(upbeat music) - Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robertson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Carolyn Renee DuPont. She is professor of American History at Eastern Kentucky University. And she is the author of the new book, Distorting Democracy, the Forgotten History of the Electoral College and why it matters today available from Prometheus Books Professor DuPont. Welcome to Current Affairs. - Thank you so much for having me on. Well, you take us back to a really truly, one of the most fascinating moments in perhaps the history of the world, which is the moment where the country, this country under the Articles of Confederation is kind of crumbling, something's going wrong. And something has to be done. The whole thing has to be reconstituted. And it's very uncertain what's going to happen next. And you try and place us in your story about the Electoral College in that moment. So tell us why you start in that moment. - Well, of course, the Electoral College was created by the Constitutional Convention when it met in 1787. And I wanted to tell this story because I wanted my readers to understand what a precarious moment was. And historians, we love to use this word contingency. It's a contingent moment. Anything could have happened. And I think that Americans very often have this sense of inevitability when it comes to our constitution, that it was almost dropped from heaven. There was Moses in the Ten Commandments and then there was the US Constitution and they basically got here the same way. And so I wanted to show the framers as they wrestled with the best issue, the best way to choose the president. And I think that by restoring the uncertainty and the difficulty of that conversation, we can understand that the Electoral College was simply the best solution they could come up with at the time for a very difficult issue. It was a pragmatic choice, not a choice born out of revolutionary principles, our noble ideals or some high-minded political philosophy. And so yeah, that's why I started there. So you deal and we will deal with this conversation with some of the myths that have arisen surrounding the origins of the Electoral College that you intend to refute in this book. So you could tell a simple story of a group of aristocrats tried to thwart the popular will by ensuring that an elected elites could put the president in power. You could tell that that's a very cynical story. You could tell a different story that's more positive, but you tell a story of pragmatism and messiness and compromise. So tell us a bit more. You said that this was difficult. This was a difficult dilemma they faced on water. Why was it difficult and what were the sort of available options being considered? - Yes, great questions. Well, it's difficult because they didn't agree. I think that's important for us to keep in mind with the entire constitution. There's very little that they agree on. And I think it's really interesting the way that we in American culture tend to think about the constitution and the men who framed it as if they were all in some sort of Vulcan mind meld and just channeling the same ideas. And so it comes out in this incredible. - Yeah, well, so they didn't agree. There are really not very many precedents and you ask about available options. And I think that is a great way to ask that question because we assumed today that they were choosing between popular election and something else. And in doing that, we're really trying to make them have the conversation we're having. They had a conversation for the 18th century. And the most common way that governors were chosen at the time was by the legislatures in their states. And that was eight out of 13 that shows that way. And then the other five did some kind of combination of methods and there were only two states that directly elected governors and those were actually fairly weak governors. And so what they're trying to do, they're starting something from scratch and the country has a unique history and a unique composition. And so for most of the convention, they decide that Congress should select the president. So they take votes on that repeatedly over and over and reaffirm it. And in fact, I think it's important to emphasize they reject different electoral college-like schemes five different times. So there's this notion out there that I know writers that write this way as if there's some kind of a priori a high-minded commitment to an electoral college in and of itself. And there absolutely is not. And in fact, at one point at the end of July, James Madison says, "Well, he likes popular election best. "An electoral college would be an okay second, "but we've rejected so many electoral college schemes. "I don't think we're even gonna talk about that anymore." So, and what actually there are forces that prevent them from choosing popular election. And that would be the slave states and the small states. But in the final analysis, what really bothers them about popular election is that they don't believe that most people have the experience with people one-on-one to know their character and the quality of a human being that might lead the country. And they think legislators have probably had that experience. And so they seem like a body with the knowledge to do this. And there's widespread dissatisfaction with this method, of course, because everyone understands it compromises the separation of powers. And so in the last minute, they've punted all