Even after all this, defenders of the Electoral College will still claim that it provides more stability than a national popular vote for president.
Their mistake isn't just blind faith or motivated reasoning. It's total certainty that the Constitution cannot possibly be flawed.
Their mistake isn't just blind faith or motivated reasoning. It's total certainty that the Constitution cannot possibly be flawed.
The Electoral College was a slapdash compromise concocted by men who disagreed about how the country should pick a president. It promptly failed, which is why we have the 12th Amendment. But now we are told the Constitution is sacrosanct, so we are stuck with this broken system.
The 2020 election has illustrated another reason why the Electoral College is a bad system: It lets the loser defy the reality of his loss for 2+ months while exploiting the *many* cogs in this convoluted machine that eventually produces a president. A popular vote avoids that.
But if you start from the conclusion that the Constitution cannot possibly be flawed, you can wave away the Electoral College's problems with abstract arguments about stability and federalism. "It's in the Constitution!" trumps an appeal to reason in modern political discourse.
The people who wrote our Constitution were not so confident in its divine perfection. After the Electoral College malfunctioned in 1800, they changed the rules. Today, the EC keeps malfunctioning, but we're no longer allowed to change the rules. It would be sacrilegious.
I think this implicit assumption—that anything in the Constitution must be good—is a pathology in American political discourse, with no greater emblem than the Electoral College. It's impossible to have a real debate about the EC if its defenders can cite an infallible authority.
All this to say: We are watching a major political party exploit the Electoral College to steal the election—or, failing that, to undermine faith in its outcome. Anyone who denies that the Electoral College is an easy mark has chosen blind faith in the Constitution over reality.
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