The Electoral College began its troubled life as the framers sought to construct a constitution in 1787. More than 230 years later, it remains fraught, especially after the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections. To address the Electoral College in historical, contemporary, and theoretical contexts, Robert M. Alexander has written a thorough, if relatively brief, assessment of an oft-criticized institution that still has delivered more than two centuries of legitimate chief executives, even in difficult and contested times. This is no mean feat, yet Alexander’s Electoral College is neither theoretically nor practically without blemish. Quite the opposite. It is a deeply flawed institution, but one that has survived and evolved in large part because it has not, so far, generated enough opposition to require constitutional repair.
Like many other students of the Electoral College, Alexander distinguishes between the originalist institution and its evolved form. He does not present a detailed originalist defense, although his discussion of the various federalism-based approaches to the Electoral College are fair-minded. Mostly, however, he is a critic, and he produces more-than-adequate secondary source assessments of the framing to downplay, if not dismiss, a strict federalism interpretation. Importantly, he weaves together his historical and theoretical approaches to the institution through a representational framework, thus providing the reader with a theory-based argument for assessing its role within the presidential selection process.
After some introductory material, Alexander lays out (ch. 2) his representational approach, relying on Hannah Pitkin’s classic work and on the perspectives of congressional scholars on the “delegate versus trustee” approach. This is straightforward, but important, in that it contrasts the framers’ trustee-based view of how the Electoral College would function with the delegate-based reality that emerged in the nineteenth century. He carries over these ideas into chapter 3, in which he lays out the debates over selecting a president within the Constitutional Convention. This is well-trod turf, but Alexander clearly presents the largely political process that produced the first-cut version of the institution offered by the framers in 1787. He then examines how it has evolved over time into a far more democratic body. In short, there are two versions of the Electoral Colleges, the “original” and “evolved,” which “explains much of the difficulty that is faced when evaluating the body. Individuals may be addressing one version of the Electoral College instead of the other” (p. 60). Indeed, those arguing over the institution often “are not…using the same facts (p. 61). Much of this disagreement derives from diverging views of federalism, which Alexander addresses in chapter 4.
Those of us who write on the Electoral College routinely must deal with a host of assertions that federalism stands as one of its core values. Individuals often assert that small states are advantaged by the Senate bonus in allocating electors. Indeed, small states do get a boost, with Wyoming, Alaska, and other small-population states having more electors than their population would dictate. This is true but irrelevant, at least as far as the politics of choosing a president is concerned. Alexander, echoing many other scholars, makes the strong case that neither small states nor large ones (given winner-take-all rules and substantial numbers of electors) gain advantage from the Electoral College. Rather, it is the battleground states that benefit the most, regardless of the metric—whether electoral influence, campaign visits, or advertising. For students, this chapter is extremely valuable, in that it will enable them to understand how the institution structures presidential election politics. Alexander’s clear writing style and solid summation of extant research produce a comprehensive understanding of how federalism affects the selection of the president.
The federalism issue relates closely to the most direct challenge to the Electoral College: that it can select a winner who does not win a popular-vote plurality. Alexander labels these situations—he counts six, a reasonable but not unassailable assessment—as “misfires,” which betrays his normative stand on electing the president. At the heart of the most powerful critiques of the Electoral College is the core institutional truth that the candidate receiving fewer total votes can emerge as the winner of the contest for the most powerful elective office in the world. Indeed, in two of the past five elections, this has occurred. Moreover, the 2016 results, in which Clinton polled 2.8 million more votes than Trump, may presage the potential for more “misfires,” given the partisanship that now shapes our elections in state after state.
Central to the question of popular-vote/electoral-vote correspondence is the issue of representation, in that the president stands as the sole elected official who represents the entire population. If a handful of battleground states effectively decide the electoral outcome, regardless of the popular-vote count, what does that mean for representation, to say nothing of legitimacy? Conversely, Electoral College results tend to overstate the margin of victory, as Alexander notes in a useful table (p. 105), thus potentially increasing the legitimacy of a narrowly elected candidate who receives less than a majority of all votes. Above all, he illustrates the long-term problem of actual and potential “misfires.” Moreover, these may well become more common, given US population trends; indeed, one respected election analyst has projected that Trump could realistically win a narrow Electoral College reelection majority while receiving five million fewer votes than his opponent (Ed Kilgore, “How Trump Could Thread the Needle again and Win while Losing the Popular Vote,” New York Magazine, July 19, 2019).
Beyond providing a history of selection procedures, which differ from state to state, Alexander makes an important contribution by collecting data on electors. He provides a demographic profile of a typical political elite as to education, income, and so forth, but goes on to report findings on electors’ opinions on the institution in terms of the unit rule (for counting states’ electoral votes), a national popular vote, and the automatic casting of electoral votes, which would remove any discretion. In the wake of the elections of 2000 and 2016, Alexander devotes substantial attention to electors’ discretion and the question of “faithless electors,” whose numbers have risen in recent elections. Given the substantial attempts to sway electors in 2016, his data-driven analysis advances our knowledge of this often-ignored aspect of presidential politics. In the end, he argues that eliminating electors’ discretion might be a positive reform.
At the same time, Alexander ignores the potential problems of having the House decide an election in which no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes. For example, a Democratic presidential candidate might end up a few votes shy of such a majority, despite winning a clear plurality of the popular vote. But a GOP-controlled House, disproportionately representing small-population votes, might well place a Republican in office. If electors had discretion, a third-party or independent candidate could swing the election to the popular-vote winner, thus avoiding the seating of a president who won neither an electoral vote nor a popular vote victory.
Alexander discusses various reform efforts, but he concludes that, for better or worse, we are stuck with an imperfect electoral system that has delivered, by and large, legitimate winners despite its more-than-occasional misfires. Staunch defenders of a federal perspective to the Electoral College will likely object to his overall approach. The rest of us, more attuned to the practicality of the framers and the realities of presidential politics, will find a book that aptly provides scholars, students, and laypersons with a coherent interpretation of a sometimes incoherent institution.
