Carolyn Dupont, a professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University, is one of the country's leading experts on the Electoral College. She is the author of the book Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today, which debunks defenses of the Electoral College and shows why it's harmful to democracy. 

The "Electoral College" we have today bears little resemblance to the system the Founding Fathers actually set up, which means that we can't appeal to their "intent" in order to defend it. Dupont explains how this system came into being, how it changed over the years, and how it fails at achieving its supposed purposes, like giving small states a voice. 

Nathan J. Robinson 

You take us back to truly one of the most fascinating moments in perhaps the history of the world, which is the moment where this country, under the Articles of Confederation, is kind of crumbling—it’s going wrong, and something has to be done. The whole thing has to be reconstituted, and it's very uncertain what's going to happen next, and you try and place us, in your story about the Electoral College, in that moment. So tell us why you started in that moment.

Carolyn Renée Dupont 

The Electoral College was created by the Constitutional Convention when it met in 1787, and I wanted to tell this story because I wanted my readers to understand what a precarious moment it was. And as historians, we love to use this word “contingency.” It's a contingent moment. Anything could have happened. And I think that Americans very often have this sense of inevitability when it comes to our Constitution, that it was almost dropped from heaven. There was Moses and the 10 Commandments, and then there was the U.S. Constitution, and they basically got here the same way. And so I wanted to show the framers as they wrestled with the best way to choose the president, and I think that by restoring the uncertainty and the difficulty of that conversation, we can understand that the Electoral College was simply the best solution they could come up with at the time for a very difficult issue. It was a pragmatic choice, not a choice born out of revolutionary principles, noble ideals, or some high-minded political philosophy. And so that's why I started there.

Robinson 

We will deal, in this conversation, with some of the myths that have arisen surrounding the origins of the Electoral College that you intend to refute in this book. So you could tell a simple story of a group of aristocrats trying to thwart the popular will by ensuring that unelected elites could put the president in power. That's a very cynical story. You could tell a different story that's more positive, but you tell a story of pragmatism and messiness and compromise. So tell us a bit more. You said that this was a difficult dilemma they faced. Why was it difficult, and what were the available options being considered?

Dupont 

Yes, great questions. Well, it's difficult because they didn't agree. I think that's important for us to keep in mind. With the entire constitution, there's very little that they agreed on. I think it's really interesting the way that we in American culture tend to think about the Constitution and the men who framed it as if they were all in some sort of Vulcan mind meld and just channeling the same ideas.

Robinson 

That's great.

Dupont 

Yes, so they didn't agree. There are really not very many precedents. And you asked about available options, and I think that is a great way to ask that question because we assume today that they were choosing between popular election and something else, and in doing that, we're really trying to make them have the conversation we're having. They had a conversation for the 18th century. The most common way that governors were chosen at the time was by the legislatures in their states, and eight out of 13 chose that way, and then the other five did some kind of combination of methods. There were only two states that directly elected governors, and those were actually fairly weak governors. They were starting something from scratch, and the country has a unique history and a unique composition. And so for most of the convention, they decided that Congress should select the president. So they take votes on that repeatedly, over and over, and reaffirm it. And in fact, I think it's important to emphasize, they rejected different Electoral College-like schemes five different times.

So there's this notion out there that, and I know writers who write this way, that there was some kind of a priori, a high-minded, commitment to an Electoral College in and of itself, and there absolutely is not. And in fact, at one point at the end of July, James Madison said that he liked popular election best, an Electoral College would be an okay second, but we've rejected so many Electoral College schemes, I don't think we're even going to talk about that anymore. Actually, there were forces that prevented them from choosing popular election, and that would be the slave states and the small states. But in the final analysis, what really bothers them about popular election is that they don't believe that most people have the experience with people one-on-one to know their character and the quality of a human being that might lead the country, and they think legislators have probably had that experience, and so they seem like a body with the knowledge to do this. There's widespread dissatisfaction with this method, of course, because everyone understands that it compromises the separation of powers. And so at the last minute, they punt it all to a committee who works out the Electoral College. 

Robinson 

So I mentioned a story of elitism, or people also talk about slavery as mattering to the development of the system. Sounds like those are two elements when you mentioned the distrust of the ability of an ordinary voter. But also, again, we have to remember, in the late 1700s, for an ordinary voter, how are they going to understand anything about the candidates running for president? You begin with the story of how difficult it was for people to even get to the Constitutional Convention. It's not like it would have been very easy to run a national popular vote system at that period of time. 

