The Electoral College: Pillar of Democracy or Vestige of a Failing Institution

 

With the grow­ing polit­i­cal divide and flar­ing ten­sion in the coun­try between democ­rats and repub­li­cans, the past 2020 elec­tion had become a top­ic of point­ed con­tro­ver­sy when sev­er­al repub­li­can can­di­dates had declared the announce­ment that Joe Biden had won the most votes for pres­i­dent false, and that the elec­tion had been rigged by faulty vot­ing machines. This lead­ing up to the riots at the nation’s cap­i­tal on Jan­u­ary 6th as well as Don­ald Trump’s pre­vi­ous pres­i­den­cy has left a great deal of pub­lic dis­trust in many of the sys­tems gov­ern­ing democracy.

One such sys­tem, writ­ten into the con­sti­tu­tion itself, and giv­en much ire as of recent­ly is the elec­toral col­lege, with near­ly 67% of Amer­i­cans stat­ing that they do not believe that the elec­toral col­lege should be a sys­tem in place in the demo­c­ra­t­ic process. Does the elec­toral col­lege have a valid place in the process of choos­ing our next pres­i­dent, or is it mere­ly a rel­ic of an archa­ic con­sti­tu­tion­al law?

Pro­fes­sor Ronald Schurin is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in res­i­dence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut who teach­es Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment and Pol­i­tics. He received his Ph. D. from the Uni­ver­si­ty of New York in 1997 and his mas­ters in pub­lic affairs from the Woodrow Wil­son School of Pub­lic and Inter­na­tion­al Affairs at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in 1977.

Prof. Schurin has been with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut for about 25 years and was ini­tial­ly a part of the admin­is­tra­tion of UConn before he went on to teach polit­i­cal sci­ence. Before work­ing for the uni­ver­si­ty he had pre­vi­ous­ly worked with the city Uni­ver­si­ty in of New York and what was for­mer­ly the Depart­ment of Health and Welfare.

 

Script:

Open­ing — Good morn­ing, good noon, good­night ladies and gen­tle­man, and wel­come to the Atom­ic State Pod­cast. I am your host Mike Thomp­son and today we are look­ing at an issue in pol­i­tics becom­ing more and more press­ing as the elec­tions go into full swing.

On Jan­u­ary 6^th, 2022, the Unit­ed States Cap­i­tal was swarmed by riot­ers who sought to inval­i­date the elec­tion of Joe Biden as the next Pres­i­dent of the coun­try. Those who were aligned with the for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, claimed that the elec­tion was rigged and that the votes were invalid.

Just a few years before, when Trump was declared the next Pres­i­dent of the coun­try, beat­ing his cam­paign rival Hillary Clin­ton, peo­ple were aston­ished because Clin­ton was said to have won the pop­u­lar vote, but Trump had more votes in the elec­toral college.

A Pew Research study showed that there was a great deal of Amer­i­cans who believed that we should move away from the elec­toral col­lege, with about 55% polled say­ing that the cur­rent sys­tem should be changed.

Is this a symp­tom of our increas­ing polit­i­cal divi­sion, or a due to mis­un­der­stand­ing of the elec­toral process?

In this episode of the Atom­ic State, this is the ques­tion that I seek to answer.

Mikhael Thomp­son — Pro­fes­sor Ronald Schurin is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in res­i­dence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut for the polit­i­cal sci­ence department.

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “I was ini­tial­ly a part of the admin­is­tra­tion at UConn. Before com­ing to UConn, I worked with the city Uni­ver­si­ty of New York, and before that I worked for the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in what then was the Depart­ment of Health and Welfare.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — I hap­pened to have heard about him in my Con­sti­tu­tion­al Law course, and learned he had been an elec­tor in the elec­toral col­lege before. I want­ed to know what an elec­tor exact­ly did, how their roll in the final step of the vot­ing process shapes the way we view the elec­toral col­lege. And why the exis­tence of the elec­toral col­lege has been crit­i­cized in recent years.

“What got you into becom­ing an elector?”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Well, I’ve been active in demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics in Con­necti­cut for quite a while, and I thought as the elec­tion was approach­ing, this would be quite an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence. It would give me a good anec­dote for my class and it would give me some­thing to write about.”

