Dan Snow's History Hit - The Electoral College

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Fabian Hilfrich joined me on the podcast to talk about the US electoral college.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. If I sound a bit croaky, I've been up all night. Obvs, it's exciting. It's November the 4th, 2020. It's the morning after the election, the US presidential election, Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. I'm recording this first thing in the morning. This November sun is streaming through the window. The results are still being counted. The count's taking longer than usual this year because so many absentee ballots and early ballots. And added to the fact that it is clearly very close, Trump managed to hold on to Florida and Ohio. So it's very close and it's going to come down to maybe a few thousand ballots in a few states. It's that time of the election cycle when people realise there's something called an electoral college.

The US, like the UK, does not elect its executive branch using a national popular vote. Whoever wins the most votes wins the top job. In fact, the UK is far more complicated than that. The US instead has something called an electoral college. You vote for electors who then transmit your wishes, who then translate your electoral preferences into who gets the top job. It was never designed to work like this. And in fact, it never, ever, not even once, worked as it was supposed to. And it is, like so much the US Constitution, something that dates back to the end of the 18th century, which, as you know, is my wheelhouse. It's my sweet spot. I'm always happy talking about this. Just because we wanted to get this episode out, we're actually going to repeat the episode we played four years ago.

It's one of our most listened to episodes. It's a short one. It's kind of an emergency podcast at the time when there was some suggestion that there might be something called faithless electors who had been elected by Republicans, but who might not cast their votes for Donald Trump. So this is a podcast all about the Electoral College. What is it? It is with Senior Lecturer, Head of American History, Dr Fabian Hilfrich. He is at the University of Edinburgh, and he was able to talk me through this. Some of it might appear to be a bit outdated. That's because it is outdated. It's four years old, but I thought it would be a good one to repeat and remind everyone about the vagaries of the Electoral College. If you want to go and listen to other podcasts that are four years old,

they're only available at History Hit TV. It's my new digital history channel. Check it out, historyhit.tv. You go there and you just can watch as many documentaries as you like on history. It's amazing. It's actually a history channel. There's no aliens on it. No neo-Nazi contributors, as far as we know. You go there and you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You get a month for free. So you check the whole thing out for free. And then you get the second month for just one pound a euro or dollar. By by the way we've got our new film up there at the moment i'm hoping it knocks dr elena janega with her medieval lives off the top spot that's proving to be an absolutely rampant smash hit at the moment but my new film 1916 the only documentary ever made, I think, in one take, in one shot, are homage to the brilliant 1917.

In the meantime, though, here is the very brilliant Dr. Fabian Hilfrich. Fabian, thank you for joining us. What an exciting time to be a US presidential historian. I bet you cannot believe your luck. Well, that is a good point. I'm probably as eagerly anticipating what's going to happen as most other people, most other observers are, waiting to see what the Electoral College will do, although I think it will most likely do the job it has been appointed to do. Okay, well, I'll stop you right there, because let's bring everyone up to speed here. The founding fathers didn't just make the presidential vote a straight headcount, a straight democratic ballot. They actually put quite a few little interesting mechanisms in

between the popular vote and the presidency. Now, we're seeing those all come into play this year because, as we know, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but she didn't win the state vote. Briefly, although we've heard a lot about it, briefly, can you explain why Hillary Clinton can win the popular vote by so much but lose the presidential race? Yes, I'll try to be as brief as possible. You're absolutely right that the founding fathers actually, the so-called Electoral College put in an undemocratic element into what otherwise is a democratic regime. And they did so particularly because they were worried about popular passions. And so the Electoral College effectively is a system by which each state receives a share of electors, and that share of electors is based on the size of its congressional

delegation, plus the two senators that each state has. So what the system also does is, like the entire US political system, it slightly favors smaller over larger states. And then what happens on the state by state level during the election is that, and of course, listeners in the UK will be familiar with that, is that on a state by state level, it's a first past the post system. So no matter how large the majorities in individual states are, the winner usually takes all. There are just Maine and Nebraska where there is a little exception and where it's proportional, the vote.

But otherwise, that means that if a candidate in a lot of states wins by a very small margin, and this is what happened in the case of Donald Trump, and if the other candidate wins in a few states by a very large margin, as Hillary Clinton, for example, did particularly in California, then it is entirely possible that the candidate with the most votes does not end up the candidate with the most votes in the electoral college. And this year, that discrepancy is actually the largest in U.S. history. As when I last checked, Hillary Clinton is ahead by 2.8 million votes.