Dupont 

I'm glad you said that. I want to emphasize it wasn't that they thought people were stupid or not trustworthy. In fact, I think they displayed an incredible amount of trust for ordinary people. The lack of information is really what it is.

Robinson 

Yes, which is quite real in an age where it takes how many days to get a newspaper? 

Dupont 

Well, exactly, and there were fewer than 100 newspapers in the entire country in 1787.

Robinson 

We use the phrase, abolish the Electoral College. But one of the things you emphasize over and over is that the system they designed and implemented is not the Electoral College as we mean that term because it functioned very differently. So, tell us, when you're talking about the origins of the Electoral College phase one, what was that?

Dupont 

Yes, and you can read about it in Hamilton's Federalist No. 68—he offers this description—and you can also read about it in Article Two of the Constitution. And the first time I read Article Two of the Constitution, I remember thinking, gosh, that really doesn't sound like the videos that I saw in high school explaining how we choose the president. And so what they created was a true proxy election system where I, Carolyn Dupont—of course, I couldn't have voted anyway, but suppose I could—chose someone that I respected, a local notable, and that person was to draw from their wisdom. Hamilton uses words like discernment and experience, and it's supposed to be an assembly of people with the knowledge to make this choice. And Hamilton uses that word "choice." He also talked about the atmosphere in which these electors are going to make this choice as kind of hermetically sealed against corruption, and the electors cannot be tampered with—they can't be tampered with beforehand. And I'm not sure that Hamilton even believed any of that. That was the vision. But within a year, he himself was tampering with electors. And until he was shot by Aaron Burr in 1804, he tampered with electors in every single election. He's our first election meddler, and the election meddler in chief. And so this vision of this pristine assembly that makes this decision just really doesn't last more than a few cycles, and it begins to be changed in a variety of ways. 

Robinson 

I want to get to the changes, but I just want to emphasize your point. You mentioned at one point in the book that if we want to hold up the Founding Fathers' vision and be faithful to it, our elections would operate today in a way that I don't think anyone seriously advocates they should operate. That is to say, the electors were supposed to be chosen how exactly? 

Dupont 

There were three different ways that were typically used. Now, the state legislatures have the freedom to do it however they want. The governor could appoint them. They're all kinds of ways. But the typical ways were that the state legislatures would just choose them. That's not political at all. Then there was popular election, but that could be done statewide, much like we elect senators today, or it could be done in districts, much in the same way that we choose congressmen. But I think anyone can see that there are partisan advantages to the different methods. And early on, the state legislatures are doing a lot of choosing. In fact, as elections become competitive, state legislatures very often take that choice away from the people because they want to control it. A good example is the election of 1800, which was so very competitive and 10 state legislatures chose the electors, bypassing the people entirely. There were only 16 states at the time, so this whole aspect of how the electors will be chosen is one of the ways that political parties game the system. We don't get widespread use of the winner take all system until about 1836, and by then every state used it, except for South Carolina. But I just want to remind listeners and readers that winner take all, what we do today in 48 states, is not prescribed by the Constitution. And Madison himself said that what they had in mind was a district elections' system. So that's one of the ways that the system has changed.

Robinson 

As it's originally designed, as you've said there, legislatures select the electors, and presumably the dominant party in the state legislature is basically selecting your electors. Then you said there's elector meddling that occurs because then you have these people who have been selected, but they have a free choice. So tell us a bit about how this gets complicated once the selection has occurred.

Dupont 

Well, once the selection has occurred, there is time before the electors actually meet and vote in their states. And in that interim, someone like Alexander Hamilton is writing to them and saying, this is how you should cast your votes. And in fact, originally, electors had two votes that were counted equally. They were supposed to choose two people, one not from within their own state. And Hamilton wanted to make sure first of all that John Adams didn't edge out George Washington. And then, he wants to get Thomas Pinckney in ahead of Thomas Jefferson. And so, he's always scheming in this way. But what's also interesting is that he utterly changes his tune by 1802 about the Electoral College. He calls it excellent in 1788, and by 1802 he's talking about its intrinsic demerits and what a humiliation it has brought on the country. And he actually helps see through a constitutional amendment, helps see to its drafting in New York State, and has it sent on to Congress and introduced there, and it actually passes the Senate. But then it gets split up, and the provision that would have stopped all this switching actually gets set aside.

