Whatever the case, there’s no denying that the Electoral College is anti-democratic. Another popular theory is that the Electoral College was designed to prevent presidential candidates from ignoring the smaller, less populated states. Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale, has argued that the Electoral College was a concession to the slave states at the time of the founding. ( It, uh, didn’t work.)īut the history is more complicated than that. It was conceived in part as a firewall against majority will in case the mob ever elected someone grotesquely unqualified for the office. Our process for choosing the president, the Electoral College, is probably the strangest and most explicitly anti-democratic feature of the American political system. Two of the last five presidents were elected despite losing the popular vote, more than half the Senate is elected by roughly 18 percent of the population, and voting districts are increasingly gerrymandered in ways that disenfranchise the people who live there. One of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s not democratic.
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