Radiolab Takes on the Electoral College

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we're joined by our colleague over at Radiolab, Latif Nasser, co-host of Radiolab, who is giving the Radiolab treatment to a controversial aspect of our presidential elections that's particularly relevant right now as everyone obsesses over the swing states. What is it? It's the Electoral College. Why is it that voters in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, or whatever states are close calls in a given year seemingly hold all the power? Why are the candidates visiting multiple cities in Michigan but rarely spending time in, say, the big four population states of California, Texas, Florida, and New York? Why do voters in some states literally have more say than the voters and others? This is how Hillary Clinton and Al Gore won the popular vote but lost their elections. Doesn't a democracy imply one person, one vote? Radiolab's Electoral College episode is out today. It's called the Unpopular Vote. None other than co-host Latif Nasser is here with the story of the origin of the Electoral College, how it affects our elections today compared to, say, 1789. The episode is also about one man who has spent his career attempting to abolish it. Hey, Latif, welcome back to the Brian Lehrer Show.

Latif Nasser: Oh, thanks so much for having me, Brian. I'm so happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: We have a couple of clips to play from the episode, but set this up for us a little first. Who's your protagonist? This person who has made it their mission to abolish the Electoral College.

Latif Nasser: Yes, well, the story centers on this guy, Birch Bayh. Birch Bayh was an ambitious young Democratic senator from Indiana in the 60s and 70s. He was charming and handsome. He got called the Kennedy of the Midwest. He starts in the Senate as a young whippersnapper at age 34 almost by accident, he winds up the chair of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, which wasn't really something he knew a lot about or cared a lot about, but basically, he took it very seriously, ended up passing two constitutional amendments, which is like a Founding Father level achievement.

He also did a lot of other impressive things, passed Title 9, among other things, but his whole career, his white whale was amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College.

Brian Lehrer: We'll hear a fascinating archive clip of Senator Bayh in a minute, but would you do just a little bit of Electoral College 101 first? I mean, some of our listeners know this really well, but some of our listeners don't. History on the radio is one of our things. When and why did the Electoral College come into existence in the first place? Why didn't the Founders and the Constitution just set up a national popular vote?

Latif Nasser: Right. It seems like it would have been so much simpler, but actually, if you go back to the-- It all goes back to the founding of the country. The founders were trying to solve a problem. How should we pick the president? Back in the 1700s, there was no mass media. Most people had no clue who was running for president. It didn't make sense for the people to vote because they might not have even known the names of the candidates. Then they had another idea. They said, ''Okay, well, we created this whole system called Congress. Maybe Congress could elect the President.''

Then they were like, ''No, that doesn't work either, because we had this whole idea of separation of powers, so what can we do?'' Basically, they come up with this different idea, basically a whole new body of government. It's basically like if you made a clone of Congress and the Senate, you smushed them together with entirely different people, and then that body would pop up every four years, pick the President based on the people's votes, and then go away. That's its whole job.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Like its own little fourth branch of government. I never thought of it that way. Here's archival tape of the late Senator from Indiana, Birch Bayh, with analysis from Latif and historian Alex Keyssar also in this clip. Birch Bayh arguing against the maintenance of the Electoral College. This starts with Senator Bayh.

Birch Bayh: You may say, well, why is it dangerous? Well, basically it's dangerous. The most dangerous aspect of it is the fact that the present system, the Electoral College system, does not guarantee that the man who wins is the man that has the most votes.

Latif Nasser: Alex says that's because when you have this winner-take-all-all system-

Alex Keyssar: It transforms the contest into a contest among states. Because once you have winner take all, then winning the state really matters.

Latif Nasser: Winning as many people as you can doesn't.

Birch Bayh: Because of this, the political leaders of both of our major parties know.

Latif Nasser: You can lose the popular vote in the election.

Birch Bayh: It doesn't make any difference if you're soundly defeated.

Latif Nasser: So long as you win the states.

Birch Bayh: You're going to have enough electoral votes to be elected President of the United States.

Brian Lehrer: That from the brand new episode of Radiolab called The Unpopular Vote. This is really a math problem, right? The math is this. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's based mostly on population, but not entirely. Each state gets a number of electoral votes that equals the number of its House of Representatives members plus two for its two U.S. senators, correct?

Latif Nasser: Yes, exactly. Basically, if you just think of how many representatives in D.C. does your state have? The congresspeople plus the senators. Plus the two senators. The congresspeople are more or less proportional to the population of your state. Then the two senators are there, no matter how big or small your state is. Whatever that number is, you add those two together, whatever that number is, that's how many electoral votes you have. 538 total electoral votes, and you need 270 of them to win.

Brian Lehrer: Right. It's those two for the senators in each state that makes it undemocratic. Because California has 40 million people, Texas has 30 million people, New York has 20 million people. Wyoming doesn't even have one million people, but Wyoming gets those same two electors added to their impact on the outcome. Is that the problem?

Latif Nasser: Yes, but in a way, I mean, it wasn't a problem at the beginning. It was a feature. It was a sort of a thumb. The whole Senate was a thumb on the scale for the small states to ensure that the small states wouldn't get drowned out by the big states. Some people would argue there's a good reason for that, but that is basically part of it, that now you have these vastly disproportionate populations, and so one voter in, say, Wyoming or something is worth multiple voters in California. There's something about that that doesn't, as you said before, it feels like it really goes against one person, one vote.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. That's the central problem, but your Radiolab episode also focuses on another controversial equation in Electoral College math that I think many fewer of our listeners know about. I think a lot of people listening right now know about the two senators thing. The other one is that the winner of the popular vote in most states gets all of that state's electoral votes. I'll say it again. Whoever wins the popular vote within each state for almost all the states gets all of that state's electoral votes.

