Electoral College 3: Why does it still exist?

I'm picking up on a series from a while back, regarding the electoral college. In previous posts in this series, I've written about the manner in which the electoral college lost its original purpose more than 200 years ago. That purpose was to limit participation in presidential elections to a small elite group who would exercise their independent judgment.

In light of that history, why do we continue to elect presidents that way? Why don't we run those elections the same as virtually all other American elections? Why don't we just all vote for president, and award victory to the candidate with the most votes (perhaps subject to a runoff, if no one candidate gets more than 50%)?

I think the reasons lie with the system of allocating electoral votes to the states.

For one thing, smaller states get a mathematical advantage from the allocation formula. Each state's electoral vote total is equal to its total representation in both houses of Congress. California has 53 House seats. Wyoming, with the smallest population, has one. Adding California's two Senate seats raises their total to 55; in other words, it increases the number by a factor of 3.8%. But adding Wyoming's two Senate seats triples its electoral vote total.

Another way of looking at that is that, when we consider the ratio of electoral votes to population, a Wyoming resident's vote has about 3.8 times as much weight as a Californian's.

Abolition of the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment, which could be blocked by as few as 13 states. So, even if such an amendment passed both houses of Congress (it would be likely to be voted down by the Senate for similar reasons), opposition from small states would probably keep it well short of the required 38 states' ratification.

Another point, beyond the simple mathematics, is that the electoral college maintains a role for the states, per se, in the presidential election process. Most states have a "winner take all" system; in other words, the candidate with a plurality of the popular vote in each such state gets all of that state's electoral votes. So, a winning candidate needs to amass a sufficient coalition of states, rather than a coalition of individual voters.

One effect of that is that a purely regional candidacy cannot succeed. I wrote here and here about how third-party candidacies of southern segregationists fared in the electoral college, in 1948 and 1968. Strom Thurmond and George Wallace won the electoral votes of some southern states, but in neither case was the total anywhere near a majority.

However, Wallace hoped (in vain, as it turned out) to play "spoiler", by denying both Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey an electoral college majority in 1968. Wallace wanted to strike a bargain to slow down federal civil rights actions, while his hoped-for electoral deadlock was being resolved by the House of Representatives. But Nixon received a majority of the electoral votes.

But it's possible that a strong third-party candidacy could bring about that scenario, which bring about more public debate about the electoral college system.

I have no profound conclusion to offer as to whether the electoral college system should be, and/or ever will be, abolished. My main point is that the question is more complicated that some make it out to be. I don't consider it self-evident that direct election is necessarily the best method for every office. And I don't think we should rush to change a system that has been in place for more than two centuries, because of many people's disillusionment with the result of the presidential election of eight years ago.