Community Corner: Abolish the Electoral College and the US Senate

by Gary Swing

The United States is the only country that uses an Electoral College to select its chief executive. The Electoral College was modeled after the system that the Holy Roman Empire used to select its emperor.

If the United States has direct presidential elections instead of a parliamentary system, the winner of the national popular vote should be elected president. A parliamentary system would be better to decentralize authority and rein in the imperial presidency.

The Electoral College and the US Senate should be abolished. These archaic relics of slavery institutionalize distorted representation by permanently overrepresenting less populated, rural conservative states. Each individual person should have equal voting rights.

The US Constitution was designed as a compact with slavery, as Alfred and Ruth Rosenblum explained in their book “Slave Nation.” Representation by state rather than by population in the US Senate and the Electoral College gave inflated representation to slave states. So did the “three fifths compromise,” which counted slaves as three fifths of a person to give extra voting power to slaveholders.

Ninety five countries now use proportional representation to secure fair, inclusive multiparty representation in their national legislatures. It is way past time for the United States to leave the political dark ages and catch up to the election systems that modern societies implemented in the 20th Century. Members of a unicameral Congress and unicameral state legislatures should be elected by proportional representation. Each party should win seats in proportion to its share of the vote.

In the United States, we’re still stuck with an archaic system that was designed in secret 237 years ago by a handful of rich white men who sought to preserve their own wealth and power. Most of them were slave holders.

The Constitution signed by 39 of those men originally excluded about 94% of the population from the right to representation in government. There were about 3.9 million people living in the United States in 1790. Today, there are about 334 million people living in the United States under a Constitution that was designed to preserve slavery.

A legitimate government would be one based on the consent of the governed.
No person living today ratified the Constitution of a “Slave Nation.” A system of government built on a foundation of slavery can never be legitimate.

Abolitionist Lysander Spooner correctly described the US Constitution as a “Constitution of No Authority.”

In a letter to fellow slaveholder James Madison, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson wrote that “The Earth belongs to the living generation.” Jefferson argued that a constitution could not bind future generations. He said a constitution should expire after one generation, which he estimated to be nineteen years.

Jefferson wrote: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”

“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind,” he wrote. “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Each generation should create its own constitution. We are at least 218 years overdue to retire the Constitution designed by slaveholders and replace it with a modern system of government. Indeed, the 2012 Cambridge University study “Conceptualizing Constitutions” found that the average lifespan of national constitutions created since 1789 was 19 years before they were replaced with new constitutions – just as Thomas Jefferson proposed.

The convention that drafted the US Constitution didn’t intend to have popular elections for the president. The delegates at the Constitutional Convention voted three times — the first time unanimously — to establish a parliamentary system with the president being appointed by Congress. However, the delegates weren’t satisfied with that proposal, so a committee proposed the creation of the Electoral College instead.

Each state legislature would appoint a number of electors equal to the state’s number of members in Congress. These electors would vote in an Electoral College to choose the President. Two days after the conference report came out, the delegates voted to establish the Electoral College, but the language they used stated that each state’s legislature would determine the method for selecting the state’s presidential electors. Within twelve years after the ratification of the US Constitution, the Electoral College changed from a system of legislative appointment to a system for the public election of a slate of presidential electors. Today, the US has the world’s most ridiculous system for choosing its chief executive, using the longest, most expensive, most meaningless, and most cumbersome election process.

The US Senate is one of the most ridiculous legislative bodies in the world. Each state has two US Senators, regardless of the state’s population. When the US Constitution was put into effect, the largest state had 11 times the population of the smallest states. Now, California has about 67 times the population of Wyoming, but each has two US Senate seats. This was not a principled decision by the framers of the US Constitution. It was “garbage in, garbage out.” At the Constitutional Convention, each state was given one vote, regardless of its population. Five and a half states voted for the creation of a Senate with equal representation for each state. Four and a half states voted against it. Three states abstained. Massachusetts split its vote evenly. The states that voted in favor of the Senate represented a minority of the states with a minority of the US population. The smaller states would not agree to form a union without equal representation in the Senate; hence it was a coerced compromise.

The US Senate has consistently created an artificial conservative bias in Congress, giving more power to sparsely populated, rural, conservative states that tended to support slavery. The slave states were even given extra power in the US House of Representatives because the Census included each slave as three fifths of a human being for the purpose of allocating each state’s number of US Representative seats. So the Constitution not only preserved slavery, but added insult to injury by using the practice of slavery to give even more representation to the slaveholders. Between 1800 and 1860, the US Senate blocked Congressional votes against slavery eight times. Even after slavery was abolished, the US Senate blocked legislation to protect the human rights of African Americans for another century. In recent decades, the equal representation of small states in the US Senate has artificially inflated the conservative Republican representation in Congress and established the ability of a conservative minority to block judicial appointments.

As attorney Thomas Geoghegan wrote in his argument for abolishing the US Senate, “the Constitution itself is an illegal act: from the Continental Congress, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had only the narrower mandate of amending the Articles of Confederation, and the amending of the Articles was supposed to require a unanimous vote. Instead, the Framers went rogue, and drafted a whole Constitution to be adopted for thirteen states if just nine agreed. Our country has never been legitimate by any standard that would hold up in a court.”

Gary Swing, Secretary
Unity Party of Colorado

2024 Unity Party candidate for State Senate District 18