“So I com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic State Chair­man, a woman at that time named Nancey DiNar­do, who’s still Demo­c­ra­t­ic State Chair­woman, and said yes. That I would like to be considered—to be nom­i­nat­ed by the state demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion in 2012 to be a pres­i­den­tial elec­tor. That if I am cho­sen, I will promise to do noth­ing oth­er than vote for the demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date for pres­i­dent. I will not be a faith­less elector—an inde­pen­dent elector.”

“So, the pow­ers that be that gath­ered for the con­ven­tion chose a slate of offi­cers. And kind of down the list was choos­ing the pres­i­den­tial elector’s slate. As sev­en pres­i­den­tial elec­tors, I was endeav­or­ing to be one of the seven.”

“One of the women in that gath­er­ing was named Denise Mer­rill, who’s the sec­re­tary of the state, and who has come to my class a few times, and who’s kind of an old friend. Denise put in a good word for me, and at the demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion when the con­ven­tion was basi­cal­ly rat­i­fy­ing the list of con­ven­tion offi­cers and oth­ers, they rat­i­fied the list of pres­i­den­tial elec­tors and I was on that list.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — I had to ask how he felt at the time. Being I such a posi­tion as this must have been nerve wrack­ing. To know that the votes of hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple were in your hands.

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Well, I guess it was not as daunt­ing to me because I knew some of the play­ers involved. And I was in fact the del­e­gate to the state con­ven­tion as well, so I would be there in any event. So, I felt if I didn’t get it, I didn’t get it, and it wasn’t going to be a big loss on my part. It would be a fun expe­ri­ence and I was look­ing for­ward to it, but we would see how it went. So, I wasn’t ter­ri­bly ner­vous about that.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “What if any com­pli­ca­tions or things that were not fore­seen had come up dur­ing your process as an elector?”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Well, when I didn’t hear any­thing after the con­ven­tion for quite a while I thought, ‘Have they for­got­ten? Is there some­thing I should be doing?’ But then I learned after the elec­tion I was told I would be con­tact­ed and be told where to go, what to do. So indeed, after the elec­tion I did get a call, maybe a letter—I don’t remem­ber, but it told me to go to the office of the sec­re­tary of the state in the state capi­tol in Hart­ford on a cer­tain date. I believe it’s the first Mon­day in December—maybe the sec­ond Mon­day. And we all arrived there and we’re told there would be a kind of script we fol­low, and we were giv­en copies of the script. Essen­tial­ly nom­i­nat­ing a chair of our lit­tle elec­tor slate, which didn’t real­ly need to be done, that we would then march out to the state sen­ate cham­ber, as we did, and there would be a mil­i­tary hon­or guard car­ry­ing flags in front of us. There was a high school cho­rus singing patri­ot­ic songs, and we got to the state sen­ate cham­ber, we’re giv­en our assigned seats, and after some pre­lim­i­nary remarks…”

“I should say this was a trag­ic day, because it was just after the Sandy Hook shoot­ing which was on a Fri­day, this was on the Monday. ”

Mikhael Thomp­son — What the pro­fes­sor said left a great deal with me. I remem­bered the loss and the col­lec­tive grief felt by just about every­one in Con­necti­cut dur­ing the events at Sandy Hook. He said the atmos­phere of the room at the time was a somber one.

 

“So, there was this deep feel­ing of sad­ness in the room.”

“There was a prayer, and there was a brief state­ment by the sec­re­tary of state. Then we were giv­en our bal­lots, which were already filled in—they didn’t take any chances. So, I got one bal­lot that said Barack Oba­ma, and anoth­er bal­lot that said Joe Biden, cast sep­a­rate bal­lots for pres­i­dent and vice pres­i­dent. And those bal­lots are cast into a box, which I was told was carved out of the orig­i­nal Char­ter Oak tree which has great res­i­dence in Con­necti­cut, hav­ing some­thing to do with what hap­pened dur­ing the time when we were a colony. And the votes were then for­mer­ly count­ed. And after that, I got a procla­ma­tion that you can see on the wall.”

“I should say that under the law, we were enti­tled to a $10 fee. But we were told it was cus­tom­ary for us to waive the fee, so I waived the fee and I nev­er got my ten dol­lars. But that was, ah…that was my expe­ri­ence as a pres­i­den­tial elector.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “There must be a great deal of pres­tige behind the position.”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “There’s noth­ing oth­er than pres­tige. Ah, you know, you don’t real­ly get to make a choice. Although there have been in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, over a hun­dred faith­less elec­tors; peo­ple who did not vote for the per­son they were pledged to vote for.”

