Today we’re revisiting one of the most requested and controversial topics from Civics 101; the electoral college. High School social studies teacher Neal Walter Young talks about some of the points he debates with his class when they dissect how we vote for the people who vote for the president.
Transcript
Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
The Electoral College votes, which occurred today, reflect the fact that even in the face of a public health crisis, unlike anything we've experienced in our lifetime, people voted. They voted in record numbers.
Nick Capodice: Of the many, many questions that we've received over the last few months and episodes we've made in response, there is one topic that has dominated over all the others, the Electoral College.
Hannah McCarthy: And it's not surprising. The 2020 election, like many elections before it, brought conversations about the Electoral College to the fore. But we've already done a big ol episode on the Electoral College for our starter kit series.
Nick Capodice: That we did, Hannah, that we did. But before we close the book on the complicated system of how we vote for the people who vote for the president, I'd like to introduce you to Neal.
Neal Walter Young: My name is Neal Walter Young. I am a teacher [00:01:00.00] at Lawrence High School in Fairfield Maine. Go Bulldogs.
Nick Capodice: Neal is a member of our cabinet. That's a group of educators from across the country who are designing lesson plans to pair with our episodes. And he wrote me a lovely e-mail about our Electoral College episode. He said that every year he has a lengthy, healthy debate in his class about the pros and the cons of the Electoral College system. And he wanted to share some of those points with us, some ideas that didn't make it into that episode. And he wanted to fix something we flat out got wrong. So that's what we're going to do today. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy,
Nick Capodice: And this is an addendum to our episode on the Electoral College.
Hannah McCarthy: We got something flat out wrong. We got to start with that.
Nick Capodice: In the episode, a guest misspoke and said that Maine and Nebraska each have two congressional districts.
Neal Walter Young: And this is just Maine pride showing through. Even our own public radio misses this one sometimes. So Maine has its lonely two. Only two representatives [00:02:00.00] in the House. Nebraska getting bigger, has three.
Hannah McCarthy: Got it. And Maine has four electoral votes and Nebraska five. All right. What's next?
Nick Capodice: The second point Neil made is that since we released the episode, there's been a 2020 Supreme Court ruling, Chiafolo v Washington that affects the Electoral College.
Mr. Chief Justice, with this court case, the question in these cases is straightforward. Do the states have the power to control the law of how an elector may vote?
Hannah McCarthy: This is the case regarding faithless electors, right? Electors who vote for a candidate other than the one who won the state.
Nick Capodice: Yeah.
Neal Walter Young: In the Chiafolo ruling, what the Supreme Court said is that states can choose to force the hand of the electors in a number of ways. But what it makes clear is that this idea of faithless electors, [00:03:00.00] those can be a thing of the past. There are many states in which there is no punishment whatsoever. And even those where there is a punishment, it tends not to be more than a thousand dollar fine. And we're in a close election and someone can switch and slap on the hand is a thousand dollars. That doesn't act as a really good bulwark against any funny business happening.
Hannah McCarthy: So Neal's arguing that the Chiafolo ruling stops any funny business, as he put it, and could put an end to faithless electors, which would mean that electors would have to vote for the candidate who won the state no matter what they feel,
Nick Capodice: Unless the candidate died before the electoral vote.
Hannah McCarthy: But there is still the argument to be made that the framers wanted an elector to be able to be faithless, to generally be guided by the vote of the people, but to be able to make a judgment call on who to vote for.
Nick Capodice: Right. But if you're [00:04:00.00] someone who's all about the popular vote, it is hard to also be someone in favor of faithless electors because they're voting against the will of the people of that state. And this brings us to our third and final point of Neal's.
Neal Walter Young: This is funny. I didn't realize it was like a legitimate rebuttal to that. So I hope any of the presenters on that, people who are legitimately many times more intelligent. So. In the last episode, it made it seem that the only argument for keeping the Electoral College is that it ensures smaller states to have a say in the process. But there are really many more areas of debate and reasons than just about this small state idea. If we think back to the constitutional convention, we think of the greatest minds at the time coming together to develop this new nation, and they were able to come to agreement [00:05:00.00] on beautiful solutions to many difficult problems. We see federalism, we see separation of powers. And then when they're going to the end of deciding how to elect their president, no one likes the solution, right? It's thrown out. Should it be a direct popular vote? No, no, no, no. This isn't going to do. What about if we give it to Congress and they're like, no, that gets rid of separation of powers and they end up leaving for the weekend. They leave it to a committee to come up with a solution. And the solution they come up with is Byzantine.
