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Civic engagement, what the nation's founders hoped would be a distinguishing feature of the young and energetic republic, can be manifested in various ways including voting, participation in political parties and campaigns, displaying lawn signs, running for office and writing letters to the editor. Newspaper readers who comment on public affairs and pose questions to columnists are part of a great tradition in the intellectual and public life of America. Recent columns on the Electoral College have generated much-appreciated questions about its origins and history, as well as its contradiction of the nation's foundational principle of political equality — that no citizen's vote should carry more weight than another's.
Readers have asked about the prospects and difficulties of abolishing the Electoral College through amendment of the Constitution. Amending the Constitution, the Framers believed, should not be as easy or as simple as repealing legislation. Fundamental changes in the law of the land, including the structure and ways and means of governance, should be preceded by deep, thoughtful nationwide discussion and debate.
Americans have amended the Constitution just 27 times over two centuries, but some of the most sweeping amendments — abolition of slavery and extension of voting rights, as well as direct election of U.S. senators and term limits for the presidency —reflected, precisely, the sort of penetrating consideration of the changing needs and circumstances of the nation, as expected by authors of the Constitution.
Rather than binding subsequent generations of citizens to the ideas of 1787 which, the Framers reasoned, might lose their currency in an ever-changing political and social landscape, the Constitutional Convention adopted Article V — the Amendatory Clause — so that original shortcomings could be remedied. Although not a delegate to the Convention, Thomas Jefferson spoke for a generation committed to the principles of republicanism when he said, "the earth belongs to the living." Readers wonder about the assertion that the Electoral College protects state interests, which is said to be important to safeguarding the interests of small states, that is lightly populated states such as Montana.
The premise of this argument, that states possess coherent and unified interests, is difficult to maintain. Even small states, like much larger states, embody substantial diversity, including diverse political viewpoints. This is why a state like Montana can elect a Republican governor and a Democratic U.
S. senator, why it can send a conservative to Helena and a middle-left candidate to Washington. Historians have noted that states, as states, don't have an interest in the election of a president, but citizens certainly do.
It has been asked, for example, what New York City and Staten Island have in common, other than that they are located in the State of New York, and what Chicago and Peoria have in common, other than that they are bounded by a legally defined jurisdiction. The Electoral College operates, apart from Maine and Nebraska, on the "unit vote," that is, a winner-take-all vote, which is grounded on the assumption that voters in the state, share the same views. They do not.
Under this system, however, the unit vote actually takes votes of the minority and awards them, in the national count, to the candidate that they opposed. In the Convention, James Madison, who favored a direct popular vote, recognized the diversity that existed within states and was thus opposed to the unit rule. If the Electoral College were to become the method for choosing candidates, he told fellow delegates, he hoped, at least, that votes would be counted by districts within states, as currently practiced in Nebraska and Maine.
This respect for diversity would, in practice, create cohesion and consensus in the nation. As we qill discuss next week, Madison said that it was not necessary to protect small states from large states. David Adler, Ph.
D., is a noted author who lectures nationally and internationally on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and presidential power. His scholarly writings have been cited by the U.
S. Supreme Court and lower courts by both Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.
Congress. Adler can be reached at ..
