because almost all those electors end up doing what they promised. A vote for these electors assigned to Kamala Harris is essentially a vote to give electoral votes to Kamala Harris. But what if someone dies? What if someone has to step down? All of a sudden, who those electors are could matter a lot in how they resolve the confusion and the circumstances, so there really is no excuse in the design of the Electoral College for us not to know who we’re electing. Just a separate thing, but a different problem,” he said. 

Voss also explained the winner-takes-all system of the Electoral College, regardless of whether 40 percent of Kentuckians voted for Harris in this last election in Kentucky. In most states, all electors will go to the candidate who won the popular vote instead of dividing the electors up evenly. This is a choice each state can make. 

“Now, here’s the less obvious bit behind that story. Why do we still have every state deciding with winner-take-all except for two? During the ’60s and ’70s, the reason that the winner-takes-all system was retained was that Republicans supportive of civil rights realized that if they got rid of the winner-take-all all system, and electors started to be assigned more proportionally, the solid South with its undemocratic institutions would be able to send almost nothing but democratic electors to the electoral college, while the states that were more democratic, the states in the north, the more politically diverse states, Democrats would still be picking up electoral seats there as well, and that getting rid of winner takes all would reward the least democratic states. Now, when you start getting rid of the Electoral College, think about how we’re moving toward the system that the northern Republicans did not want to find themselves. Right now, which states are the battlegrounds? They tend to be the most diverse, the largest, and competitive states, where both parties are strong and can monitor the election. You get rid of it, and the votes in Alabama, however many republican votes Alabama can pile up, that will affect the presidential contest. The votes in Oregon, how many votes the democrats of Oregon can pile up, in every single precinct, in every single state, no matter how lopsided, no matter how one-sided the control of electoral institutions, it starts getting piled into that total. Could you imagine what it would be like right now if there was some chance those votes still being counted, cause they’re still being counted, could tip this presidential election, do you think that would add stability to our political system if we still weren’t 100 percent sure who the president was going to be because that many votes had not been counted, I don’t think I like that idea of that sort of uncertainty hanging over the presidential election this late in the system, given what we’ve seen,” Voss said.

He explains that the Electoral College allows for a more responsive system and posits that another system would not likely be more responsive. He begins by explaining what happened in 2016.

“The democrats alienated a large chunk of the midwest. Many voters shifted, especially in those three states right: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And the system was responsive to the Democrats losing that support in an important region of the country. And what happened after that? Well, the Midwest didn’t like what they got. Some of those states swung back to blue, and the system responded. Donald Trump was kicked out of office. You have a democratic president. And those states didn’t like what they got, and now they’re back in the republican camp. This is a system responding to shifts in the vote. You’re almost certainly wrong if you believe that dumping all those votes into one common pool will result in a more responsive system over time. What you’re looking at is much more continuity. Do you want a system that rewards large, overwhelming, lopsided majorities in certain places or one that rewards candidates who are more broadly popular across a much wider geography of the United States?” Voss said.