Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

by Alexander Keyssar

Overview

A New Statesman Book of the Year

“America’s greatest historian of democracy now offers an extraordinary history of the most bizarre aspect of our representative democracy—the electoral college…A brilliant contribution to a critical current debate.”
—Lawrence Lessig, author of They Don’t Represent Us

Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose their presidents through an arcane institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Congress has tried on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral College, and in this master class in American political history, a renowned Harvard professor explains its confounding persistence.

After tracing the tangled origins of the Electoral College back to the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Keyssar outlines the constant stream of efforts since then to abolish or reform it. Why have they all failed? The complexity of the design and partisan one-upmanship have a lot to do with it, as do the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments and the South’s long history of restrictive voting laws. By revealing the reasons for past failures and showing how close we’ve come to abolishing the Electoral College, Keyssar offers encouragement to those hoping for change.

“Conclusively demonstrates the absurdity of preserving an institution that has been so contentious throughout U.S. history and has not infrequently produced results that defied the popular will.”
—Michael Kazin, The Nation

“Rigorous and highly readable…shows how the electoral college has endured despite being reviled by statesmen from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson to Edward Kennedy, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford.”
—Lawrence Douglas, Times Literary Supplement

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674278592
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	622,046
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Alexander Keyssar is the author of numerous books including The Right to Vote, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association. He is Matthew W. Stirling, Jr., Professor of History and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I Origins 15

1 From the Constitution to the Twelfth Amendment 17

Part II The Long Struggle to Abolish Winner-Take-All 57

2 Electoral Reform in the Era of Good Feelings 61

3 Three Uneasy Pieces, 1870-1960 116

Part III A National Popular Vote 171

4 "A Population Anomalous" and a National Popular Vote, 1800-1960 173

5 An Idea Whose Time Has Come 206

6 Last Call for the Twentieth Century 263

Part IV Partisan Stalemate and Electoral Misfires 309

7 Pessimism and Innovation, 1980-2020 311

Conclusion 365

Appendix A Public Opinion Polls 383

Appendix B Constitutional Provisions for Presidential Elections 389

Appendix C The Evolution of the Term Electoral College 393

Abbreviations 395

Notes 397

Acknowledgments 515

Index 519

Editorial Reviews

Slavery and the origins of the Electoral College, the electors who actually determine who will be president, are intricately bound…Keyssar recreates the debates at the Constitutional Convention that birthed the body that centuries later gave Trump the presidency in 2016, though he lost the popular vote. Convention participants were torn between the practical challenges of holding a national election and the political balancing act between the needs of states small and large, free and slave.

Susan Smith Richardson

A rigorous historian of the institution.

New Yorker - Steve Coll

To fully explain how difficult the Electoral College is to dislodge, Keyssar chronicles more than two centuries of near-constant disputation and battle.

Washington Monthly - Lee Drutman

[A] remarkable book.

The Nation - Ariel Dorfman

Provides perhaps the most exhaustive treatment of the oft-maligned body. Despite nearly a thousand attempts to reform or abolish it, the Electoral College has persisted. Keyssar sets out to help readers understand why this is the case. In rich detail, he illustrates how the complex nature of the Electoral College and the difficulties presented by the constitutional amendment process largely explain its resilience…A must read for anyone interested in understanding the Electoral College and its history.

Choice

A brilliant history, analysis, and critique of one of the most undemocratic elements of our supposed democracy—and another anti-democratic device whose roots were partly racist.

Robert Kuttnern Prospect

This is a powerful work twice over. Its contributions to the debate over the Electoral College’s effects on our politics are profound. No less important, though, are the fascinating accounts of the changing rules governing presidential elections since the nation’s founding, a turbulent and largely unknown history. Keyssar’s lucid scholarship does justice to the past while it forcefully informs the present.

Sean Wilentz

Comprehensive and full of historical insight. Even specialists in political and constitutional history will encounter surprises…As another presidential election looms, [it] deserve[s] a wide readership.

London Review of Books - Eric Foner

Without question this is the best book ever written on the electoral college. It destroys any pretense to the wisdom of the framers in crafting the institution, and it points to a history of repeated problems with it…Anyone who cares about American politics, democracy, or the Constitution needs to read Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? It opens up our eyes to how we think about our political process and to whose benefit it serves.

New York Journal of Books - David Schultz

I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wanted to properly understand the Electoral College…It’s designed to inform the debate in the US over whether or not it should be reformed, and if so, how that could be achieved…Not only a masterful narrative history, but a powerful political intervention…Deeply rewarding.

Oxonian Review - Daniel Sutton

Rigorous and highly readable…shows how the electoral college has endured despite being reviled by statesmen from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson to Edward Kennedy, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford.

Times Literary Supplement - Lawrence Douglas

Perfectly timed…Keyssar tells a riveting and winding tale about attempts to reform the Electoral College and replace it with either a national popular vote or a distribution of electors in proportion to the state’s popular vote…His confrontation with racism in the U.S. as it relates to electoral reform—a topic that isn’t often viewed through this lens—is one of the strengths that make this book well worth the read.

Kyle Scott

America’s greatest historian of democracy now offers an extraordinary history of the most bizarre aspect of our representative democracy—the electoral college. In a clear and complete account of this anomaly’s origins and how it has survived, we can see the outlines for how it might be replaced, or at least improved upon. This is a brilliant contribution to a critical current debate, just in time to help guide effective reform.

