Understanding the troubling Electoral College System
The world patiently waited five days for Joe Biden to be declared President-Elect on November 7th. In the run-up to the election and the days that followed, everybody was talking about states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Arizona - but why do these states matter more?
It is because they are “swing states” that either candidate could win, and they are decisive because of how the system elects a President. 270 is the magic number that gets a candidate across the line to become the President-Elect.
What is the system?
The number of electors from each state is roughly in line with the size of its population. Each state gets as many electors as it has lawmakers in the US Congress (representatives in the House and senators).
There are 538 electors in total.
Each elector represents one electoral vote, and a candidate needs to gain a majority of the votes - 270 or more - to win the presidency (BBC 2020.)
To understand more check out this Vox explainer below;
History behind the system
The current electoral system is portrayed as big vs. small states but it is about North vs. South states, and coasts vs. centre.
Akhil Reed Amar, Professor of Law at Yale University, declares that the system is still based on slave-owning and non-slave owning states. The southern states would have lost every election if everybody’s vote was worth equally hence they presented their opposition to the regular popular vote system. In 1787, an average of 40% of people living in southern states were Black slaves but they could not vote as they were not considered people. Nonetheless, enslaved Black people were counted as three-fifths of a person to allocate representatives and electors (Vox 2016.)
He explains:
Such a system was a political mechanism to make slavery persist and, despite abolishing slavery in 1865, the system retained its roots in racial discrimination as it remains unchanged today. Therefore, the Electoral College is undoubtedly racist.
Is this system fair?
Unlike the majority of democracies worldwide, the US does not elect its president with a popular vote. The US is the only nation-state that utilises the Electoral College. Arguably, the American voting mechanism is disturbingly undemocratic.
Americans do not vote for their candidate of choice but for who their state will vote for. Each state is assigned X electoral votes based on the number of representatives it has in Congress. Candidates for the presidency need an absolute majority of 270 electoral votes or more to win. The issue relies upon that there are states that have more representatives than others.
Some critics of this system argue that this mechanism gives an unfair advantage to states with large numbers of electoral votes. Look at these facts:
A presidential candidate can have zero votes in 39 states but still be the president if he/she wins in the 11 states with the largest electoral votes.
The vote of a person living in California values over three times more than another’s living in Wyoming (The Guardian 2020).
A vote for Joe Biden in the battleground state of Florida during the 2020 elections meant nothing whatsoever. Precisely, 5.3 million voted for the Democrat candidate but, since Trump received 5.7 million votes, the Republican won the 29 electoral votes of the state. 5.3 million votes vanished in the blink of an eye. Same could be said for Democrats voting in key Republican states like Texas or Republicans voting in key Democrat states. Take for example California whereby Joe Biden won 63.6% of the vote, however, the 34.2% of Trump voters still accounted for over 5 million votes however their vote had zero value.
Does this sound democratic to you? The value of your vote should not be conditioned by your geographic area.
Furthermore, a candidate can become the president of the US without winning the popular vote. Five presidents who lost the popular vote won the election. What is the purpose of holding elections if the person who receives the most votes does not win?
Al Gore, the Democrat candidate, won the popular vote by half a million votes in 2000 yet he lost to Bush. Donald Trump became the president elected in 2016, albeit the Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes.
Democrats have won the popular vote 7 out of 8 times in a row. The majority of democracies across the globe with universal suffrage would translate such a statement into seven Democrat presidents in the last eight administrations. However, reality distances far from the truth.
The current system has favoured Republicans during the XXI century. Three economic researchers at the University of Texas explained in their study that the Republican party is expected to win 65% of the elections in which they narrowly lose the popular vote (Geruso, Spears & Talesara 2020: 15). It presents an advantage to Republicans in the way their votes are distributed across the country. They are more likely to happen in states which are closely divided between the parties. And because it favours them, red states do not currently support abolishing the Electoral College.
