The Electoral College Is a Shield Against Tyranny

Having witnessed profound political changes under America’s first “Common Man” president – Andrew Jackson, Alexis de Tocqueville issued stern warnings against the “tyranny of the majority” in his otherwise glowing account of American Democracy:

If liberty is ever lost in America, it will be necessary to lay the blame on the omnipotence of the majority that will have brought minorities to despair… This is a tyranny of majority opinion. It’s a psychological tyranny. It’s a sort of conformity that forces everyone to believe and say the same thing.

Our Constitution offers a blueprint of intricate institutional designs to tame and discipline popular rule with restraints—not hindrances—on public action. The majority, roughly 80.5 million registered voters or slightly over 50 percent of the electorate today, can impose their demands for public policies and governance on the rest only if they win the House and the Senate and elect a favorable presidency. Even then, constitutional amendments require supermajorities because such proposed policy changes are too consequential—and often controversial—to be decided by 50 percent + 1.

The Electoral College is another constitutionally vested process against impulsive democracy. It contains tyrannical tendencies of the presidency while preserving the spirit of federalism. Each state has a certain number of electors based on the number of congressional districts, which is determined by population size, non-voters included. Awarding electors to Presidential candidates who either win the State’s popular vote or win through proportional representation—Maine and Nebraska—ensures that metropolitan areas such as New York, California, and a few others don’t run the country. Traditionally, these places lean left politically and embrace progressive cultural values that are not shared across the board.

Dissatisfied with the electoral results of presidential races in 2016 and, to a lesser degree, in 2000, when Donald Trump and George W. Bush won without popular majorities, Democrats are aggressively promoting the idea of abolishing the Electoral College. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, eight in ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favor replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote system.

This call for a majoritarian rule for deciding the presidency, rooted in partisan academic research and simple-headed idealism, has found a way to the young and impressionable. In October 2024, the Edward M Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate gathered 850 students in grades 5 to 12 from nine states in a civic education event called “Election 2024: Electoral College.” During the event, part of the institute’s “Today’s Vote” ensemble, which also includes “The Green New Deal” and “Voting Rights” as topics, the students were divided into two groups in a mock election on a constitutional amendment to remove the Electoral College. The first group of students voted 54 percent to 46 percent in favor of the motion, while the second group passed the resolution with 80 percent. One participant commented:

The electoral college is making the power of the people less effective. Presidents are winning power without the support of the people.

Strong support for the proposal comes from the self-anointed intelligentsia. In their 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt depict the growing success of the Republican Party at the polls as a political crisis of epic proportions. Indulging freely in their liberal hysteria and ideological biases, the two award-winning authors lambasted the Electoral College system as an undemocratic device of empowering the “wrong people,” such as Donald Trump, to dominate and influence our political system.

After opining on the fundamental differences between the popular vote and the Electoral College, they advise removing the latter since it has a “small-state bias” and “clearly favors the Republicans.” This is certainly not grounded in historical realities, considering that the U.S. presidency has been evenly divided between the two parties—16 Democrats vs. 18 Republicans—since Andrew Jackson, under the Electoral College system.

To combat such a tyranny of the minority, Levitsky and Ziblatt recommend expelling extremists, about half of the electorate, according to Biden and Harris, and canceling anti-democratic groups, which include over 1,400 conservative groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The sour-loser syndrome, based on a moral misjudgment of political rivals as irredeemable “bad guys,” is shared by other academic elites. Wilfred Codrington, a New York-based law professor, whose time in the American South or crime-ridden inner cities is yet to be documented, calls the Electoral College system “racist” from the beginning to the present:

The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams … The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes.

Professor Codrington’s observation on the 1800 election conveniently ignores the fact that the Federalists accepted Adams’s defeat as decisive, which undergirded the first time of peaceful and legitimate transfer of power from one political party to another in American history. His indictment on the Electoral College diluting the “black vote” runs on the rather arrogant and increasingly inaccurate assumption of the race-based voting bloc, negated by profound, within-group voting pattern changes.

In an age when 70 percent of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz and only 27 percent of U.S. students could identify the Vice President as the president of the Senate, no serious observer should take to heart inadequately informed opinions of youngsters who partook in a program sponsored by a left-leaning nonprofit. Nor can we simply rely on establishing intelligentsia or passing public passions for sound judgment. Weighty questions on the nature of electoral politics cannot be addressed with naïve rhetoric that could, if adopted, ruin the deliberate balances of power refereed in the “King” of our land—the U.S. Constitution.

A pivot towards absolute popular rule is not just about the Electoral College. It is a means to the end of making sure the “bad guys” never win again and ensuring perpetual Democratic victories. Such ruinous passions have all it would take to tyrannize the political minority and compromise their liberty.  In the 2020 election, this minority, demonized and vilified ever since, amounted to 74.22 million Americans, more than the total population of England or France.

Image by Michael Flippo — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 324396982