“In Con­necti­cut under the law, you are sup­posed to vote for the per­son you are pledged to vote for. But the penal­ty is not spelled out in Con­necti­cut law. So, there’s real­ly just sort of the hon­or of it.”

“In the 2016 elec­tion, of course the Trump ver­sus Clin­ton elec­tion, there were sev­er­al faith­less elec­tors, maybe 8 or 10, they didn’t make the dif­fer­ence in terms of the out­come of the election.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “Could you explain a bit more about faith­less elec­tors? I had heard about the con­cept, but can’t quite wrap my mind around it I remem­ber it being men­tioned that there are fines, but you said that the penal­ties weren’t clear in the state.”

Prof. Ronald Schurin -“It is not! Aha, pre­sum­ably that would be defin­ing you of your $10 dol­lars, but again there is no clear penalty.”

“More­over, it’s not clear that it is con­sti­tu­tion­al. This is a fed­er­al office that we are vot­ed into. Can the state impose laws regard­ing how you behave when you are elect­ed to this fed­er­al office?”

“That remains to be deter­mined. Maybe some­day it’ll get to the Supreme Court.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “So, this could be a poten­tial 10^th Amend­ment case?”

At this ques­tion the pro­fes­sor paused for a moment and pondered.

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Inter­est­ing. (Pro­ceeds to recite the 10^th Amendment).”

“Maybe. I would think it more of a 2^nd amend­ment case hav­ing more to do with the elec­tion of the president—err, 2^nd arti­cle, Arti­cle 2.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “Has your expe­ri­ence as an elec­tor changed your view of pol­i­tics at all, or has it affect­ed the way you teach your cours­es here at UConn?”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Well, I can tell a lit­tle anec­dote about my elec­tor expe­ri­ence and that’s about it.”

“But in terms of my feel­ings about pol­i­tics, or even about the elec­toral col­lege, I’m still on the fence about that.”

“There’s some­thing a lit­tle pre­pos­ter­ous about this group of 7 peo­ple that nobody’s ever heard of, mak­ing a deter­mi­na­tion that the vot­ers think that they’re going to deter­mine. I tell peo­ple that I am the only per­son you know that has actu­al­ly vot­ed for pres­i­dent and they don’t know what I’m talk­ing about.”

“There’s this sort of cer­e­mo­ni­al rat­i­fi­ca­tion ele­ment, and we saw that this year on Jan­u­ary 6^th. The whole steps toward the cer­e­mo­ni­al rat­i­fi­ca­tion became not just cer­e­mo­ni­al, as there was an effort in the insur­rec­tion to deprive Con­gress of the abil­i­ty to make the true report­ing, the true count­ing of the electors.”

“So, I real­ly would like to see laws very clear­ly cod­i­fy­ing, very clear­ly mak­ing it 100 per­cent beyond dis­pute what the role of the elec­tor is, how the votes are to be cast, and how they are to be count­ed. And leav­ing that not up to chance, as it was some­what put up to chance this past year.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “To me there is this notion that every­one has a vote, and that our votes count. But maybe I’m ask­ing out there for every­one that might wor­ry about that fact. Does the elec­toral col­lege have a place in the vot­ing process, since it is some­thing writ­ten in Con­sti­tu­tion law?”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Well, the the­o­ry is that wise peo­ple should be mak­ing the deter­mi­na­tion of who the pres­i­dent is. But real­ly, one of the com­men­ta­tors said way back in the 1790’s, an elec­tor who had been cho­sen as a poten­tial elec­tor for John Adams but instead vot­ed for Thomas Jef­fer­son. And some­body wrote a cri­tique say­ing “we chose him not to think, but to act!”

“And the idea is, we as the elec­tors should ‘act’, not ‘think’. Just do what we are told we are going to do and let the vot­ers have the con­fi­dence that their vote is count­ed, with the elec­toral col­lege sim­ply rat­i­fy­ing their vote.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — I couldn’t help but reflect on this bit of infor­ma­tion. As con­vo­lut­ed as it seemed, was it the inten­tion of the founders to cre­ate anoth­er sys­tem of gov­ern­ment which fol­lowed the stan­dard of a Repub­li­can form of gov­ern­ment, with the elec­tors act­ing pure­ly as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the voters?

Or is it more of a stop-gap mea­sure for inde­cent politics?

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “There were some who said in 2016, the elec­toral col­lege would be our pro­tec­tion against Don­ald Trump. There should be many faith­less elec­tors who should not vote for Don­ald Trump because he would be a ter­ri­ble president.”