The last election we had, of course, between Gore and Bush in 2000, there, the difference, I mean, also Gore had a higher count of the popular vote, but only by 500,000. So this is quite significant this year. It's really extraordinary, not just because of the character of the election and the participants, but just because of that result. But now the Electoral College isn't just a sort of mathematical exercise. People forget it actually meets, does it? Or what do you tell me? There's a gathering this week, which will see the Electoral College action their decision. Who are they? How does that happen? They are basically nominated and the constitution is basically silent on who these people have to be, although

it says they may not be allowed to be either senators or representatives. But they are usually, you know, more or less prominent citizens of the community that meet and they all meet with the purpose of casting their state's votes as they basically, I mean, as they have been decided by the voters. They are supposed to vote for the candidate who won that particular state. So back in the 18th century, was that the idea or were you supposed to vote for your elector who would then elect the president? So you sort of send a nice chap from your neighborhood off to somewhere, Washington, D.C., who would then have a vote for the president. Or was it always a sort of the idea was they would sort of always be a delegate. You would send them to the Electoral College, having told them exactly who to vote for.

No, you are right. Originally, the idea was that you would vote for a prominent citizen of your community, someone who was usually known to you and who was then also, I mean, in the 18th century, there was the possibility, or at least people were considering this, that the electors would be freer in the exercise of their vote. And we see in the early years, we sometimes see that electors did not vote for the candidate they were supposed to vote for. There is one particular instance in 1836. And this, you have to remember, this was a time where actually electors had two votes.

One vote was for the presidential candidate, and the other separate it was men at the time, where the Virginia delegation abstained in order not to vote for a vice presidential candidate who had an avowed, quite open relationship with a slave. And so they didn't want to vote for this person. The man in the end did become the vice president. So perhaps the other thing to keep in mind is that even when electors were, as it is usually called, or as it is usually known, even when they were faithless, when they did not vote for the candidate they were supposed to, or they had been instructed to vote for, this never in the history of the US changed the outcome of any election. Right. So not even back in the very earliest days. So even in the earliest days, quite quickly, the electors sort of were less important than they might have appeared to be on paper.

Yes. Yes, that that is absolutely the case. OK, so and in the 20th century, have any electors ever strayed from, you know, if you're an elector, if you're from Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania votes Republican. You just turn up and vote Republican, do you? Have there been many examples of faithless electors, people have gone against the wishes of their constituency? There have not been many examples. And frankly, scholars think, I mean, usually, you know, since for the most part, up until 2008, electors' votes were cast anonymously. No one really knew who the faithless electors were. So frankly, they couldn't have been asked about why they did what they did. that they couldn't have been asked about why they did what they did. And in some instances, quite simply, people think that they cast the wrong vote.

For example, in 2004, there must have been a faithless elector who cast the presidential vote for John Edwards, even though John Edwards was the vice presidential candidate who had been a presidential contender earlier in the campaign. But people don't actually think that this was, I mean, people think that may very well have been a mistake. So all in all, throughout American history, you have 179 cases of faithless electors on 22 separate occasions. But as you already intimated, most of these were in the 19th century. And as I said before, they've never changed the outcome of the election.

Have the electors got the power to elect Hillary Clinton this week? Well, that is very much a contested area. I think very much the assumption is that they will cast their votes as they have been instructed to cast their votes. Although it is also true that the Supreme Court never passed on the constitutionality of the measures that some states have, where they basically promise to penalize faithless electors. So ultimately, you could say this is untested. But what we can very definitely say is, were this to happen in the case of this election, I think the United States would be thrown into a very deep constitutional crisis. And so I frankly do not expect this to happen. I mean, we had the speculation, we had very similar

speculations in 2000. Remember the election with the hanging chads and where the Supreme Court ultimately stopped the recount in Florida and so on and so forth. So again, a very contested election and an election where you might have thought, well, if there ever was the case for faithless electors, this would be the case, as it is very much again now. But nothing happened then. And I don't, I frankly don't expect that enough electors would swing their vote to Hillary Clinton for this to really change the outcome of the election. Is this an example of the Constitution as it was conceived back in the 18th century was a very interesting mixed Constitution, but with aristocratic elements, with democratic elements. Is this another example of the Electoral College being just having to do exactly what the people tell them to do? And an example of how the democratic elements have grown increasingly stronger within the US Constitution? Because if you look at the old days, senators could be elected in all sorts of weird and different ways and congressmen. Now, lots of

those, lots of the things that the founding fathers put in the way of popular passion has slowly been dismantled over the following 250 years, haven't they? Well, yes, you can say that, although I think this this really doesn't apply to the Electoral College. I mean, I think you would really have to if you wanted to strengthen the democratic elements in this respect, you would have to dismantle the Electoral College, because I think this system will only work if the electors, by and large, remain faithful to to their instructions, because otherwise that entire system will break down and you won't ever. And once it breaks down, it will be very difficult to fix again because you won't ever know when they should or when they should not be faithful to their vote. And which electors should be faithful and which should be faithless. and which should be faithless. So frankly, I mean, I completely agree with you that there are these elements in the U.S. Constitution which strike us as anomalous, which ever a political debate, any political debate in which the constitution is not invoked. So frankly, I don't see that there is going to be a reform process that would completely overhaul the system. So I think, you know, for better or for worse, the United States is stuck with the electoral college.

Fabian, thank you so much for joining us on this very exciting week. I have a feeling I'm going to be calling you again over the next few weeks, months and years. I hope you're happy to come back on the podcast. Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much for having me. for having me. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle

out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.