Robinson 

So it seems like of the couple of points you've made so far, one is understanding that the Electoral College, even in its origins, is a messy, pragmatic measure that is introduced because nobody can agree. This is a compromise. Also, it doesn't work that well from the outset, from what you've described there. And also, it's not at all a system that we would want to return to, even if we could. And nobody advocates that.

Dupont 

Nobody advocates that. I don't think Americans would be up for giving their proxy to someone else to make that choice for them. But if I could, I'd like to mention another way that has really changed, and I think that this is really interesting. I think in certain ways, our ballots are deceptive, and so what we have is the rhetoric of a democratic choice—let the people decide. We have the activity of a democratic choice—we go to the polls, and we darken the circle by a candidate's name. But that's not the reality of what happens. I live in Kentucky, and when I darken the dot next to my candidate's name on November 5, my vote will be credited to the eight electors that Kentucky has that are pledged to that candidate, and now someone in Wyoming will only vote for three electors. And of course, we don't know these people's names. We don't have any consciousness that we're voting for them. And I just want to underscore this difference because there was a time when you showed up and cast your ballot for electors. You knew how many you were choosing, and you knew their names, but now that whole part of the process is invisible.

And just to underscore the very odd arbitrary inequality of it, if you live in California, you're actually voting for 54 electors. So we're voting for different numbers of people, and we don't know their names. Then state laws passed in the 20th century, at the time that we went to these shorter ballots, to bind the electors to vote for the candidate of the party that they're pledged to. So you think back to the Hamiltonian vision, this whole idea of making a choice, is actually, by law, now forbidden. And this is really a perversion of this system. In fact, it was a perversion of the system by the second decade of the 19th century. You have framers who participated in creating it who say, this is not what we envisioned—it is not the system that we created.

Robinson 

It's funny because we talk about the Electoral College and about whether we should abolish it, and we talk about it basically as the number 270 to win versus the popular vote and adding up that number. The whole part of it with the electors, as you say, is invisible, and also, everyone wants it to be irrelevant. There's a kind of consensus that the part where you're voting for people, and the people are then going to cast their vote, is just essentially a formality, and we have to keep it a formality to avoid the chaos of the faithless elector. And then all of a sudden, because of this arcane piece of the system, some people that you've never heard of are actually the people who are picking the president. 

Dupont 

That's right, and just to underscore the point a little bit further, these electors really serve no purpose. And the fact that it's eight if you live in Kentucky, three if you're in Wyoming, 40 if you're in Texas, 54 if you're in California, really underscores that what we have now is an algorithm. And I think back to, let the people decide. What would people think if we told them the truth and said, let the algorithm decide? I think people would object if they really understood what is actually happening, and it's a distortion in ways that we would never tolerate in any other election.

Robinson 

One of the things you do in the book, in addition to recounting the history of how this system came about, how it changed over time into what we have now, and departs completely from the Founding Fathers original agreement, is to go through the arguments that could be made today in favor of maintaining this system. One of those arguments makes pretty clear that they're myths. That instead of a national popular vote system where whoever gets the most votes becomes president, we have a system where we have the electors, each state has its numbers, and you have to get 270 to win—the argument is that this helps the small states. And I go back and read pieces in defense of the Electoral College, and they all say, well, you wouldn't want the metro centers to have too much of an advantage. Can you respond to that and explain why you don't accept that?

Dupont 

Because what we are is a country of incredible political diversity, and that political diversity is present in every part of the United States. So for example, you probably know this if you've gotten all the way through the book, what state gave Donald Trump the most votes in 2020? That would be California. Six million Americans voted for Donald Trump in California. Texas gave more votes to Biden than New York did. And so what this argument is assuming is that people vote as monoliths. But 25 percent of people in Los Angeles voted for Donald Trump. Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country, and yet it's almost split fifty-fifty. So it's not even possible for the metropolitan centers to carry the vote in their states, much less to carry the votes in the entire country. And what we're instead doing is completely disenfranchising anyone who doesn't vote with the majority in their state. And then we take the rest of those and give some the weight of 54 which, by the way, is 20 percent of what you need to win the Electoral College. So California, by the Electoral College, could get you 20 percent of the way to victory, and you can actually win the Electoral College with the 12 largest states. 

Robinson 

So much for helping the small states. You could just win the large states, and then you're done.

