Okay everybody! How you doing? I am Dr.
Arsenault. I'm a Political Science professor
here at Mount Aloysius College. Today, I
am actually working at my other job.
I'm a medic by my hometown so I'm
hunkering down, hoping we don't have any
Covid calls.
Now that being said, I want to talk a
little bit about
the Electoral College. So, as you know,
we have a presidential election coming
up
and every time we have a presidential
election, I often get questions on
this weird, bizarre aspect of American
politics and that is the Electoral
College. And how does the
Electoral College vote and why does the
vote matter?
So let's quickly go back to 2016.
2016: Hillary Clinton won the popular
vote,
meaning the majority of people in the
United States voted for Hillary, but
obviously Hillary is not in the White
House. In fact,
we have Donald Trump and Donald Trump
collected more than the minimum
of 270 Electoral College votes
needed to win the office of the
Presidency.
It seems odd, okay. So today, I want to
start to look at what is the Electoral
College and why is it
important to American government in
American elections
in general? So we'll start to think about
things like
do the popular votes even matter in our
political sphere
or is it really left up to the select
few elites?
So the first question I think we can
address is how is the Electoral College
founded?
And the Electoral College really emerges
from
a debate between the founding fathers
regarding the amount of power that
should be granted to the President
and to whom the President should be
beholden.
So some delegates in the Constitutional
Convention
favored a President directly elected by
the people.
Others wanted a president that was
selected by and beholden
to Congress. So ultimately, a solution was
carved out where electors would be
selected
by state legislatures which would thus
make the President beholden to state
legislators
rather than directly to the people. So
originally,
the power lied with
the state governments, particularly the
elected officials at the state level.
So you might be wondering, okay, why? What is the purpose of establishing this
Electoral College? Well, it's an indirect
system of voting
and the United States is not the only
country that uses a similar system.
In many countries during the early years
of expanded suffrage
where we started to expand the votes
into other areas,
voters would choose members of some
intermediary group, somewhere between
government
officials and the actual public, and it
was these people
that would choose the Chief
Executive.
So the idea was that the average citizen
really wasn't qualified to choose
political leadership.
So the political elite created sort of a
firewall against what they saw as
excessive democracy.
So Thomas Jefferson was especially
skeptical of direct democracy, or one in
which the people vote directly for their
leader,
and he referred to it as "mob rule".
We also see the Electoral College
serving to protect the interests of
smaller,
less populous states. So we start to see
a system of disproportionality,
one that's based on the fact that each
state,
regardless of the population, maintains
two Senate seats.
So states with a small population like
say, Wyoming,
have a disproportionate amount of
representation when compared to large
states like California.
California has a much larger population
than Wyoming,
but it still has that same equal two
Senate seats.
So next let's talk about how does the
Electoral College work.
Well, each state may have different rules
for selecting electors.
There are a total of 538 votes in the
Electoral College
and a candidate running for President
has to win
270 of those 538 votes.
So it's the state legislatures that
decide the allocation of Electoral College
votes.
Now, most states maintain a "winner take
all" system
in which the Electoral College votes are
awarded to the candidate winning the
popular vote.
So winner take all -  if you win a
particular state, you win
all the Electoral College seats. However,
there are two
examples of states where Electoral
College votes
are distributed more on a proportional
basis. That is, if you win 40 percent
of the popular vote in a given state, you
will get 40 percent of the Electoral
seats. Maine and Nebraska grant two
Electoral College votes to the candidate
with the highest
number of votes statewide, then they
grant an Electoral College vote to the
candidate winning the most
votes in congressional districts, that's
two in Maine,
three in Nebraska. And in these states,
we actually can see the Electoral
College votes being split between
Republicans and Democrats. So we actually, in some states, have a much more
proportional
system instead of the the predominant
"winner take all".
So the next question we have to answer
is how do states get their assigned
Electoral vote count?
Electoral College votes are based on the
size of each state's
congressional delegation - that is
the total number of representatives and
the two senators.
So for example here in Pennsylvania, we
have 20 Electoral College votes
based on our 18 congressional districts
plus our two senators, which gives us 20.
Now what's really interesting is that
the number of electors
can change.
So the number of electoral votes can change. So every 10 years,
congressional seats are reapportioned
based on population changes.
And how do we know when population
changes? The census, and we have a census
coming up. So the last apportionment occurred in
2010,
and what happened was we saw a
significant number of congressional
seats
move away from the industrial north,
including Pennsylvania,
to the south and southwest. So population declines,
the number of congressional districts
declines,
the number of Electoral College votes
declines as well - they move to another
geographical area.
So I'm sure we're asking why is it so
important?
Why is the Electoral College important?
Well, the Electoral College really places
a significant degree of political power
in highly competitive states like
Florida,
Pennsylvania and Ohio. These
states tend to be highly competitive
with an electorate that's relatively
evenly split between Republicans and
Democrats. Now the problem lies in the
fact that those living in
safe Republican or Democrat states get
very-
Call!
All right, so let's try and wrap
this
up with part two, sorry for the
interruption.
So last question we have to ask is why
should the Electoral College continue,
especially if the voices of the
people or the
the popular vote isn't listened to?
And so, you know, honestly I think we
should ask
not if the the Electoral College
should continue but rather why
it will continue. Now from a pragmatic
point of view,
the Electoral College is going to remain
in place for the foreseeable future.
And this really lies with the fact that
those states that are over-represented by the Electoral College are
very unlikely to relinquish their
disproportionate power.
So let's talk about a hypothetical
change to the system. So if we were to
change the Electoral College, it would
require
38 states to agree on a Constitutional
change,
and this is a super high bar to
allow any sort of institutional
change to our system. So even under these
circumstances, it's up to the state
legislatures
how the Electoral College is distributed.
Now I guess best case scenario, at
least in my opinion, would be that some
states would adopt a more proportional
system like those in Maine and Nebraska in
which we would have a more
representative
distribution of votes and it would be 
a lot more closely aligned to that
popular vote than what we see
currently. So
long story short, the Electoral
College is here to stay
and hopefully that grants a little bit
of insight of where it comes from, how it
works
and why we have it. So thank you very much!
