The 2022 Midterm Elections Underscore The Need For An Electoral College Approach At The State Level

The debacle of the 2022 midterm elections underscores how a single city/county determines the voting outcome for at least 19 states. We have reached the point where the fear by the Founding Fathers that the large states would dominate the smaller has come to pass, albeit at the state level.

 The Electoral College

 From the Heritage Society:

     “The manner of electing the President was one of the most contentious issues at the Constitutional Convention held in 1787. The Founders struggled to satisfy each state’s demand for greater representation, while attempting to balance popular sovereignty against the risk posed to the minority from majoritarian rule. Smaller states, in particular, worried that a system that apportioned representatives based on population would underrepresent their interests in the federal structure. This concern, that either the big states, or the small states, would have too much influence over the choice of the President, was voiced by many of the delegates at the Convention. They understood the dangers that a direct democracy, with the potential for mob rule, brings to elections.

     After long and serious debate, they arrived at an intentional design for electing the President that would incorporate the will of the people, but still safeguard against faction and tyranny. That system, the Electoral College, balances the competing interests of large states with those of smaller states. By allocating electors based on a state’s cumulative representation in the House and Senate, the Electoral College system avoids purely population-based representation, while still giving larger states greater electoral weight. This design incorporates the “genius of a popular democracy organized on the federal principle,”3 and has been our electoral system that has operated successfully for over 200 years.”(https://www.heritage.org/the-essential-electoral-college/origins-the-electoral-college)

 Today we have reached the point where the voices of the rural Americans is being overwhelmed by the political machines in the large city/county states that now exist in many states. Given the Founders intent to protect the smaller from the larger, I wonder if there is a way to declare single cities/counties deciding the results for the entire state as unconstitutional based on the Founder’s rationale for establishing the electoral college?

 One remedy would be to allocate the popular vote count for statewide and Federal offices to be decided by Congressional district vote tallies vice the entire state so that the rural areas have their voices heard and not overridden by places like Philly, Detroit, NYC, etc. Maine and Nebraska already split their electoral votes for President by Congressional district, so there is precedence.

 One potential drawback to this approach is the states that have only two Congressional districts: Hawaii, Maine, Idaho, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. What happens when the districts split in their voting? For the Presidential election the EVs would be split according to the voting results in each district (e.g., candidate A gets one EV, candidate B gets one EV). For Federal and statewide offices like Senator, Representative, Governor, etc., in the event of a split in the district totals, the total popular vote would prevail. Not satisfactory, I know, but the major problem with single city/counties dominating the overall state voting totals occurs in states with more than two Congressional districts.