Now that the ill-fated recall effort against state Rep. Tom Sullivan has fizzled like a dollar store seltzer tablet, the same folks being paid to push the failed ideologies of trickle-down economics and guns for everyone, everywhere, all-the-time want to change the subject to the slightly less indefensible effort to overturn the law committing Colorado to support a national popular vote for president.
Proponents of that effort claim they are halfway to gathering the signatures they need to place this question on the ballot, so now seems like a good time to review why we have an Electoral College in the first place.
The new law is simple. If enough states join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to trigger its effects, Colorado will pledge our nine, probably soon-to-be 10 Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide. It is an elegant workaround to the antiquated and undemocratic Electoral College to finally make good on the principle of “one person, one vote” when electing the chief executive of the United States of America.
Admittedly, I too was once an opponent of effectively doing away with the Electoral College. I was told that presidential candidates would stop visiting Colorado, and besides, if we eliminate the Electoral College don’t states like California and Texas end up with a disproportionate share of influence over the outcome?
That’s not how it works in reality. Once I did my research, I became a convert to the radical idea that one person ought to have one, and only one, vote in an election and everyone’s votes should count equally.
In truth, the Electoral College doesn’t even do that much for Colorado. Our state ranks 29th in terms of the power of individual votes in a presidential election: 422,621 people per Electoral College vote. Under the Electoral College system, our northern neighbors in Wyoming are the most powerful voters in the country — with a ratio of 142,741 people per electoral vote.
Ask yourself this question: why should a vote in Wyoming have many more times the power of your vote in Colorado? It’s asinine to argue that “states should have a voice” when the logical conclusion of that view is to diminish the votes of actual people.
And then there’s the uncomfortable fact that by defending this antiquated and nonsensical institution, one is, by default, defending slavery. Before the 13th Amendment, slaves were counted in the Census, running up the number of electoral college votes states like Virginia had — but without granting those people a vote.
The truth is that since the nation’s founding, suffrage and representation have expanded in the small-“d” democratic way: first through the right to vote itself but also through the direct election of U.S. Senators, which were formerly selected through the state legislatures. This last point is important for people worried about the power of small states like Sen. Cory Gardner who wrote in an op-ed for The Denver Post saying that he wanted to preserve states’ voices through the Electoral College. As his title implies, Gardner serves in a chamber that already gives disproportionate influence to smaller, whiter, and more rural states.
When the Constitution was ratified, 40 percent of the population of the south was made up of slaves. Add to them every woman in the country, and every non-land-owning white male, and you’ll quickly realize that the Electoral College was created in order to reinforce an unrepresentative system and to divide power illegitimately without acknowledging horrors like slavery and the lack of suffrage for a majority of citizens of the nation.
The Electoral College was about deliberately vesting the power to elect the nation’s chief executive solely in the hands of slave-owning, land-owning, white men.
Back in the present day, a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t carried the state of Colorado since 2004. So from a purely objective standpoint, if you’re a Republican presidential voter, your vote hasn’t counted here in 15 years. And the way things are going, it doesn’t seem as if that will change anytime soon.
As long as Republicans are under the impression that the Electoral College benefits them politically — it overturned the popular vote twice in the last 20 years in their favor — they will keep finding reasons to defend it. But the truth is, the Electoral College exists to preserve inequality and all Americans will benefit once it’s finally consigned to the dustbin of history.
Ian Silverii is the executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, the state’s largest progressive advocacy group.
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