Have you ever thought about how insane the way we elect our President is?
Consider the following: it has been 2 and a half years since the first democratic hopeful—John Delaney—officially announced his candidacy. Since then we have had 18 candidates announce and drop out all before a single vote was cast. We will now spend the following nine months trying to decide who will be President in January 2021.
The process will begin in one of the least representative states in the country, Iowa, where 90% of its population is white—and where its population is also famously outnumbered by pigs. It will then move on to an even less representative state where 93% of the population is white—New Hampshire. But at least our neighboring state makes it so that the choice is more or less open to everyone that wants to participate, Iowa’s caucus rules are such that it is extremely difficult for people that have jobs, kids, or some type of physical disability to choose, making an already unrepresentative state even more unrepresentative. In 2016, for instance, about 30% of each party’s registered voters (roughly 18.5% of all registered voters) caucused. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if Iowa and New Hampshire were not so decisive in determining who the nominee would be, but in fact they are. Since 1976, when the current system was instituted, Bill Clinton has been the only candidate for either party to be nominated without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire, and no candidate that has won both has ever been denied the nomination.
It gets worse. Who gets to vote and how those votes are allocated depend not just on what state you live in but also in which party’s process you want to vote. States may be open, closed or somewhere in between, that is, you might or might not have to declare yourself a member of x party to vote in their election. But how those votes are counted and how much weight they have also depend on the party. Democrats usually employ proportional representation—but not Iowa or most caucus states which are even more complicated; Republicans prefer winner-take-all, but sometimes they go with proportional (as in Massachusetts), sometimes they prefer winner-take-most (candidates who win the state get most of the delegates, but not all) and even, in some cases, a state convention. Of course, these also tend to change a bit from one election to another, other than New Hampshire and Iowa, for instance, states often shift the order in which they hold the elections during the primaries. To add to the complexity, Democrats use extra-delegates who are not bound by the vote of any electorate but are instead party members from each of the states and can decide entirely on their own who to support. Commonly known as superdelegates, this caused such confusion and resentment in 2016 that the Democratic Party has since agreed to have their vote count only in the case of a contested convention.
And after all that, when election day arrives in November, the winner is not the person with the most votes across the country, but rather, the person with the right number of votes in the right number of states, although in theory the Electoral College is not bound by those results either and could under perfectly constitutional rules choose any person they wanted to including someone that had not even run. In fact, in 2016, there were 7 faithless electors who voted for someone other than Trump or Clinton. Some states do have restrictions against faithless electors, but how constitutional those are is unknown. Imagine how much fun it would be to try to find out the legality of that type of maneuver in a situation where the election ended 270-268 and then a faithless elector or two either reversed it or simply denied the needed majority to the winner so that instead it would be up to Congress to decide.
If the quirks described above were of little consequence and only political scientists cared about it, that would be one thing, but in fact, this system has very real consequences and it is at the root of some of the worst excesses in American politics. Consider each one in turn.
THE LENGTH: Having such a long process makes it so that a disproportionate level of our political discussion is about the horse race—who is up, who is down—instead of policies or even platforms. It also gives an advantage to those candidates who can command the media spotlight more readily which might or might not mean they will have the other necessary skills for the Presidency. In other words, our system tests for showmen not statesmen and makes it infinitely harder for women, period. Even worse, in more recent times, its length also helps those who would want to spread misinformation or confuse the public.
THE COMPLEXITY: The norm is for people to not follow politics very closely. When one adds complexity on top of that, it leads people to feel more likely to be disappointed and jaded. For instance, even now there are many Bernie supporters who to this day believe incorrectly that the DNC rigged the election for Clinton. Indeed, one of the genius of the Russian interference in 2016 was to weaponize the complexity of the election against us.
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: I would need a whole book to detail all of the problems the electoral college engenders. The most important of all, however, is that it is probably the single most important reason why our political system revolves around two parties. Its winner-take-all format distributed state by state strongly discourages voting for anyone other than the two parties, but even when people do, their vote is rendered meaningless. For example, the person to get the most electoral votes as an independent since the republican-democrat system has been in place is Theodore Roosevelt, and he only managed 88 or 178 less than he needed. In other words, a former President and one usually ranked in the top 10 of all time, could not even get half of the necessary electoral votes as an independent. In more recent times, in 1992, Ross Perot received just under 20% of the total vote and exactly zero electoral votes. The largest vote for a third party in 90 years did not lead to the creation of a third viable party, but instead to people blaming him of being a spoiler. Much smaller but significant percentages in 2000 and 2016 did the same for Nader and Stein, and so on and on we go with the logic of the two-party system.
Finally, because these things together create a system where the media disproportionately pays attention to who the next President will be, many voters have a deep belief in the green lantern theory of the Presidency. That is, they way overestimate what the Presidency can be used for on its own and fail to see how important Congress and local races are. This in turn, leads to a vicious cycle where more people are disappointed so fewer people participate, and when they do, their participation is not sustained long enough for it to dramatically change our politics.
In the end, if someone tried to deliberately create the most convoluted, inefficient and undemocratic system possible way of electing a President, they’d have a hard time coming up with something worse than what we have. When will we change it?