Listeners, here's a clip from the Radiolab episode. This features Latif, Radiolab producer Annie McEwen, and Harvard history professor Alex Keyssar, who wrote a book called Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? Latif speaks first.

Latif Nasser: The Virginia politicians got together and passed a state law that said, ''Okay, we're done with this district system. From now on, the way our electors will vote will be- Alex: Keyssar: Winner-take-all.

Latif Nasser: If you win the majority of the votes in this state, all of our electors will cast their votes for you. The Virginian politicians, they did this because they knew Jefferson was going win a majority of votes in their state, and this way he wouldn't leave any on the table.

Annie McEwen: A little dirty.

Latif Nasser: A little dirty.

Annie McEwen: I don't know. Something's a little smelly.

Latif Nasser: Yes, the candy's gone smelly. Because what they're doing is erasing all of the votes of the people who voted for Adams.

Alex: Keyssar: Yes, no, exactly. What's interesting when you look into the documents of it, is they passed that law and then they attach to it a kind of apology for doing it.

Latif Nasser: It effectively, saying-

Alex: Keyssar: We know this isn't really good or fair.

Latif Nasser: We know it would be better for the country if we did not do this, but we're doing it anyway.

Brian Lehrer: So a lot of explained that issue that winds up with the candy going smelly, as you put it. The Electoral College wasn't necessarily going to be that one statewide winner of the popular vote takes all the electoral votes from that state. I think we take that as a given today.

Latif Nasser: Right. It didn't need to be that way. Crucially, actually going back to the Constitutional Convention, when they came up with this idea of the Electoral College, they crucially left ambiguous and left to the states this one decision of basically almost the question of how to translate the votes from the people into these electoral votes. If you think about it, they could have done that any number of ways. They could have done it proportionally. They could have said, ''Okay, there's this percentage of people in our state voted for this candidate.''

That means that this percentage of our electoral votes will go to this candidate and so on. They could have done it by district. They could have said, ''Okay, this person won this district, so this electoral vote corresponds to this district, and so that person will get that electoral vote.'' They could have done it that way, but instead, basically, the way that this ends up getting decided for virtually all of the states now, all but two, is this election in 1800 between these legendary frenemies in the history of our country, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

What happens is Jefferson's friends, they know he's going to take the majority. They don't want to give any electoral votes to his rival. They're like, ''Okay, we know he's going to win the majority. Even though we know it's not particularly fair, let's say it's winner-take-all all. Whoever gets 50% plus 1, they're going to get it all.'' Effectively in doing so, erase everyone in our state who's voting in a way that is counter to the majority is, and in that case was what we didn't agree with.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Every state now does it that way except Nebraska and Maine, which do it by congressional districts. Before we run out of time, let me ask you two pushback questions because that's what we do. The basic problem with the Electoral College is that it's not a winner-take-all national popular vote. When they do exactly that at the state level to choose the state selectors, then it is a problem. I'm not sure I get why the popular vote is good democracy nationally, but bad democracy within a state.

Latif Nasser: I think to me it's just about the simplicity. There's this famous phrase, it's like democracy is not in the voting, it's in the counting. I think when you are adding this extra step, all of these complicated numbers, it's a system where there could even be a tie. This system is such that when you're adding all of these extra layers of complexity where there are these sort of secret thumbs on scales and these secret political games of winner take all, things like that, to me it really dilutes the power of the election.

An election is something we all need to buy into, we all need to understand and believe, and a popular vote is something I think just is more intuitive. It just feels more logical adding this whole kind of Rube Goldberg machine where the states, they each have different weights. To me, it's a much clearer, simpler system that we can all agree on the result of.

Brian Lehrer: The other pushback question for opponents of the Electoral College is this. The Federalist argument against popular rule back then is preventing tyranny of the majority. That's why they didn't want 50% plus 1 as a national popular vote. The fear that minorities may suffer due to this status. A supporter might say, ''Hey, this is actually progressive in that it guarantees that a minority group, people in smaller states, in this case, can influence presidential elections.'' Progressives often like carve-outs for political minorities to have a guaranteed influence. Why isn't that a good thing?

Latif Nasser: Yes, it's a great question. I mean, in a way, again, it was a question right at the beginning. Among the minorities originally protected in the Constitutional Convention were small states, as we mentioned, and slaveholding states from the South. Then along the way, paradoxically, there have been other groups like African Americans, Jewish Americans, and others who believed the Electoral College was actually serving them, protecting them. We talk about this in the story, the NAACP, for example, was for the Electoral College in the '60s and '70s, but now are actually have changed their mind. They're against it.

I do think this whole thing is a question of, should there be thumbs on scales for minorities? Should we try to protect minorities from a majority? I do think there needs to be safeguards in our government for minorities. I just don't think this is an effective way to do it. If you are a minority in a swing state, it really does help you, but once your state stops being swingy, you stop mattering, and I think it's not doing that very well.

Brian Lehrer: Latif Nasser, co-host of Radiolab here at WNYC. Their new episode just out today, looking at the Electoral College is called The Unpopular Vote. Lot of thanks.

Latif Nasser: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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