to a committee who works out the electoral college. - Yeah, so well, it sounds like, you know, I've mentioned a story of elitism, or people also talk about, you know, slavery as mattering to the development of this system. Sounds like those are two elements. When you said, you know, the distrust of the ability of an ordinary voter, but also, again, if we have to remember, in the late 1700s, an ordinary voter, how they're going to get to understand anything about the candidates running for president, given that, you know, you begin with the story of how difficult it was for people to even get to the constitutional convention. It's not like it would have been very easy to run a national popular vote system at that period of time. - Well, and I'm glad you said that because I want to emphasize it wasn't that they thought people were stupid or not trustworthy. In fact, I think they display an incredible amount of trust for ordinary people. It's this lack of information is really what it is. - Yeah, which is quite real in an age where it takes, you know, how many days to get a newspaper, you know. - Well, exactly, and there are fewer than 100 newspapers in the entire country in 1787, so. - Now, one really important thing that comes out of your book is that, actually, you said earlier, you used the phrase, you know, we're not having the conversation there, we're having. It's also true, it strikes me that we're not even talking about the same thing. We use the phrase, you know, abolish the electoral college. But one of the things you emphasize over and over is that the system they designed and implemented is not the electoral college as we mean that term because it functioned very, very differently. So tell us, when you're talking about the origins of the electoral college phase one, what that was. - Yes, well, so, and you can read about it in Hamilton's Federalist 68, he offers this description. And you can also read about it in Article Two of the Constitution. And the first time I read Article Two of the Constitution, I remember thinking, gosh, that really doesn't sound like the videos that I saw in high school explaining how we choose the president. And so what they created was a true proxy election system where Carolyn DuPont, of course, I couldn't have voted anyway, but suppose I could, you know, that I knew that I didn't have that information and I chose someone that I respected, a local notable, and that person was to draw from their wisdom. And Hamilton uses words like discernment and experience. So it's supposed to be an assembly of people with the knowledge to make this choice. And Hamilton uses that word choice. He also talks about the atmosphere in which these electors are gonna make this choice. It was, in his speaking about it, it's kind of hermetically sealed against corruption. The electors cannot be tampered with. They can't be tampered with beforehand. And I'm not sure that Hamilton even believed any of that. That was the vision, but within a year, he himself is tampering with electors. And until he is shot by Aaron Burr in 1804, he tampers with electors in every single election. He's our first election meddler and the election meddler in chief. And so this vision of this kind of pristine assembly that makes this decision just really doesn't last more than a few cycles. And it begins to be changed in a variety of ways. - I wanna get to the changes, but I just want to emphasize the point, you mentioned at one point in the book, you said, you know, if we really want to say, if we want to hold up on the founding fathers vision, you know, we have to be faithful to it. Our elections would operate today in a way that I don't think anyone seriously advocates they should operate. That is to say, it would be, I mean, how would the electors were supposed to be chosen? How exactly? - Well, there were three different ways. And one of those ways was for the state legislatures. And I'm sorry, I say three different ways. There were three different ways that were typically used. Now the state legislatures have freedom to do it, however they want. The governor could appoint them, you know, they're all kinds of ways. But the typical ways were that the state legislatures would just choose them. That's not political at all. Then there was popular election, but that could be done statewide, much like we elect senators today, or it could be done in districts, much in the same way that we choose congressmen. But I think anyone can see that there are partisan advantages to the different methods. And, you know, early on, the state legislatures are doing a lot of choosing. And in fact, when elections become more competitive, as they become competitive, state legislatures very often take that choice away from the people because they want to control it. And a good example is the election of 1800, which was so very competitive. And 10 state legislatures chose the electors bypassing the people entirely. There were only 16 states at the time. So this whole aspect of how the electors will be chosen is one of the ways that political parties gain the system. We don't get widespread use of the winner-take-all system until about 1836. And then by then every state uses it except for South Carolina. But I just want to remind listeners that winner-take-all, what we do today in 48 states, is not prescribed by the Constitution. And Madison himself said that what they had in mind was a district elections system. So that's one of the ways that the system has changed. Now, the