I posted this answer:
The Electoral College is part of the checks and balances designed to prevent concentrations of government power. For example, the United States Constitution supersedes the state constitutions, allowing the federal government to act as a check on states’ power. Likewise, since the elected legislatures of the states has the responsibility of choosing the electors "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct," the states can act as a check on federal power.
Also, the Electoral College acts as somewhat of a power balance between large and small states.
Likewise, the electoral college acts as a check on populism, which can be quite tyrannical. Instead of one huge national majority acting as a single overbearing power, candidates must win enough smaller majorities in individual states, each of whom may have differing interests, to accumulate the necessary electoral vote majority. The point is to check populist power as a means of limiting concentrations of government power.
America was never to be a nation of majority rule. It was to be a country of individual self-rule--that is, of individual rights. Individual rights, not the wishes of electoral majorities, is what government is intended to protect. Constitutional scholar Timothy Sandifur on James Madison’s thinking:
In “the extended republic of the United States,” a “great variety of interests, parties and sects” would prevent “a coalition of the majority of the whole society” from coming together in ways that might harm the minority or the individual.
There was always a risk of oppression in any form of government, of course, because factions would seek to benefit themselves at the expense of their rivals. . . The . . . solution was a constitution of limited powers, with a system of checks and balances by which “the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”
Madison consistently recognized that the essential goal of the Constitution was not to expand democratic authority or give voice to the “will of the people”—an idea he regarded skeptically—but to establish a political system that would enable the majority to accomplish its legitimate goals while protecting minorities against oppression. [from The Genius of James Madison by Timothy Sandefur for The Objective Standard]
This does not mean that populism doesn’t have its place: It gets its expression, for example, in the powerful U.S. House of Representatives. But the intricate structure of checks and balances embedded in our constitution checks populism just as it checks state power, presidential power, court power, and legislative power through its two branches. The purpose of this structure is to protect the primacy of individual liberty. The Electoral College is a part of that structure. That’s why the Electoral College of the United States of America exists.
Related Reading:
Was the Electoral College a ‘Compromise to Protect the Institution of Slavery?’
Avoid ‘Majority Rule’—Keep the Electoral College in Fact and in Spirit
Wouldn't going by Popular Vote be an even worse system than the Electoral College?
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right
QUORA: Can't We Make the Electoral College More Democratic?
The Conscience of the Constitution—Timothy Sandefur
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2 comments:
Your quote from Madison is accurate, but he was referring to the Bill of Rights. He did not consider the choosing of the President by electors to be at all fair, but endorsed it so as to bring slave states into agreement. You can find his logic here: http://constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0719.htm
He believed direct election by "The people at large" to be "the fittest in itself."
The myth of small states vs. large in the formation of the electoral system can be traced to Professor William Dunning of Columbia University and his little band of students in the late 1800s. Their enthusiasm for healing the divisions among white folks after the Civil War provided a great scholastic incentive to paper over actual history. Their work went into textbooks and lasted through my elementary school education over 50 years ago.
Original documents, including contemporary accounts of the constitutional debate, tell a different story. The electoral college was not an attempt to rein in government or to protect the minority from a "tyranny of the majority." That consideration was part of the debate for the first ten amendments.
The purpose of the electoral college was solely to protect slavery by giving additional weight to voters in slave states. The logic was that since only non-slaves could vote but slaves were partially counted for representation, including in the selection of President, it would help ensure the survival of slavery.
You can look it up, Mr. LaFerrara.
My response to the charge that the Electoral College was to "help ensure the survival of slavery" is contained in my post "Was the Electoral College a ‘Compromise to Protect the Institution of Slavery?’". See Related Reading under this post.
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