Dupont 

Exactly. And so this is really a myth. It's always interesting to me, too, that people who make these defenses never actually offer data or numbers. They'll offer population figures, but population figures are not voting figures. And then there's this underlying, tacit assumption that everyone in California votes Democratic.

Robinson 

Well, what you're saying here suggests that one harm that the Electoral College does is to reinforce this idea that we have red states, blue states, and swing states, and that's what the country is. But as you point out, it's not that every state is a swing state, but that every state has a lot of people that are the opposite of—California, as you say, has a lot of Republicans. I'm in Louisiana, and I always think my vote just doesn't matter because we do it by the states, and the state is going to go red. So, people ask me who I voted for, and I say, who cares? Who cares who I'm voting for? Because I could vote third party, I could vote for Kamala Harris, and it wouldn't matter. So it disenfranchises those of us who live in that state, but a national popular vote system would, in fact, make it so that the votes of rural conservative people in California or liberal people in Austin would actually matter.

Dupont 

Precisely. And I do sometimes hear people say that it helps rural voters, but that's just not true. There are tons of red rural voters in places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. There are tons of blue rural voters in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, that are disenfranchised by this system. And I would really encourage listeners and readers to look for a county or precinct level election map. The New York Times actually published a very detailed map of the 2020 election. You can see any state that you think you know what color it is, red or blue, and it will just be stunning to you how much of the other color is there. And so it's really flattening this, I think, wonderful political diversity.

Robinson 

It's very strange, the defendants of the Electoral College. You responded repeatedly through the book to Tara Ross, who's written a whole book defending the Electoral College. Some of these defenses are really strange. 

She writes, for instance, that "the Electoral College forces presidential candidates to build a support base that is national in character, because focusing too exclusively on one region or one special interest would cause a candidacy to fail. You have to appeal to as many States interests as possible." 

But it strikes me that actually it's entirely the opposite. It means that nobody's going to campaign here in Louisiana because it's a foregone conclusion what the outcome of the state will be. But if we had a national popular vote system, Kamala Harris could go into a metro city in a deep red state, and it would actually be worth it. Donald Trump would go to California to campaign.

Dupont 

You're exactly right. And I don't mean to keep coming back to California, but that's the one that so many of the tropes are all about. The Republican Party has no incentive to try to get votes from California because it's got such a big margin that they wouldn't be able to achieve it. The Democratic Party is not trying to get any more votes in California. And it's also quite interesting that it doesn't, in that regard, reward broadening the franchise. It doesn't reward turnout, and in some cases, it actually rewards quite the opposite because you get the exact number of electors, no matter what the margins are—you can win by one vote margin, or you can win by a million vote margin, and you get the exact same numbers of electors.

Robinson 

But I will say it does seem to me there’s one argument for the Electoral College: I am a Republican, and it helps the Republican Party win. If you believe that the Republican Party deserves to win because you worry about the agenda of the Democratic Party, it does seem to me that systematically, since we know that Republicans have only managed to win the popular vote once or twice in the last—I can't remember exactly how many—

Dupont 

Well, since 1988 only once.  [note: this episode was recorded before the 2024 election]

Robinson 

Yes, you go through all the principled arguments, and you make it pretty clear that you can't—I'll quote you: "it reflects no valuable principle, confers no benefits and endangers our republic." I think you proved that case pretty successfully. But if I'm a Republican, I'm still going, yes, but it sure does help us win. 

Dupont 

Let me just kind of reframe what you're saying in a way, and we'll see how really lacking in any principle or value it is. I think that almost all of us want to believe that we have values underpinning our politics. And it seems to me that the only reason for having the Electoral College is that you want ways around the choice of the majority. Because if you are committed to majority rule, then a national popular vote is just fine. But if you're not committed to that, and you want ways to subvert the majority, well, then the Electoral College is for you. And I think another way to think about this is that the political equality argument is so very important. And I actually heard an Electoral College defender say something to the effect of, you're just making a fetish out of equality.

Robinson 

That's a funny phrase. 

Dupont 

Well, it's very funny, considering that just basic political equality is something that so many of us, our ancestors, fought for. Women have fought for that. African Americans have fought for that, and indeed, men without property fought for that. And so it really ought to be a bedrock principle that when we show up to vote, we all have equal power. And I just want to say that this was absolutely a principle that James Madison embraced and that Thomas Jefferson embraced. Jefferson said in an 1816 letter—I love the way he said this, and I hope that I can say it with as much beauty if I can remember the quote—that a government is republican in proportion that it gives all its members an equal say in the direction of its concerns, and we just don't all have an equal say right now.