Donald Trump tweeted on 2012 election day that “the electoral college is a disaster for a democracy” (CNN 2020). Ironically, after he won the presidency in 2016, he has sent mixed signals both praising the electoral college system and also claiming he would prefer the national popular vote. Likewise, only 1 out of 4 Republican voters support a popular vote system as opposed to nearly 9 out of 10 Democrats.
Moreover, if you followed the full coverage of the 2020 presidential election, you must have come familiar with the terms “swing states” or “battleground states”. These states have demographic diversity and high voter volatility, which decide who the next president will be. Accordingly, the rest of the states are regularly deliberated safely Republican and Democrat. Therefore, the presidential candidates do barely hold rallies in those safe states during the presidential campaign as they have mostly secured their vote and the focus on the battleground states where many electoral votes are at stake. Joe Biden has become the 46th president of the United States given he has won 7 out the 12 of the states considered battleground states by analysts. Those states could have swung either way (The Indian Express 2020).
See the map below of the 12 battleground states.
Understanding the voting systems troubling past and present
As explained earlier, the electoral college system is largely about South V North States. Despite Southern states being highly populated by black citizens, they are largely known as the "Red states" as black voting rights have historically been restricted in these states.
Following the 13th amendment outlawing slavery in the United States, Southern States got smart about how they could discriminate black people with an introduction of “Black Codes” which strictly governed Black citizen's behaviours and denied them suffrage and other rights. However, in 1870 the 15th Amendment out-lawed any such discrimination, which meant once again the Southern States had to get smart. Many southern state legislatures used literacy tests, poll taxes so they could legally discriminate them (History 2020).
Over a century later and states still use these types of tactics to racially discriminate on voting laws. In 2013, a Supreme Court ruling invalidated a provision that would require states with a history of voter discrimination to seek federal approval before changing their election laws. This, in turn, encouraged states to pass new restrictions on voting that included limiting early voting and requiring voters to show photo ID - this like the poll taxes and literacy tests before them - disproportionately effect black voters.
In the state of Georgia, this gained recognition in 2018 when incumbent Brian Kemp kept his role as Governor of Georgia over African-American candidate Stacey Abrams by just over 50,000 votes. However, the controversy surrounded Mr Kemp’s suppression of minority votes, as it was revealed by the Associated Press that a month before November’s midterm election that his office had not approved 53,000 voter registrations - most of them filed by Black citizens (PBS 2016). Furthermore, during his six years in office, Mr Kemp cancelled voter registrations for more than a million Georgia residents due to "inactivity" or error (BBC 2020).
Ms Abrams spent the following two years canvassing for the 2020 election and raising awareness of voter suppression. Her network organised and registered more than 800,000 voters in Georgia alone. (BBC 2020.) And of course, we all know now that Democrats won Georgia in a narrow lead in the recent presidential election for the first time in more than two decades, proving if more African Americans could vote in the southern states, the states would not always be “red states”.
But this is not the only discriminatory modern policy effecting black citizens in the US. Many states will not allow convicted criminals, even from minor crimes to ever vote. This is described by CNN contributor, Van Jones:
“Voter suppression is: you’re 19 years old and you get caught with marijuana, and you’re forced to plead to a felony. Then you can never vote again, whereas a white kid getting caught with marijuana is gonna be admonished and sent home to their parents. That’s voter suppression . . . mass incarceration is a strategy not just to criminalize a generation, or now generations of African-Americans, but also to politically marginalize the black community. Mass incarceration is not just taking our freedom, it’s taking our vote. It’s taking our power.”
This directly effects the election result as Jones says,
“Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans are permanently barred from voting because they’re convicted felons. If former inmates were able to get voting rights restored, Florida would be a blue state every time.”"
Let us remember a state like Florida has 29 electoral college votes and it is a key swing state, in fact usually when a candidate wins Florida they go on to win the whole election.
