We are five weeks away from Election Day in the US, and things have certainly been eventful in the presidential race, to put it mildly.
This election may be American democracy’s greatest test. With revenge in mind, and with a guide to converting the federal bureaucracy into a conservative vehicle and removing many checks on presidential power vis-a-vis Project 2025, a second Trump presidency would be dramatically worse than his first and may well signal the end of American democracy. Even in defeat, his refusal to accept the results in a tight race will likely instigate political violence as it did on 6 January 2021, but across multiple states. Since the United States is one of the greatest military and economic powers on Earth, as well as an ally and proudly democratic country, such outcomes would be deleterious to the rest of the free world.
The Electoral College is the key to Donald Trump’s success in 2024. Despite Kamala Harris’s nationwide three-point lead, this may be insufficient to overcome its distortive effects. However, Trump may not even need to win states’ popular votes to win the Electoral College. Learning from 2020, pro-Trump Republican strategists have endeavoured to put in place election officials who will refuse any state-level result other than a Trump win to enable the appointment of Republican electors by Republican-controlled legislatures.
The Damoclean threat of the 2024 election result should be argument enough against the Electoral College. While this alone would simply be discounted as partisan, there are plenty of reasons to oppose the Electoral College.
When the Electoral College was agreed upon at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, it was as a short-term compromise to overcome gridlock after the rejection of direct popular election and indirect election by either Congress or the states, rather than as part of a grand design to ensure political moderation. As part of it, the Three-fifths Clause was devised to accommodate slave states by allowing the counting of three-fifths of enslaved populations in determining the allocation of, amongst other things, electoral votes. As this year’s presidential candidates are an authoritarian populist and a woman from ethnic minority backgrounds, how can the Electoral College today be defended, given its historical context?
There have been five elections in which the Electoral College caused a wrong winner outcome, two of which occurred in living memory. Other than the actions of the Trump administration, these outcomes have had disastrous consequences, such as the illegal invasion of Iraq after 2000, and the establishment of Jim Crow after 1876 (a contentious election which 2024 has been compared to). 
While we oppose First Past the Post due to its distortive effects upon a 650-member House of Commons, imagine how voters would feel if their MP was elected with only the second-most votes of any one candidate in their constituency by some quirk of the rules.
Since the disastrous outcomes of the US’s first genuinely contested elections in 1796 and 1800, there have been over 700 attempts to abolish the Electoral College. As of 2023, according to Pew Research, 63% of Americans favour abolishing it. In the present, it runs contrary to many Americans’ expectations of democracy.
Putting aside the difficulties of amending the US Constitution, we Liberal Democrats and our sister parties within Liberal International should formally and wholeheartedly condemn the Electoral College as an unfair and discriminatory voting system and a threat to both international and American domestic security. Opposing it would not be a controversial stance for many Americans, while it would force its proponents to defend it for reasons beyond partisan advantage and tradition.
* Samuel James Jackson is a member of the Executive Committee of the Calderdale Liberal Democrats, the Secretary of the Lower Valley Liberal Democrats and has served as a council candidate in the Ryburn and Park wards
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17 Comments
No, we should not.
Criticising the day-to-day politics of other, broadly democratic countries is always a bad idea, if noticed it just gets their backs up.
The Electoral College does what it was designed to do, the bias to less populated States was deliberate & is widely accepted.
If only the matter of how much the Americans had to care about UK opinions of their system had been resolved at some historic point. Perhaps 1776?
@Paul Barker
“The Electoral College does what it was designed to do, the bias to less populated States was deliberate & is widely accepted.”
It seems to me that the disparity in populations between the most heavily populated states (38 million +) and the least (Wyoming ~ < 1 million) is now so great as to bring the system into disrepute.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population
Although I don’t agree with the EC it is a stretch to say it “caused the Iraq war” indeed when Bush was reelected in 2004 he won the popular vote. And Trump would refuse to accept a close result whatever system was used. Candidates would also campaign differently if the vote was counted nationally.
@Paul Barker has it exactly right. Yes, the US electoral college is awful and causes extraordinary democratic anomalies. But, unless Americans start en masse actively asking for our opinions about the electoral college (which seems pretty unlikely), it’s also none of our business. America is a democracy, and it’s up to American voters how they want to elect their representatives and be governed.
(It would be different if America were a dictatorship in which people were being oppressed without any democratic say: In that case I’d have no qualms about speaking up on behalf of those people, but doing that when we’re talking about a democracy is just not a good idea)
I agree with Paul Barker and Simon R and think that the way in which the USA president is elected is a matter for Americans.
