Photo: A meeting of the Electoral College in Annapolis, Maryland. Credit: Flickr/Maryland GovPics (CC BY 2.0)
Every young person in America is taught in school about the wonders of the U.S. system of government — brilliantly designed to protect freedom, flexible enough to solve any problem, and given legitimacy by the consent of the governed. But this fairy tale version of U.S. politics bears no resemblance to reality.
In fact, these notions might seem so outlandish that many people’s eyes glaze over at the mere mention of the intricacies of how the government functions. But for those who want to put an end to this unjust order, it is absolutely essential to understand those intricacies. It is not necessary to grasp the ins-and-outs of the Constitution or the legislative process to come to the conclusion that the system has to end — but to actually bring about this profound transformation of society we need to know in detail how our enemy operates.
Liberation News is producing the “Civics Class for Radicals” series to shine light on the reality of this system of government of, by and for the rich. Read other articles in this series here.
The idea that the United States is the world’s greatest democracy is at the very core of the idea of American exceptionalism. The ruling class uses the myth of U.S. democracy to manufacture consent for imperialist invasions and election meddling in countries from Venezuela to Iraq to many, many others in the Global South in the name of “spreading democracy.” The capitalist elite work hard to funnel radical energy behind social movements inside the United States back into the electoral system, claiming that U.S. democracy is so perfect that voting is the only action needed to exercise that democracy.
However, peeling back the curtain on how votes are actually tabulated for the top position in the United States, it’s easy to see that the entire U.S. electoral system was not set up to create democracy, but actually to make sure that the ruling class is protected from it. Nowhere is the complete lack of democracy more apparent than in the system to elect the president of the United States: the Electoral College.
The last line of defense against democracy
The ”founding fathers” were very open in their disdain for the idea of democracy. The Federalist Papers, the historic document from 1787 that set up much of the basis for the U.S. Constitution, is rife with arguments against the establishment of a democratic system for the U.S. government. The men who created the U.S. government were extremely condescending in how they described working people, calling them as “obnoxious,” “turbulent,” and a whole host of other insulting terms. For example, in Federalist No. 10, James Madison writes that democracy is at odds with the values of the government he hopes to create:
[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
While the “founding fathers” were more or less united in the decision that they could not allow working people a voice in their own governance, they still needed a form of choosing leaders that would give some illusion of impartiality and fairness. In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton introduces his idea for the method of electing the president: the Electoral College. Hamilton viewed the Electoral College as a way to ensure that the “right people” were selecting the president, i.e. it would place the power of choosing the president in the hands of people who were part of the ruling class and create a layer of separation between the executive and the supposed fickle whims of the average people. Hamilton wrote about how this enlightened form of electoralism would insulate the electoral process from the “heats and ferments” of the common folk:
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder … The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.
Slave quarters at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s plantation. Over 500 slaves worked at Mount Vernon over the course of Washington’s life. Image: Tim Evanson (CC BY-SA 2.0)
At the time the Federalist Papers were written, a deep debate was raging over how the president should be chosen. One idea was the Virginia Plan, in which the legislature would choose the executive. Another idea was the New Jersey Plan, in which each state would get one vote toward the president. Some raised the method of using a popular vote to elect the president. None of these plans, however, satisfied the most powerful members of the ruling class of the day: the plantation-owning slave drivers. The Electoral College had an edge over the other plans due to its huge popularity among the Southern slaveholding elite. The South at the time was pushing for the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted each slave as ⅗ of a person when counting the census for apportioning representatives. The Electoral College tied the number of electoral votes to the number of representatives for each state, and the Southern states saw an opportunity to maximize their influence. They were also able to avoid the question of suffrage for slaves by turning down a system for a popular vote. In resolving the question of how to choose the president, James Madison viewed the Electoral College as the obvious choice. As he stated in 1787:
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
In keeping with general U.S. history, the Electoral College began with the racist aims of appeasing slave owners and keeping the plantation-based economy humming. The Electoral College also had the benefit of not being reliant whatsoever on the votes of the working population, who, regardless of race, generally were far less in favor of the institution of slavery compared to the people who profited from owning slaves. At its inception, state legislatures mainly chose electors. Even as more sectors of the U.S. population gained suffrage, they continued voting for presidential electors instead of directly for president. For many years, presidential electors were not a partisan position and did not pledge to vote for any specific candidates. This formulation was in line with Hamilton’s conception of the Electoral College as made up of educated, free-thinking men who were to make their own choices for president with the support of the populace. In fact, it was not until the 1800s that any president’s name even appeared on the general election ballot.
What is the Electoral College?
While the identities of individual electors are nowadays obscured from the general public, the anti-democratic process of the Electoral College has hardly changed since the institution was first established in the late 1700s.