In our previous post on the topic of racism, we discussed that even though Black people are a minority in the US they are the race stopped and searched by the police the most, many times with no apparent reason, but purely on a basis of the colour of their skin. Such a racial biased can jeopardise their right to vote in the future. The police do not maintain a good relationship with racial minorities in the United States as we have publicily witnessed outrageous actions against black people like in the case of George Floyd. For instance, Black people are 25% more likely to be searched and 8% more likely to be arrested without a warrant in San Diego (BondGraham 2020).
Racially biased policing can violate a person's rights, and can have severe consequences for Black people in exercising their right of freedom of expression when it comes to voting. It is impossible for crime to be related to just one race, however, the system heavily incarcerates people of colour, as the documentary "13th" states that although African Americans make up 6.5% of the American population they account to 40.2% of the prison populace. If you are reading these lines and you believe that criminal actions are subjected to one race...you might have to reconsider your level of racism if you do not consider yourself racist.
The United States, the leader of the Western world, has still a presidential vote system ingrained in slavery roots that has unrivalled to voter suppression and discrimination. This shocking reality proves the importance of education and reform. We have tiredly stressed the power of providing academic knowledge regarding these matters to combat phenomena like racism throughout this blog, and we stand by it. History books still omit slavery history and the origins of the electoral system; hence a constitutional amendment is significantly challenging to achieve. If there is no real awareness, there is no change. As Wilfred Codrington adds, downplaying the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Electoral College is, in effect, whitewashing history (The Brennan Center 2020).
Nevertheless, more people are pushing for voting change more than ever, just take a look at Stacey Abrams success in Georgia, change can happen if we continue to educate ourselves and demand for electoral reform. Starting with the abolition of an outdated system that keeps reminding the US of its racist legacy every four years.
KEY POINTS:
The biggest threats to security and democracy come from within our system and institutions.
The most sacred institution in the United States, the Electoral College, is undemocratic and has a racist legacy which still disadvantages people of colour.
Democrats have won the last 8 elections by popular vote but have only won 6 of the Electoral College system and therefore have only had 6 Presidents serve in that time.
The system being institutionally racist has allowed for the voting system in many southern states to allow discriminatory voting laws that largely effects people of colour.
Bibliography
BBC News (2020). Stacey Abrams: The Woman Behind Biden's Biggest Surprise. [online] Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54875344>
BBC News (2020). US Election 2020: What Is The Electoral College?. [online] Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53558176>
BondGraham, D. (2020). Black People In California Are Stopped Far More Often By Police, Major Study Proves. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/02/california-police-black-stops-force>
Brennan Center for Justice (2020). The Electoral College’S Racist Origins. [online] Available at: <https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins>
CNN (2020). Opinion: Republicans Were Against The Electoral College Before They Were For It. [online] Available at: <https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/26/opinions/gop-electoral-college-abolish-opinion-alexander/index.html>
Geruso, M., Spears, D. & Talesara, I. (2020). Inversions in US presidential elections: 1836-2016. University of Texas, pp. 1-47.
HISTORY (2020). When Did African Americans Actually Get The Right To Vote?. [online] Available at: <https://www.history.com/news/african-american-voting-right-15th-amendment>
PBS NewsHour (2020). Georgia Election Fight Shows That Black Voter Suppression, A Southern Tradition, Still Flourishes. [online] Available at: <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/georgia-election-fight-shows-that-black-voter-suppression-a-southern-tradition-still-flourishes>
Robertson, H., Kirk, A. and Hulley-Jones, F. (2020) . Electoral College Explained: How The US Election Is An Uphill Battle For Biden. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/oct/30/electoral-college-explained-how-biden-faces-an-uphill-battle-in-the-us-election>
The Indian Express (2020). US Elections 2020: A History Of The Swing States. [online] Available at: <https://indianexpress.com/article/research/us-elections-2020-results-swing-states-arizona-florida-michigan-pensylvannia-wisconsin-north-carolina-6935345//>
Vox (2020). The Real Reason We Have An Electoral College: To Protect Slave States. [online] Available at: <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/12/13598316/donald-trump-electoral-college-slavery-akhil-reed-amar>
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