Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why it Matters Today

by Carolyn Renee Dupont

Stephen Clements

Distorting Democracy will awaken Americans to the perils of our system by unveiling the Electoral College’s origins, history, and present operations. This book demonstrates that the system has no principled foundation, that it has changed dramatically over its 230–year history, and that it threatens the legitimacy of our political system in the present.

 

A narrative-driven mix of history and political science, Distorting Democracy offers compelling stories to make its case in three distinct sections, each featuring a key argument.

 

Part I tells the story of the Electoral College’s origins in the Constitutional Convention. Vaunted myths often dominate Americans’ understanding of the founding, but this account highlights the full humanity of key framers and reveals the decidedly un-immaculate conception of the Electoral College. The system for choosing the chief executive did not spring from pristine political commitments or deep philosophical foundations. Rather, the framers settled on this option after months of wrangling, rambling, and back-tracking. In the Convention’s final days, the exhausted, irritable, and overheated framers opted for an Electoral College primarily to avoid selection of the president by Congress, a problematic and corrupting method that many framers nonetheless preferred. Under the Convention’s political realities, they could get sufficient agreement on no other option.

 

But the framers’ plan did not last long. Almost immediately, it worked differently than anticipated, as political operators manipulated it to their own ends. Part II traces two hundred years of innovations—many of them subtle but highly consequential—to the plan described in the Constitution. As the new nation rapidly descended into bitter political conflict, many of the framers themselves, driven by their partisan interests, massaged the Electoral College into a form that differed profoundly from their own founding intentions. Subsequent generations tinkered similarly with the systems’ possibilities, always exploiting its potential for political gain. The protocols of today’s presidential contests arose mostly from these efforts, though some features acquired the formal sanction of Constitutional amendment and legislation.

 

In recent decades our strange presidential election system has produced frustrating results with increasing frequency. Who can forget the Bush-Gore contest of 2000, when the results hinged on “hanging chads” and fewer than 1,500 votes in Florida? Americans endured weeks of a single-state recount, only to have the Supreme Court halt the process and hand the election to George W. Bush. Bush won the Electoral College by a single vote, but Al Gore captured 500,000 more popular votes. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump stunned the world with a substantial Electoral College victory of 302-227, though nearly 3 million more Americans preferred his opponent, and roughly 7 million voted for a third-party candidate. The system increasingly returns results that conflict with the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, a product of our hyper-polarized landscape and unique geopolitical distribution of party loyalists. And it doesn’t look like things will improve anytime soon.

 

Defenders of the Electoral College tend to invoke gauzy images of the Founding Fathers infusing our system with their unique, timeless wisdom. But history tells a different story. The Founding Fathers faced a mess; they responded by creating a mess.

• Publish Date: 17 September 2024
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Prometheus
• Edition: Kindle Edition
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 250
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Distorting The Discussion. For a book about the history of the Electoral College that opens up admitting that the author thinks the Electoral College is foolhardy at best... the actual history here is quite good, and absolutely stuff virtually no one learns about even with a major in American History in college. (Perhaps Masters' or PhD students specifically studying the EC or at least the Constitutional Convention that created it would know at least some of this?) So absolutely read this book for Parts I and II, where Dupont shows that the fights that we have today about the Electoral College have been there basically since its creation and have reignited every few decades since.

 

It is in Part III, where Dupont begins discussing the current debates about the issue, that her acknowledged disdain comes to the fore and truly distorts the discussion. Here, she creates strawman after strawman after strawman and "debunks" them... without ever actually getting to the heart of any of the arguments she is "debunking".

 

Which is a shame, because throughout parts I and II, Dupont almost goes to pains to show that there have been some throughout American history who had at least part of the actual solution to the problems we now see - and were working to push that part of the solution through. In Part II, she even notes the other part to the solution... and glosses right on by it.

 

The solution that Dupont brings up repeatedly is the "District method" (vs the "General ticket" method we now call Winner-Take-All). Here, each Electoral Vote is, essentially, chosen by the popular vote of each Congressional District, with the overall popular vote of the State determining the Electoral Votes represented by that State's US Senators. Going to that method right now would mean that both "large State" and "small State" (to use the Founders' terms) or "urban" and "rural" (to use more modern terms) concerns would be more accurately represented in the overall Electoral College system.

 

But wait! There's more! The item that Dupont glosses over is the 1920s era law passed by Congress capping the number of US Representatives at 435. This was the final nail in the coffin as far as how unequal the system currently appears, allowing even a District based Electoral Vote in Wyoming to represent 400K ish people vs a District based vote in Los Angeles to easily represent 3x as many people. But that is "simply" an Act of Congress... meaning Congress can remove that restriction at any time, even, literally, the day you are reading this review.  

 

And then there becomes a point in the Constitutional Convention that even Dupont completely misses. You see, while I haven't examined the relevant records myself (and perhaps Dupont could, and possibly release a 2nd edition of this text examining this), there are some who point out that the First Amendment as we know it... wasn't the actual First Amendment. Instead, it was the *second*, and the actual First Amendment actually closed the "Representational loophole" that Article I, Section II of the Constitution created when it noted that the "number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand". Reading that carefully, it means that the population represented by a single US Representative has a *minimum* - 30,000 people - meaning that the overall number of US Representatives has a *maximum* - 11,234 US Representatives, based on the US population in August 2024 as I write this review. But notice what this does *NOT* do - set a population *maximum* - and therefore an overall number of US Representatives *minimum*.  

 

THIS is where the fight over the Electoral College misses its most crucial point - and it is a point Dupont seems to be entirely unaware or even ignorant of. If this so-called "true First Amendment" had passed, it would have set the population maximum per Representative - and therefore the minimum overall number of US Representatives - at 50,000 - or 6,740 US Representatives based on current US population as of late August 2024 as I write this review.

 

Combining the District Method Dupont discusses at length in the text here + this missing "actual First Amendment" would largely solve every single argument Dupont has against the Electoral College, and yet she missed such a crucial detail of James Madison's own efforts regarding the construction of the Constitution - thereby distorting the discussion from the get-go.

 

Recommended, mainly for Parts I and II, where most everyone will learn quite a bit.