It’s time to abolish the Electoral College

This is how I believe that the Apportionment Act of 1911 and the subsequent Reapportionment Act of 1929, rendered the Electoral College obsolete. Today’s Electoral College is not the same as the one created by the Founders.

It involves the selection of electors. The number of electors is based on the number of representatives in Congress from each state including both House representatives and the Senate.

In the original Constitution, the House membership and by extension the Electoral College, was based on what the Founders thought would be the best ratio of citizens for each representative which was 30,000 citizens for every rep. The Founders concluded that any number above 30,000 could not be adequately represented by one person. It was the only provision in the Constitution that Washington, as chairman of the convention, spoke out about. In that regard, Washington was prescient.

However, by 1910 it had become evident to Congress that due to population growth, the House would become too unwieldy if the numbers of reps were increased according to the population. So they passed the Apportionment Act of 1911 which capped or apportioned the number of representatives in the House at 435. That meant that instead of more reps in the House, each rep would be representing more people as the population grew. Otherwise, we would have ended up with thousands of reps in the House today.

The effect this had on the EC was that it also was capped with a total of 535 electors (435 House and 100 Senate) instead of a growing EC that represented a larger population. Due to the 23rd Amendment which gave D.C. 3 electors, the total today is 538.

The consequences of the Apportionment Act meant that a district in a sparsely populated state had an equal electoral vote with a district in a large urban area with a much larger population. Electors from a small state like Wyoming whose appointments are based on the Representatives and 2 Senators from that state have a huge advantage over the national majority. In other words, the Electoral College has created a tyranny of the minority over the majority which is the opposite of the Founders’ intent. That’s neither a democracy nor a republic no matter how one defines them.

No other democracy or republic, current or past, uses such a contrived system as an Electoral College. Moreover, the U.S. has no need of it in local, state or federal elections (Senate and House). The EC was a flawed compromise from its very beginnings that the Founders invented in order to reach consensus toward the end of the Constitutional Convention. They were ready to go home. We now have the hindsight that they didn’t have and in that regard it has become evident that the EC should be abolished.

It shouldn’t matter where the majority lives whether on the coasts or elsewhere. In a representative democracy/republic, the majority vote should hold sway. To believe otherwise by promoting the outdated EC, is to essentially renounce the very system we claim to work under.