system is originally designed. As you've said there, legislatures select the electors and presumably the dominant party in the state. Legislature is basically selecting your electors. Then you said there's electoral meddling that occurs, because then you have these people who have been selected, but they have, as you've said, a free choice. So tell us a bit about how this gets complicated with once the selection has occurred. Well, so once the selection has occurred, then there is time before the electors actually meet and vote in their states and in that interim, someone like Alexander Hamilton is writing them and saying this is how you should cast your votes. And in fact, originally, electors had two votes that were counted equally. They were supposed to choose two people, one not from within their own state. And Hamilton wanted to make sure, first of all, that John Adams did an edge out George Washington, and then he wants to get Thomas Pinkney in ahead of Thomas Jefferson. And so he's always scheming in this way. But what's also interesting is that he utterly changes his tune by 1802 about the Electoral College. So he calls it excellent in 1788. And by 1802, he's talking about its intrinsic demerits and what a humiliation it has brought on the country. And he actually helps see through a constitutional amendment, helps see to its drafting in New York state, and has it sent on to Congress and introduced there. And it actually passes the Senate. But then it gets split up in the provision that would have stopped all this switching actually gets set aside. So it seems like a couple of points of it we've made here so far. I mean, one is understanding that the Electoral College, even in its origins, is a messy, pragmatic measure that is introduced because nobody can agree this is a compromise. Also, it doesn't work that well from the outset, from what you've described there. And also, it's not at all the way system that we would want to return to even if we could. And nobody advocates that. Nobody advocates that. I don't think Americans would be up for giving their proxy to someone else to make that choice for them. But if I could, I'd like to mention another way that it's really changed. And I think that this is really interesting because I think in certain ways, our ballots are deceptive. And so what we have is we have the rhetoric of a democratic choice, let the people decide. We have the activity of a democratic choice. We go to the polls and we darken the circle by a candidate's name, but that's not the reality of what happens because I live in Kentucky. And when I darken the dot next to my candidate's name on November 5th, my vote will be credited to the eight electors that Kentucky has that are pledged to that candidate. But now someone in Wyoming will only vote for three electors. And of course, we don't know these people's names. We don't have any consciousness that we're voting for them. And I just want to underscore this difference because there was a time when you showed up and you cast your ballot for electors, you knew how many you were choosing and you knew their names. But now that whole part of the process is invisible. And just to underscore the very odd arbitrary inequality of it, if you live in California, you're actually voting for 54 electors. So we're voting for different numbers of people. We don't know their names. Then state laws passed in the 20th century at the time that we went to these shorter ballots. State laws require the electors. They bind the electors to vote for the party, the candidate of the party that they're pledged to. So you think back to the Hamiltonian vision, this whole idea of making a choice is actually by law now forbidden. And this is really a perversion of this system. In fact, it was a perversion of the system by the second decade of the 19th century. And you have framers who participated in creating it who say, this is not what we envisioned. It is not the system that we created. - It's funny because we talk about the electoral college day and whether we should policy electoral college. And we talk about it as basically the numbers, 270 to win versus the popular vote and adding up the number. The whole part of it with the electors, as you say, is invisible. And also everyone wants it to be irrelevant. We're trying to make sure, you know, there's a kind of consensus that the part with the actual where they're voting for people and the people are then going to cast their vote, that is just essentially a formality. And we have to keep it a formality to avoid the chaos of the faithless elector. And then all of a sudden people you've never heard of because of this arcane piece of the system. Some people that you've never heard of are actually the people who are picking the president. - That's right. And, you know, just to even underscore the point a little bit further, these electors really serve no purpose. And the fact that, you know, it's eight if you live in Kentucky, three if you're in Wyoming, 54 if you're in Texas, 40, sorry, 40 if you're in Texas, 54 if you're in California, really underscores that what we have now is an algorithm. And, you know, I think back to, you know, let the people decide what would people think if we told them the truth and said, let the algorithm decide. It's very, I think people would object if they really understood what is actually happening. And it's distorting in ways that we would never tolerate in any other election. - Well, yes. I mean, one of the