Robinson 

And it strikes me that even if there are a number of people who are perhaps Republican partisans, who are very reluctant to entertain even any of the arguments against the Electoral College because it would make it more difficult to win presidential elections, as we've said, there are many conservative voters for whom you can make the argument, well, don't you want your vote to matter? Even here in Louisiana, don't you want candidates to have to campaign for your vote instead of it being a foregone conclusion?

Dupont 

It's so true. And it actually would make both parties better, because the whole theory of democratic accountability is that parties have to respond to the changing electorate, and I think what we have now is an overly rigid kind of system. But certainly when a party is trying to win without the majority of the vote, they're not responding to the electorate, and you can get some extremists in a few places, and there you are. I think it actually helps push the parties to the extremes.

Robinson 

And so you could say to a Republican voter, look, your own party will take you for granted because they've already won Louisiana, so why do they need another vote? But, they'll need another vote in a popular vote system. Okay, we've made the case. We've seen how there are all these myths. We've seen how we don't even use the system that the Founding Fathers had. We've seen all the disadvantages. Let's assume that we have successfully persuaded our readers and our listeners of the case you make in this book. But then they're going to ask you, Professor Dupont, how could it ever change? What would be the means by which we would transition? 

Dupont 

Well, the best way to change is to have a constitutional amendment. And I think this is a good place for me to say that Americans have always been dissatisfied with this system. More than a thousand amendment proposals have been introduced in Congress, more than on any other subject, on the Electoral College, and seven times an amendment has passed one house of Congress only to fail in the other. But it's come close twice. In 1822, that amendment failed by six votes in the House. In 1969, the amendment that passed the House was for abolishing the Electoral College, and it won 83 percent of the vote. I think that's just a staggering statistic, that Congress agreed—83 percent of them—that this mechanism had to go. And it's very telling that what happened to that amendment was that it got filibustered by segregationists in the Senate. And so, I'm taking a long time to answer. There are people in Congress who are very aware of this and very interested in it. There are a number of different organizations, and I think that what it really starts with is waking people up. And I think people need to feel the outrage. And I think that  it depends on what happens in November, but we're in a time of great political change, and when politics is fluid, that's when we have the best chance for something like this to succeed.

Robinson 

You mentioned in the book this project somebody proposed, the National Popular Vote Compact. Tell us about that. You do conclude it's not the optimum way to go, but it's probably worth mentioning.

Dupont 

It is worth mentioning. I'm a little bit ambivalent about it because I love these people, and they're pointing out the problem and bringing attention to the problem. On the other hand, I think it's an imperfect solution because it seems to be kind of a workaround, and it would be subject to constitutional challenges. I think there's good reason to believe that might succeed, or that the challenges might succeed. What it essentially does is a state legislature agrees that it's going to give its electors to the winner of the national popular vote, not necessarily to the winner in their state, and it doesn't go into effect until states with 270, totally 270 electors, have signed on to it, so it won't go into effect yet. But I also think that there's an argument to be made that it's sort of playing fast and loose with the rules. So for example, if Kentucky were to sign on to that compact and Kentucky chose the Republican, but the Democrat won the national popular vote and then Kentucky gave its electors to the Democrat, I think there's an argument to be made that people would feel cheated. And they ought to feel cheated now, but they would also, I think, possibly feel cheated in that scenario. And I think that how we feel about the fairness of our system really matters. It gives it legitimacy.

Robinson 

When I first heard about it, I thought, well, this is clever. That was my first reaction to it. I was like, what if we just gave our votes to whoever won the national popular vote? That's good. But as you point out, ultimately, what we need is a fair system enshrined in the Constitution, a system that works. And you go through numerous ways, and it is staggering. You point out just how far the Electoral College tally can depart from the popular vote. Ronald Reagan turns the whole country red, and you look and go, wow, this massive victory, just an overwhelming blowout. And then you look at the popular vote, and it wasn't that much—

Dupont 

A bit over 50 percent. And that just demonstrates the gross distortions.

Robinson 

Yes, it's really wild when you read about it. And then, because of the history that you recount, you can't at all even make the historical appeal because of the changes in the system, and because it wasn't even meant to be something that was designed as the result of, as you say, these philosopher kings, going, what is the optimal way to select a president? 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.