“There have been five elections in which the Electoral College caused a wrong winner outcome,” I do not agree. The EC has produced the intended result: the fact that some of us might think the outcome is unfair does not make it the wrong result. Especially if we are not citizens of the USA.
“…the Three-fifths Clause was devised to accommodate slave states by allowing the counting of three-fifths of enslaved populations in determining the allocation of, amongst other things, electoral votes.” What is your point? If there were still Slave States this then you could legitimately raise this. But since there aren’t it’s irrelevant. Even if it was it’s an argument against the way votes are allocated not the EC itself.
the Three-fifths Clause was devised to accommodate slave states by allowing the counting of three-fifths of enslaved populations in determining the allocation of, amongst other things, electoral votes
More to the point, the three-fifths compromise wasn’t devised to accommodate slave states, it was devised to accommodate free states (the slave states obviously wanted each slave to count as a full person, as it would have given them greater representation).
“It would be different if America was a dictatorship etc”. Is that not what we can expect from the next Trump Presidency?
The paper is interesting and worthy of discussion I suggest we focus on our own elections this year. How can we criticise other countries when we have a government which can show only a record level of support? The most important question in our own country is to give priority to how to campaign for our changes in our own electoral system.
Tom Harney is right to concentrate on our own system. Everytime this government does things we disagree with we should remind them they only had around 20% of people voting for them. It is also noteworthy that some surveys should majorities of people not agreeing with their policies; for example there are increasing numbers of people who support PR, support taxing the rich more and want poor people to receive much more.
In my comment ‘should’ was meant to be ‘show’. I must add that I find the article interesting, especially revealing how the current system in the USA is based on situations very different from today.
It seems to me that, when the US constitution, with all the attendant political systems, was devised, it was revolutionary – so much more progressive than anything else around (Aside from the racism etc, that meant it’s provisions were at the time only really applied to white people and it still allowed slavery). But over the subsequent 200+ years, democratic standards have moved on, so what was progressive then now seems flawed and outdated in many ways – including the electoral college. The trouble is, the US constitution was written in a way that sets a very high bar for changing anything in it, hence very little ever gets changed and Americans are broadly stuck with all the anachronistic political systems. I think the real lesson there for us is, if the UK ever gets a written constitution, make sure it can be changed and updated without too much difficulty.
I think we can acknowledge the feet of clay and obvious flaws of many western democracies – including or own – without rushing to silly words like ‘condemn’.
The post-revolutionary era – as in many post-civil-war states, Ireland would be no different in the 1920s — was a mix of experiment, falling back on pre-independence precedents, and dirty compromise to try to stabilise a turbulent society paranoid about a recurrence of war and outside threat. Yes it was a racially divided society with active slavery. Yes that legacy continues through to unsettle the present. (Another example in the US – although benignly intended at the time – would be the modern enshrinement of overt gerrymandering by legislators to create racially segregated electoral districts, as a conscious form of positive discrimination).
The Jefferson/D’Hondt formula is referenced in the Electoral College formulation so its not entirely disproportionate. One way the problems of the electoral college could be mitigated would be for a constitutional amendment that would enforce the Maine/Nebraska apportionment by proportionality on all States. That would take consdiderable time, though. And is for the US itself to do so, maybe under friendly – not condemnatory – advice.
I would say, we do need to acknowledge the Electoral College precedent in UK democratic discussions, as its an attempt to find a consensus view that attempts to accommodate territories with differing views from the majoritarian one.
And somewhat parallels the concerns here in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland about how widely their result in the Brexit referendum differed from that of the country as a whole.
We can’t be consensualists one minute and majoritarians the next, depending on what when it suits ‘progressive’ trends. Yes, US democracy is sick, cynical and hypocritical. So is ours (maybe with slightly less overt corruption).
And Lib Dems need to acknowledge that to win elections, their own party catches sickness of the system and can be very averse to acknowledging it.
@Matt (Bristol): had the Brexit referendum been run under an electoral college system (perhaps based on constituencies), then Leave would have won by a landslide.
The US fashion for “majority-minority” (I think I got it the right way round there) districting needs to be seen in the context of a system where districting is in most States an overtly partisan affair. Where gerrymandering is considered more-or-less politically legitimate, it’s not clear that a particular type of “benign” gerrymandering should be singled out as bad.
@Simon “ I think the real lesson there for us is, if the UK ever gets a written constitution, make sure it can be changed and updated without too much difficulty.”
Whilst I get the sentiment, surely a reason to have a written constitution is to make change difficult. A risk has to be that a constitution that is too easy to change is that governments will change it eg. Repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act and the running of simple majority referendums.