November 18, 2004

Benefits of the Electoral College

Orson Scott Card has these great observations on benefits of the electoral college:

Direct elections [...] would encourage voters to consider third-party candidates precisely because it would be easy to get enough votes to keep either major-party candidate from getting a majority.

Under the present system, that would throw the election into the House of Representatives—where the voting is far, far less democratic than the electoral college.

...Another problem with direct elections is that they would encourage widespread electoral cheating.

In 2000, for instance, there would have been no point in cheating in most states. Only in Florida and New Mexico was the vote count close enough that cheating would have paid off, and only Florida had enough votes to change the national outcome. So it was only in Florida that a serious attempt was mounted to steal the election after the fact.

But without the electoral college, cheating would have been useful everywhere. In Utah, where there are many precincts that don’t even have enough Democrats to staff the polls, somebody might realize that if you could get a few dead Republicans to vote the way that dead Democrats so often voted in Chicago in the old days, that extra Utah margin might make a difference in a tight race. In Massachusetts, the same idea might occur to Democrats.

Most people don’t succumb to temptations like that. But some do. The electoral college removes the temptation in most places, most of the time; direct election would make it a temptation everywhere, all the time. So unless there were a radical change in human nature, cheating would be bound to increase.

Getting rid of the electoral college often can sound like a “good idea”—until you start considering the alternatives.

Read the whole thing