“The argu­ment against that is that peo­ple who went into the vot­ing booth and vot­ed for, they thought Don­ald Trump but actu­al­ly the elec­tors pledged to Don­ald Trump, they have their rights too. Their right is to have the per­son they’re choos­ing become the pres­i­dent if that per­son gets more votes than any­one else.”

Mikhael Thomp­son -

His response was thought­ful and mea­sured. As I under­stood, to have faith in the elec­toral sys­tem, would mean to have faith in your neigh­bors as well. For their vote mat­tered just as much as mine. Would this mean that a sense of social aware­ness and a sense of civic duty was all it took to solve polit­i­cal divi­sive­ness? I had to wonder.

“Giv­en our cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate, what would you say is our best path forward?”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Well one thing is what I indi­cat­ed, hav­ing laws that clear­ly state the role of the electors.”

“But ultimately…the more I think about it, and I’ve thought about it a great deal, it comes down to the peo­ple. If peo­ple are going to choose to be fool­ish when engag­ing in pol­i­tics and believ­ing things that are demon­stra­bly untrue, then I’m not sure what we can do about that. I have tried to think of answers to that and I don’t have one yet.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “It is a mark of the times it seems, con­sid­er­ing the rise of social media and misinformation.”

“Peo­ple seem to believe in gos­sip and rumor. ”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “I don’t know the answer to that but I will say, giv­en the sys­tem we have, which has last­ed over 200 years, we’ve man­aged to defeat both fas­cism and com­mu­nism. We’ve man­aged to move toward—haven’t reached it yet, goals of social jus­tice. We’ve man­aged to inte­grate mil­lions upon mil­lions of immi­grants into the Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty, and some­how or oth­er it’s worked. Whether now with the rise of things like social media, (pod­casts), and oth­ers, will it continue…I just don’t know, but I just have to cross my fin­gers and hope so.”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “Giv­en that we have made it this far, that we are see­ing a lot of progress, I believe we as a soci­ety are capa­ble of com­ing togeth­er on cer­tain issues.”

“What are your thoughts on the Supreme Court’s recent deci­sion to leave the abor­tion issue up to the states?”

“From what I’ve heard, most peo­ple believe that there is a lot of nuance.”

Prof. Ronald Schurin -

“Of course, the abor­tion issue has always had peo­ple on one extreme, nev­er under the cir­cum­stances the oth­er extreme; up to the moment of birth. Most Amer­i­cans fit some­where in the middle.”

 

“It seems to me like we had reached kind of an unhap­py com­pro­mise, nobody was total­ly sat­is­fied with it, that gov­ern­ment would per­mit abor­tion, but states were allowed to assure that peo­ple not take that pro­ce­dure light­ly. And that’s kind of where we were for a while. And now under the new deci­sion the states can pret­ty much decide what­ev­er they want. And I don’t know how it’s going to play out.”

“As you say, nuance. Some­times laws don’t deal well with nuance.”

Mikhael Thomp­son -

To me it had seemed like we had some­how reached an unhap­py mid­dle ground. It had me think­ing back to the one of the orig­i­nal ques­tions brought up in the Roe v. Wayde case; whether gov­ern­ment had the right to decide what a woman could do with their bod­ies. And it seems that ques­tion is still being chal­lenged, maybe not in law but in the sphere of pub­lic discourse.

“What do you feel would be the best path forward?”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Well, as I said, we’ve gone through trou­bled times before…”

“But I am deeply trou­bled now. And I wish I could give you a clear answer about the best path for­ward. To keep hop­ing for the best. Not sink­ing to the lev­el that some have brought us down to. To sup­port edu­ca­tion. For­mer Jus­tice San­dra Day O’Conner was big on civic edu­ca­tion, which I think is some­thing that we very much need. And to just keep out fin­gers crossed. ”

Mikhael Thomp­son — “Is there any­thing you would like to Add? Or any per­son­al thoughts you would like to put out there for the stu­dents at UConn?”

Prof. Ronald Schurin — “Only that I’ve read that the aver­age lifes­pan of a repub­lic in his­to­ry has been 200 years, and we are now at about 235.”

“I hope it doesn’t mean our time has come. (He chuckles)”

Out­ro — Thank you again for join­ing me today on the Atom­ic State, where we are hit­ting you with all the lat­est news and high­lights of the day. This has been your host Mike Thomp­son, here from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, and I’ll see you next time.