Due to the existence of the Electoral College, it is fundamentally impossible for any voter to actually vote for a presidential candidate directly in the general election. When voters cast their votes every four years for president, they never actually vote for the president and vice president themselves; they are instead casting their votes for the presidential electors nominated by the party or body to which the presidential and vice presidential candidates belong. The Constitution leaves broad discretion to the states to decide how presidential electors from that state are nominated and elected. In some states, the electors are chosen at party conventions, and in others, the presidential and vice presidential candidates choose the electors for their slate directly. Many states employ a “winner takes all” system for electing presidential electors. Kentucky and Maine notably use a district-based system.
Once the votes are tallied for presidential electors, the governor of each state prepares a certificate of ascertainment that includes the name of all individual electors, to which candidate those electors are pledged, and the vote tallies for each presidential elector. The governors of each state send these certificates to the Office of the Federal Register, a part of the National Archives, to be received by the National Archivist.
In mid-December, the winning presidential electors meet in a designated location in their respective states to cast their votes. This is done by preparing a Certificate of Vote designating the recipient of each elector’s vote and signed by that elector. They send these certificates to the president of the U.S. Senate (i.e. the vice president), the archivist of the United States, the Secretary of State of each state, and the Chief Judge of the Federal District Court of the district in which the electors met in each state.
Finally, each year on Jan. 6, the electoral votes are finally tallied. The vice president presides over this vote count in the presence of Congress and officially certifies the election results.
The ‘fake electors’ plot
This crucial final date in the Electoral College process probably sounds familiar to anyone who remembers the Jan. 6, 2021 far-right wing assault on the Capitol trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep Trump in the presidency. On this day, some of the most vile elements of the vigilante right, from the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers, stormed the White House with collusion from high-level military, police and security officials. The media has painted these events as a one-day anomaly from fringe, extreme elements in the United States. However, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not simply a one-off violent, angry mob, but the culmination of a plot coordinated by top officials in the Republican Party to use the very structure of the Electoral College to manipulate the 2020 presidential election results.
Just a few days after the 2020 general election, Republican Party lawyers from Wisconsin came up with a plot to interfere with the vote count long enough that Biden could not be certified as president, and Trump would remain in power. They modeled this plot after the racist events of the 1876 election, in which multiple states sent conflicting electoral certifications to the Senate, delaying the final electoral count to the point of constitutional crisis. Only 13 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1876 election season was marked by both increasing Black political representation as well as a racist backlash from white Southern Democrats who wanted to end the revolutionary Reconstruction period. Election Day came with widespread fraud and racist voter intimidation by paramilitary groups at the polls, particularly in the South against Black Republican voters. During the official vote count, presided over by the sitting Republican vice president, Democrats objected to the Republican electors’ certificates of vote from three states, then filibustered effectively to prevent a resolution by the temporarily appointed Electoral Commission. For nearly three months, the election had no clear winner. Finally, the crisis was resolved mere days before Inauguration Day with the Compromise of 1877 — Republican Rutherford B. Hayes would end Reconstruction in return for the presidency.
By the 20th century, the peaceful transfer of power seemed to be a hallmark of the American system — but Trump’s team looking to overturn the 2020 election results recalled historical precedent that showed this peaceful transfer was not to be taken for granted. Since 1876, no process has been created to resolve conflicting electoral votes from a state. The Republicans planned to get fake certificates of ascertainment from swing states, where it would be easier to cast doubt on official vote counts. The 2020 fake electors scheme spread quickly. Top Republican Party officials in seven states in which election officials had certified Democratic Party wins — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico — agreed: The Republican Party slates of presidential electors would meet on the legally designated date for the Electoral College in mid-December and craft their own certificates of vote reflecting a Trump victory in addition to the certificates of vote that were to be submitted by the Democratic Party electors. These fake certificates were submitted to all officials who are usually required by law to receive certificates of vote, including the national archivist and the sitting vice president, Mike Pence.
The 10 Republicans who met in December 2020 at the Wisconsin State Capitol to cast unauthorized Electoral College votes for President Donald Trump. (Screenshot from court documents)
The Jan. 6 insurrection aimed to delay the certification of votes long enough to keep Trump in office and create a constitutional crisis, like the racist crisis in 1876, by introducing competing vote counts. The insurrectionists directly threatened Pence while storming the capitol, chanting “hang Mike Pence,” in an effort to intimidate him into introducing the fraudulent certificates onto the floor of Congress during the vote count. Although Pence ultimately did not honor the fraudulent certificates and certified Biden as the victor, the Jan. 6 insurrection called into question the validity of the Electoral College process and set the stage for potential future challenges to the meager amount of democracy enjoyed by the people of the United States today.
The popular vote: A tenuous relationship
Although the insurrection failed at overturning the 2020 election results, it came frighteningly close to having a major impact on the election results and also threatened the lives of many members of Congress who did not go along with the scheme. Following the questionable events surrounding the 2020 election certification, lawmakers attempted to reform the Electoral College with the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022. This act tried to close gaps in the way the Electoral College is carried out without making any fundamental challenges to its structure. Other reforms have had similar effect and avoided taking on the fact that the Electoral College remains undemocratic to its core.