Lawrence Lessig

Will surely remain one of the most detailed and scholarly investigations into these serial attempts at reform, while also offering a thoughtful analysis of the many different reasons for their failure.

New Left Review - Tom Mertes

Pathbreaking historical analysis.

Balkinization - Sandy Levinson

Our foremost historian of voting and elections explains the frustrating experiences the nation has had in attempting to eliminate—or even amend—the antiquated Electoral College. While the procedures of self-government should be rational, or at least ones Americans want, they are anything but, and Keyssar provides a nuanced and eventful narrative as to why. The result is a much-needed book that fills a gap in our national self-understanding, which surely is the first step to making any progress in rectifying the situation.

Edward B. Foley

Keyssar, our great narrator of the American right to vote, is a national treasure who keeps giving us the history we need right when we need it. In this thrilling achievement, he tells the history of the Electoral College—how it has repeatedly eroded democratic values and how we might come to replace it in the twenty-first century. This is a dazzling contribution not just to American history but to the American future.

Congressman Jamie Raskin (Maryland)

Sets out to explain the persistence of a technique that in public opinion polls has never accumulated support from a majority of Americans…[Keyssar’s] telling, artfully balancing broad themes and specific anecdotes, is both readable and valuable; knowing how we got here is a useful prerequisite to charting how to get where we want to be.

Washington Times - Daniel B. Moskowitz

To thoroughly understand the Electoral College, but also the nature of institutional reform in general and American Constitutional reform in particular, one could hardly do better.

Liberal Currents - Adam Gurri

[A] definitive study.

Jacobin - Chris Maisano

Monumental…fills in the blind-spot we did not know we had…It is hard to imagine another work significantly improving on this study of the recurrent controversies over the design of the Electoral College…Provides bracing accounts of how far partisans were once willing to go to manipulate the features of the presidential election system to advance their cause.

New Rambler - Keith E. Whittington

A detailed history of the electoral college and the attempts to change it…Enlivened by fascinating episodes in U.S. political history.

Australian Book Review - Varun Ghosh

A masterpiece. Keyssar shows us that America’s Electoral College has ever drifted on turbulent waters, surviving various near-misses at reform both local and national. He leaves readers with the humbling reminder that popular sovereignty can ossify the rules of election, even as he lays bare the political vulnerabilities of the Electoral College and the real possibilities for change.

Daniel Carpenter

The most thorough study of our Electoral College debates ever written…A magnum opus with many contributions to political understanding.

Claremont Review of Books - Christopher DeMuth

Excellent.

Bloomberg - Justin Fox

[A] comprehensive new history of the Electoral College.

New York Times

Keyssar asks a simple question that seems to have an equally simple answer—the small states would never allow it, so why even think about it? Being the careful historian he is, he offers a complex analysis proving that our presidential election system has long been controversial; that serious efforts, now forgotten, were made to alter it; and that the case for its amendment remains as compelling, but also challenging, as ever. At this critical moment in our history, he brilliantly engages one of the most vexing problems in our working Constitution.

Jack N. Rakove

One of the chief virtues of Alexander Keyssar’s remarkable new book Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? is that it conclusively demonstrates the absurdity of preserving an institution that has been so contentious throughout U.S. history and has not infrequently produced results that defied the popular will…A scholarly masterpiece…Keyssar has crafted an absorbing, if dispiriting, narrative about the durable obstacles to structural change in the United States.

The Nation - Michael Kazin

A brilliant history, analysis, and critique of one of the most undemocratic elements of our supposed democracy—and another anti-democratic device whose roots were partly racist.

American Prospect - Robert Kuttner

2020-03-16
Why the Electoral College system has survived more than two centuries of opposition to its obvious imperfections.

Featuring nearly 120 pages of endnotes, this is clearly a scholarly book that will appeal most to specialists and policymakers. Amid the obviously deeply researched scholarship, Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard, clearly explains the numerous objections to the Electoral College and the reasons those objections have never gained enough traction for reform to occur. An overly simplified explanation involves the desire to maintain the status quo instead of tinkering with “new arrangements that might have unintended consequences.” Keyssar devotes some attention to the EC anomaly of Donald Trump in 2016 but digs more deeply into the history. The author begins with the Constitutional Convention in 1787, “where the framers of the Constitution struggled to figure out the best way for a new kingless nation to choose a chief executive.” Within a decade, certain “problems” surfaced, which required the “adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804.” However, as Keyssar shows throughout the book, little has changed since the early 19th century. Much of the reform effort has focused on the winner-take-all-provision in each state on Election Day. A national popular vote, minus the EC mechanism, seemed like an obvious fix, but that idea never generated adequate momentum and “was essentially a nonstarter until the second half of the twentieth century.” Further Constitutional amendments could have accomplished change, but that process is difficult to achieve regarding most issues. As efforts at solutions emanate mostly from the state government level, Keyssar explains the possibility of the current movement to free state electors from unquestioningly confirming the winner-take-all tradition. The author, who also offers cogent discussions of the role that race has played over the decades, believes the only way to parse the enduring illogic of a flawed system is the close study of historical forces.

General readers may skim some sections, but the book contains solid, useful information to learn before the 2020 election.

Kirkus Reviews