The Electoral College Isn’t the Problem

I’m a proud supporter of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I hope she wins her election. That said, I’m about to make myself unpopular with my left-leaning friends. I disagree with Cortez and her assertion that we should end the Electoral College.

The Electoral College Provides Checks and Balances

While the institution isn’t perfect, the Electoral College provides a healthy check on majority rule. A lot of Democrats like the idea of majoritarianism. After all, when polled, we find that most people support things like universal healthcare. However, there have been times that the majority supported some generally awful things too. Things like sterilization of the disabled.

And if you think the urban/rural divide is bad now, imagine what would happen if cities and some wealthy suburbs could outvote rural America at every single turn. Things would start getting nasty. The backwoods militia types would be having a recruitment drive. A government ruled strictly by cities would be seen as illegitimate. The Electoral College and the Senate provide checks and balances on the power of big cities. And even though the Founders were flawed, they were correct in trying to strike a balance between urban and rural interests.

That said, Cortez and other Democrats are also correct that there is a problem. There is too much minority rule. However, stripping away checks and balances that protect that minority is not the answer.

To restore balance, restore urban power

The Electoral College and the Senate were designed in large part to represent and protect the interests of small states and rural communities. They do this job well. The House of Representatives was designed to represent big states and urban interests. This meant that in order to get things done, rural Americans and urban Americans had to come together and make compromises. Then, city voters were defanged.

In 1911, Congress put a cap on the House of Representatives. The cap became permanent after rural representatives derailed the 1920 census. They were fearful of city-dwellers gaining too much power. For perspective, in 1911, one Representative represented about 212,000 people. Today, a Representative represents around 750,000. That was the first blow to urban representation and the intended purpose of the House.

The second blow was gerrymandering. City voters already get a bum deal. Most cities, despite having hundreds of thousands of people, get a few districts if they’re lucky. This is the hazard of how we draw districts. Then comes gerrymandering. It gives rural districts even more power that they were meant to actually have.

This may seem good for rural districts at first. However, if steroids in professional sports have taught us anything, it’s that there is always a dark side to giving yourself an unfair advantage.

Unfair advantages create hatred and resentment

Part of the reason a lot of city people don’t want to hear about the very real problems of rural America is that the political system is artificially tilted in its favor. Rural America, for all its problems with infrastructure, jobs and education system, has one major thing going for it: It plays politics on easy mode. With a defanged and heavily gerrymandered House of Representatives, not to mention states themselves, city dwellers basically have no power.

So when (to use an example) we hear about rural schools falling down because funding schools by property taxes is a stupid method of school funding unless you live in a ritzy suburb, we city dwellers are not as sympathetic and as inclined to work with rural Americans as we perhaps should be.

Our first thought tends to be something along the lines of, “ You could vote in politicians that could easily fix that problem in one session. Why is the fact you won’t do that our problem?”

By having an easy mode and the ability to do anything they want, rural America has been expected to go it alone for years. People lack sympathy and empathy for anyone on easy mode. People who have unfair advantages tend to find they get the cold shoulder when they face a problem they aren’t able to handle on their own.

More representation in the House is needed

In order to get started on fixing the urban/rural divide, we must first restore the balance of power. While increasing the size of the House and thereby giving more representatives to urban Americans may seem unfair to people in rural America, that’s actually the point.

The House was never meant to be fair to the small states and small towns. The Senate and Electoral College are the way rural Americans have their fairness. The House was meant to give voice to the big states and big cities. When rural America threw a fit in the early 20th century and got a cap on the House, it artificially nerfed the power of the big states and cities in a fashion that was neither designed nor intended. Coupled with gerrymandering, the result has been minority rule and stewing resentment.

City dwellers resent rural America for having an artificially higher degree of power than it was supposed to have and sometimes misusing it to get back at urban America for perceived wrongs. As such, there isn’t all that much enthusiasm for helping resolve the real issues of rural America among urbanites. This has caused rural Americans to feel abandoned. The result has been that the cities and the small towns have been at each other’s throats.

The way to end this is not to take away the Electoral College and allowing the big cities to steamroll rural America, but to undo what was done to the House. By leveling the playing field once more, with each side having a piece of the Legislative branch to represent their interests, we can go back to what the Founders intended: Big states and small states, big metropolises and small country towns having to work together and compromise.