Whither the Electoral College?

On Nov. 8, Hillary Clinton received a 2 percent larger portion of the popular vote than Donald Trump, yet Trump won the presidency. Historically, five presidents won in the Electoral College while holding a popular vote deficit, the most striking being John Adams in 1824 with a whopping 10 percent deficit. Frustration and anger over a system that seems to hand the presidency to the wrong person is alive in the land.

Perhaps the smartest and wisest man I ever met was my father. With little more than a high school education, he spent much of his career in the mathematically intense field of encryption. Many years after leaving the field, an Army general showed up at his funeral to tell my mother that my father had made an important contribution to America’s Cold War effort. He didn’t elaborate, and we will likely never know what that contribution was. But my admiration for my father is boundless.

A theme among the things my father taught me was what I call “the power of powerlessness.” He often brought to my attention people who were powerless, and he pointed out the destructive power of powerlessness in their lives. When I was baffled by the Electoral College, he explained to me “the tyranny of the majority,” which my school teachers were slow to articulate. He specifically taught me to appreciate the role of the Electoral College in impeding the abuse of power and the favoring of a powerful class over the less powerful.

You will read in popular media that the purpose of the Electoral College as formulated in Philadelphia was to favor slave states and the perpetuation of slavery. But the design of the Electoral College was driven by the interests of the (then) less populous states like New Jersey and Connecticut, which did not want to be run over by the big states, like Massachusetts and New York. A good illustration of this wisdom is in the election of 2016. This is not because Donald Trump will make a better president than Hillary Clinton, but because of how power was distributed in the electoral process.

Observers have noted that, with the votes of California and New York removed from the 2016 popular vote, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote decisively. From this, it’s evident that, since the large, wealthy coastal population centers tend to favor the same electoral outcomes, without the Electoral College, they would simply decide all elections.

But across much of middle-America lies a wasteland of closed factories and a substantial population of people who have been denied the dignity of work. They are left to fight over scraps with people who may not be in the country legally. What has evolved is a system in which this population is supported by government disability insurance and other financial support systems. No one is more conscious than they of the indignity of their situation, and of their powerlessness. No one in the population centers of California or New York understands their plight, and, if they did, they wouldn’t care.

You may argue that the displaced workers don’t understand the role of, say, automation in how they came to their situation, but, for once, their voice matters. You may argue that the remedies Donald Trump has proposed will create more problems than will be solved, but, nevertheless, their voice matters. Without the Electoral College, neither of the major political parties would lift a finger to restore their dignity. But now these people have a voice, and the politicians must pay attention to them. We must hope that remedies the politicians now enact will, in fact, aid in restoring the workers’ lost dignity.

This story was originally published January 8, 2017 at 4:01 AM with the headline "Whither the Electoral College?."