Neal Walter Young: It's complicated. It has all these different inner working parts. And essentially what they decide is that this will be good enough because we all already know that Washington is going to be president. So whatever the kinks are in this system, they'll be worked out as time goes along.
Nick Capodice: Neal pointed out to me that early on some states like New York, didn't do a vote of the people at all. The state legislature appointed [00:06:00.00] electors until 1820. It wasn't until 1828 that this idea that the people's vote should influence who the electors pick for president became a national norm.
Neal Walter Young: A lot of the discussions we have about the Electoral College today are rooted in why don't we just use the popular vote? So I think it's helpful to remind ourselves that throughout history, when do you even have a popular vote? Is it 1828 when only white males can vote, albeit white males don't need to own land anymore at that point, is it? After we passed the 15th Amendment?
Nick Capodice: The 15th Amendment, by the way, prohibits the federal government from denying a citizen's right to vote based on, quote, race, color or previous condition of servitude.
Neal Walter Young: Is it after the 19th Amendment and now women are their right to vote, is being protected against states? Who would deny them that? Right? Is it up through the 1960s where we're talking about, again, 10 percent of African-Americans being registered to vote [00:07:00.00] in Mississippi? So when we talk about popular vote, we should understand what we mean by that term and kind of what standard we'd like to set and feel comfortable for. There's never been an election where the majority of the American people have voted for a specific candidate.
Hannah McCarthy: What does he mean by that?
Nick Capodice: Let's take 1968 as an example.
On our board showing the popular vote. Hubert Humphrey is still ahead, but barely there. Each now has roughly 41 one percent. Humphrey has a lead.
Nick Capodice: That election, Richard Nixon versus Hubert Humphrey, had the highest turnout in modern history, with 60 percent of eligible voters voting. Nixon won the popular vote by less than one percentage point. And we don't know how that other 40 percent of people would have voted.
Neal Walter Young: If we replace it, what are we comfortable with to ensure that if a candidate we have five, six, seven candidates such [00:08:00.00] as think about elections in the recent past in Mexico, where you do have candidates winning with twenty three percent of the vote, and then step back and say what percentage of eligible voters even participated? And then you start getting down to very, very small percentages of the entire country's population. And does that still lend as much legitimacy in the eyes of voters?
Nick Capodice: And that hypothetical switch to a popular vote system is also pretty tricky.
Neal Walter Young: Another thing that comes in is that the electoral system is handled at the state level. Right. And this is one of the hard parts about the Electoral College is it's really difficult to change one part. You kind of have to change multiple parts that come together. So if we change to a popular vote, how is that regulated through each state? Because every state does its elections a little bit differently. Who's allowed to vote? Felons being a fantastic example. Can you vote from within jail, as you can in the state of Maine and Vermont? Are [00:09:00.00] there voter ID laws in your state? Can you have no excuse absentee ballots or do you need an excuse? So we have to figure out how do we ensure that the requirements in each state are the same, giving up some power to the federal government? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Hannah McCarthy: I am truly grateful that Neal brought these issues up. I'm going to be up all night thinking about this.
Nick Capodice: Me too. And it was especially helpful to hear from somebody who has this debate in his classroom. Year after year.
Neal Walter Young: I have no idea what the right answer is, it's it's one of those things where I really have no clue Electoral College, good or bad. It's one of those things where you kind of get stuck in the mud a little bit, where you're like, well, I know what the problems are, the devil, you know. And then just enough unknowns about if we go to popular vote, enough that make me nervous of what are we going to find out about this after it's in place.
Nick Capodice: So there's the addendum to our Electoral College [00:10:00.00] episode, by the way, if you're interested in the work of the cabinet, which is our advisory board of teachers, we're releasing their Civics 101 activities at Civics101podcast.org/lessonplans.