things you do in the book in addition to recounting the history of how this system came about and how it changed over time into what we have now and, in fact, departs completely from the original founding fathers original agreement is, you know, you go through the arguments that could be made today in favor of maintaining this system. One of those arguments being, you know, pretty clear that they're myths, that this system of not doing, if we weigh it next to having a national popular vote where whoever gets the most votes, that the president. If we have a system whereby we do the electors and each state has its numbers and you have to get 270, the argument is that, well, this helps the small states. This helps make sure that they, and this is, I go back, I've go back and read in defense of the electoral college pieces and they all say, well, you wouldn't want the small, so you wouldn't want the metro centers to have too much of revenge. Can you maybe respond to that and explain why you don't accept that? Well, because what we are is a country of incredible political diversity and that political diversity is present in every part of the United States. So for example, you probably know this if you've gotten all the way through the book, what state gave Donald Trump the most votes in 2020? That would be California. Six million Americans voted for Donald Trump in California. Texas gave more votes to Biden than New York did. And so what this argument is assuming is that people vote as monoliths, but 25% of people in Los Angeles voted for Donald Trump. Houston is the fourth largest city in the country and yet it's almost split 50, 50. So it's not even possible for the metropolitan centers to carry the vote in their states, much less to carry the votes in the entire country. And what we're instead doing is completely disenfranchising anyone who doesn't vote with the majority in their state. And then we take the rest of those and give some way to 54, which by the way, that's 20% of what you need to win the Electoral College. So California, by the Electoral College, could get you 20% of the way to victory. And you can actually win the Electoral College with 12 largest states. So so much for helping this mall states. You could just win the large states and then you're done. Exactly. And so this is really a myth that it's always interesting to me too, that people who make these defenses never actually offer data or numbers. They'll offer population figures, but population figures are not voting figures. And then there's this underlying tacit assumption that everyone in California votes Democratic. (upbeat music) You're listening to Current Affairs. Current Affairs is a non-profit left media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners with no corporate backers or advertising. We depend on your subscriptions and donations. If you're enjoying this program and you're not a monthly subscriber already, please consider becoming one at patreon.com/currentaffairs. And if you are a podcast subscriber, check out everything else Current Affairs offers, including our flagship print magazine, which comes out six times a year and is loaded with beautiful art and insightful essays. We also offer a twice weekly news briefing service that will keep you up to date on everything happening in the world and the stories you won't find in your morning newspaper. You can sign up for those at currentaffairs.org/subscribe. And if you just want to help us, keep building independent progressive media because you understand how vital that project is, go to currentaffairs.org/donate where you can read more about our work and make a monthly or one-off contribution. Current Affairs is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and donations are tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. Now back to the program. Well, what you're saying there suggests that one harm that the electoral college does is it reinforces this idea that we have red states, blue states, and swing states. And that's what the country is. But as you point out, it's not that every state is a swing state, but it is that every state has a lot of people that are the opposite of California, as you say, has a lot of Republicans. And those people, if you're a Republican in California, I mean, I'm in Louisiana, right? And I always think, I mean, it just doesn't matter 'cause my vote's gonna, you know, the state, 'cause we do it by the states. The state is going to go red. So people ask me who I voted for. But I say, who cares? Who cares who I voting for? Because, you know, I could vote third party. I could vote for Kamala Harris and it wouldn't matter. So it disenfranchises those of us who live in the, but a national popular vote system would in fact make it so that the votes of rural conservative people in California or, you know, liberal people in Austin, those votes would actually matter. Well, precisely, and, you know, I do sometimes hear people say that, you know, it helps rural voters, but that's just not true. I mean, there are tons of red rural voters in places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. There are tons of blue rural voters in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina that are disenfranchised by this system. And I would really encourage listeners to look for a county or precinct level election map. The New York Times actually published, I think it's under the, if you Google a very detailed map of the 2020 election, it'll come up. And