The Electoral College gives vastly different weights to a person’s vote depending on which state a voter lives in. Electoral votes are equal to the sum number of representatives in the House of Representatives and the number of senators from each state. Therefore, states with a smaller population get more electoral votes relative to their population, as each state gets two senators regardless of a state’s size. As a result, the state with the lowest population, Wyoming, gets one electoral vote for every 195,000 people, while California gets one electoral vote per 712,000 people. A person who lives in Wyoming’s vote is almost 3.5 times as powerful as the vote of someone from California!
Population per electoral vote for each state and Washington, D.C. (2020 census). A single elector could represent more than 700,000 people or under 200,000. Image: Perl coder (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Furthermore, it’s growing increasingly common for presidents to be elected without achieving a majority of votes. Two of the last six presidents -—George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 — entered office with fewer votes than their opponents. In fact, in 2000, the final election result was decided by about 500 votes from Florida. The Florida election process that year was marked by voting machine glitches and confusing ballots that made it possible for voters to misinterpret which candidate they were casting their vote for. Bush was certified the winner on election night, but when courts ordered official recounts, Republican staffers threatened violence and even rioted to shut down the recount. In the end, the votes were settled in Bush’s favor. Imagine what the United States would do if an election like that happened in any country threatened by U.S. imperialism!
While the role of a presidential elector is today usually little more than a ceremonial role in practice, nothing necessarily ties electors to the outcome of the popular vote. No federal law states presidential electors must cast their vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates to whom they had pledged, and in fact, most states have no requirement that presidential electors must vote for the candidate whose slate they are part of at all. These electors, who are nominated and elected as part of a slate but then cast their votes for different candidates in the Electoral College, are known as “faithless electors.” The laws regarding faithless electors vary greatly from state to state, with some states invalidating the votes or fining the electors and some that don’t penalize a faithless elector in any way at all.
Faithless elector laws vary immensely from state to state. Image: Ketrit (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A high-profile Supreme Court case arising from the 2016 election attempted to at least partially resolve the ability of states to tie their electors’ votes to the candidate to whom they pledged. In this case, one elector voted for Faith Spotted Eagle and three electors from Washington attempted to cast their votes in the Electoral College for Colin Powell instead of Hillary Clinton in a last-ditch effort to influence Republican electors to deflect from Trump. The state of Washington fined these presidential electors and invalidated their votes. The landmark 2020 Supreme Court case decided that punishing faithless electors and replacing them with new electors were within the states’ constitutional rights. Many hailed this case as a victory for democracy, ignoring the fundamental anti-democratic structure of the Electoral College itself.
Maintaining the two capitalist parties’ status quo
The typical “winner-takes-all” system of allocating electoral votes in each state ensures the difficulty of gaining momentum for any party or candidate outside the two capitalist ruling class parties. States’ abilities to regulate elections independently of each other ensures that third parties have to wade through a massive patchwork of different laws and procedures in each state to gain ballot access, but even when they do manage to successfully get on the ballot, the Electoral College stands as a final hurdle to national representation. The ruling class, while usually spouting praise for the United States’ democratic system, go into overdrive every election season to make sure one of their two parties prevails as the winner.
Today, the Electoral College continues to ensure that the results of the election will be decided in a handful of so-called “swing states.” In 2024, Democrats and Republicans are waging their fight almost entirely in the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania. The Electoral College ensures that not only will the major parties not campaign at all in states where two-thirds of the population lives, but that the overall outcome of the election will rely on only a few tens of thousands of votes from residents of a few counties in even fewer states. While the Republicans gear up for another challenge to the legitimacy of the vote count in 2024, the Democrats have resorted to direct attacks on third parties’ ballot access as a strategy to win the highly sought-after electoral votes from Georgia and Pennsylvania. Traditionally, line by line signature challenges have been the preferred method to keep third parties off the ballot. Interestingly, this strategy seems to be shifting. The ballot access challenges in 2024 in Georgia and Pennsylvania have relied almost solely not on signature challenges or invalidating the presidential and vice presidential candidates themselves, but on the eligibility of the electors nominated by each alternative party. If the system is so democratic, why does it even matter who serves as an elector?
Real democracy means a whole new system
While the electoral system has shifted in some minor ways since it was created, the basic function of the Electoral College as the last line of defense against democracy in the United States has remained exactly the same. Endless reforms cannot fundamentally change a system designed explicitly to safeguard the ruling class from the will of the people. Calls for new ways to model the electoral system nationally continue to gain steam, including demands for a national popular vote and ranked choice voting. On the other hand, the ruling class continues to defend the Electoral College to the hilt, because they know that in a truly democratic system, their days in power would be numbered. Developing real democracy requires a whole new system!