you can see any state that you think you know what color it is, red or blue, it will just be stunning to you how much of the other color is there. And so it's really flattening this, I think, wonderful political diversity. - It's very strange, the defenders at the Electoral College, you respond repeatedly through the book, The Tara Ross, who's written a whole book defending the Electoral College. Some of these defenses are real strange. I mean, she writes, for instance, that the Electoral College forces presidential candidates to build a support base that is national in character because focusing too exclusively on one region or one special interest could cause a candidacy to fail. You have to appeal to as many states interested as possible. But it strikes me that actually it's entirely the opposite because it means that nobody's gonna campaign here in Louisiana because it's a foregone conclusion what the outcome of the state will be. But if we had a national popular vote system, you know, Kamala Harris could go into a metro city in a deep red state and it would actually be worth a, you know, Donald Trump would go to California to campaign. - You're exactly right. And I don't mean to keep coming back to California, but that's the one that, you know, so many of the tropes are all about, you know, the Republican party has no incentive to try to get votes from California because it's got such a big margin that they wouldn't be able to achieve it. The Democratic party's not trying to get any more votes in California. And, you know, it's also quite interesting that it doesn't in that regard reward broadening the franchise. It doesn't reward turnout. And in some cases it actually rewards quite the opposite because you get the exact number of electors no matter what the margins are, you can win by one vote margin or you can win by a million vote margin and you get the exact same numbers of electors. - But I will say it does seem to me as if the one argument for the electoral college is I am a Republican and it helps the Republican party win. If you do believe, if you do believe that the Republican party deserves to win because you worry about the agenda of the Democratic party, it does seem to me that it's systematically since we know that Republicans have only managed to win the popular vote, you know, once or twice in the last, I can't remember exactly how many to. - Well, since 1988 only once. - Yeah, if you design a system on principle, you go through and all of the principle documents, I mean, you make it pretty clear that you can't, you say, I'll quote you, it reflects no valuable principle, confers no benefits and then dangers are republic. I think you proved that case pretty successfully. But if I'm a Republican, I'm still going, yeah, but it sure does help us win. - Well, so let me just kind of reframe what you're saying in a way and we'll see how really, really ugly it is and how really lacking in any principle or value. And I think that almost all of us want to believe that we have values underpinning our politics. And it seems to me that the only reason for having the electoral college is you want ways around the choice of the majority. Because if you are committed to majority rule, then a national popular vote is just fine. But if you're not committed to that and you want ways to subvert the majority within the electoral colleges for you. And I think another way to think about this is the political equality argument is so very, very important and I actually heard an electoral college defender say something to the effect of, oh, well, you're just making a fetish out of equality. And I'm like, thank you. - That's a funny phrase. - Well, it's very funny considering that just basic political equality is something that so many of us, our ancestors fought for. Women have fought for that. African Americans have fought for that. And indeed, men without property fought for that. And so it's really ought to be a bedrock principle that when we show up to vote, we all have equal power. And I just want to say that this was absolutely a principle that James Madison embraced and that Thomas Jefferson embraced. Jefferson said in an 1816 letter, I love the way he said this and I hope that I can say it with this as much beauty if I can remember the quote, but he said that a government is Republican in proportion that it gives all its members an equal say in the direction of its concerns. And we just don't all have an equal say right now. - And it strikes me that that isn't argument that even if, yes, there are a number of people who are perhaps Republican partisans who are very reluctant to entertain even any of the arguments against the electoral college because it would make it more difficult to win presidential elections. But there are many, as we've said, there are many conservative voters for whom actually you can make the argument, well, don't you want your vote to matter? Don't you want, even here in Louisiana, don't you want candidates to have to campaign for your vote instead of it being a foregone conclusion? - It's so true. And it actually would make both parties better because the whole theory of democratic accountability is that parties have to respond to the changing electorate. And what we have now is, I think it's an overly rigid kind of system, but certainly when a party's trying to win without the majority of the vote, they're not responding to the electorate and what they, you can get some extremists in a few places and there you are. I think it actually helps push the parties to the extremes. - And so you could say to a Republican vote, you could say, "Look, your own party, "I'm not assuming that you're gonna vote for Democrats, "but your own party is gonna take you for granted "because they've already won Louisiana, "so why do they need another vote?" But they'll need another vote if in a popular vote system. - Okay, we've made the case. We've seen how there are all these myths. We've seen how we don't even use the system that the founding father has. You can't really say, "Oh, this is the precious system." We've seen all the disadvantages. Let's assume that we have successfully persuaded all our readers and our listeners of the case you've made in this book, but then they're going to ask you Professor DuPont, how could it ever change? What would be the means by which we would transition? - Well, the best way to change is to have a constitutional amendment. And I think this is a good place for me to say that Americans have always been dissatisfied with this system, that more than a thousand amendment proposals have been introduced in Congress more than on any other subject on the Electoral College. And seven times an amendment has passed one House of Congress only to fail in the other. But it's come close twice. So in 1822, that amendment failed by six votes in the House. In 1969, the amendments that passed the House was for abolishing the Electoral College. And it won 83% of the vote. I mean, I think that's just a staggering statistic that Congress agreed, 83% of them, that this mechanism had to go. And it's very telling that what happened to that amendment was that it got filibustered by segregationists in the Senate. And so I'm taking a long time to answer how. So there are people in Congress who are very aware of this, very interested in it. There are a number of different organizations. And I think that what it really starts with is waking people up. And I think people need to feel the outrage. And I think that it depends on what happens in November, but I think that we're in a time of great political change. And when politics is fluid, that's when we have the best chance for something like this to succeed. - You mentioned in the book that this thing, the project, some of you proposed the National Popular Vote Compact. To tell us about that, I mean, you do conclude it's not the optimum way to go, but it's worth mentioning, I think, Pauline. - It is worth mentioning. And so I'm a little bit ambivalent about it because I love these people because they're pointing out the problem and bringing attention to the problem. On the other hand, I think it's an imperfect solution because it seems to be kind of a workaround and it would be subject to constitutional challenges, I think, and I think there's good reason to believe that that might succeed or that the challenges might succeed. What it essentially does is a state legislature agrees that it's going to give its electors to the winner of the National Popular Vote, not necessarily to the winner in their state. And it doesn't go into effect until states with 270, totally 270 electors have signed on to it. So it won't go into effect yet. But I also think that there's an argument to be made that it's sort of playing fast and loose with the rules. So for example, if Kentucky were to sign on to that compact and Kentucky chose the Republican, but the Democrat won the National Popular Vote and then Kentucky gave its electors to the Democrat, I think there's an argument to be made that people would feel cheated. I mean, they ought to feel cheated now, but they would also, I think, possibly feel cheated in that scenario. And I think that how we feel about the fairness of our system really matters. It gives it legitimacy. - I would describe what I first tried out. I thought, well, this is clever. That was my first reaction to it. 'Cause I was like, you know, oh, well, what if, you know, what if we just gave our votes to whoever won the National Popular Vote? Oh, that's good. But as you point out, like, you know, ultimately what we need is a fair system enshrined in the Constitution, the system that works. And you go through lots of ways. I mean, it is staggering. You point out just how far the electoral college tally can depart from the popular vote. Like, you know, Ronald Reagan turns the whole country red and you look and you go, wow, this massive victory just over where we blow out. And then you look at the popular vote, you know, what does that mean? What's that much about? - A little bit over 50%. And that just demonstrates the gross distortions. - Yeah, it's really wild when you read about it. And, you know, and then because of the history that you recount when it doesn't even have a, you can't even make at all the historical appeal because of the changes in the system and because it wasn't even meant to be something that was designed as the result of the, as you say, these like philosopher kings going, what is the optimum way to select a president? - Well, okay, the first thing we need then is for people to pick up copies of distorting democracy, the forgotten history of the electoral college and why it matters today. So they actually understand the origins of this system and they can read the arguments that you make. - So Professor Carolyn Renee DuPont, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs Today. - Well, thank you. I've enjoyed this conversation. 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