It would be worse than a shame to get rid of the singular invention of those who drafted the Constitution of 1787. It would be a mistake, and a very big mistake at that. Just what was that unique entity? It would be the creation of “electors” to serve in what we have come to call the electoral college.

Lots of other countries have presidents and legislators and judges. Some countries even have some semblance of our separation of powers. But no other country has a separate set of unelected “electors.” Rather than dismissing this “college” as outmoded, or deeply flawed, or itself a terrible mistake, we should keep it just as it is.

Instead, we are in the process of making a very big mistake all our own. It goes by the unwieldy name of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). What it amounts to is an end run around the electoral college by way of a state-by-state agreement to surrender their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

Apparently, this can be accomplished without the messiness of bothering to amend the Constitution. But not to worry, say NPVICers. No state will be required to abide by this pledge until enough states have signed on to constitute a majority of the 270 electoral college votes necessary for victory.

No doubt this explains why the recent Trump victory does not seem to be leading to any serious reconsideration of this end run. At the moment sixteen states, plus the District of Columbia, have taken the pledge. Not surprisingly, virtually every one of this “sweet sixteen” is a reliably blue state. Had their compact been in effect last fall Trump would have virtually swept the entire electoral board. Only Virginia would have escaped his reach, since it was the only non-NPVIC state that Harris won.

The irony here is inescapable. Just imagine Donald Trump, the alleged dictator, taking office on the heels of a massive 525-13 romp in the electoral college. Heck, with that kind of wind in his sails who knows what he might try to do. He might even be able to make a case that he has grounds for behaving as the autocrat he was charged with intending to be during the campaign!

To be sure, the founders did intend to create an independent executive. The British parliamentary system was not for them, as it has not been for us. The electoral college alone is evidence of that, since it was the result of a compromise between choosing a president by popular vote or by a vote of Congress. Detaching the president from Congress was—and remains—important.

But the electoral college has had perhaps unintended positive benefits as well. One such benefit has been to boost the impact of a popular vote win, which was precisely the result in 2024, as well as many times before that.

Trump won the popular vote comfortably. He won the electoral vote decisively. But he did not win it anywhere close to overwhelmingly. A margin of 525-13 would be somewhere beyond overwhelming, not to mention somewhere close to the old Soviet vote total neck of the woods.

Decisive, but not lopsided, electoral college results happen quite often–and to the benefit of both parties. For example, in 1960 John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by just under 111,000 votes in the general election, but his electoral college margin was 303-209. Eight years later Nixon returned the favor by defeating our own Hubert Humphrey by fewer than 112,000 votes nationally, while “carrying” the electoral college 301 to 191, with the remaining votes going to third party candidate George Wallace.

Essentially, three arguments have been put forth for instituting and now keeping the electoral college. Most important, it has served to strengthen the power and independence of the office of the president, whether intentionally by removing Congress from the selection process or unintentionally by solidifying and enhancing a president’s victory at the polls.

And ours is intentionally a presidential system. There had been no executive at all under the Articles of Confederation. In addition, state governors initially had very limited powers and often had to face the voters every year. Patrick Henry’s warning had carried the day during and immediately after the American revolution: “Where annual elections end, slavery begins.”

By 1787, however, revolutionary-era thinking about the executive had changed significantly, and Patrick Henry (who “smelled a rat”) chose to stay away from the constitutional convention. Hence a very different result, namely a president independent of the legislature, a president with a four year term, and a president who initially could be re-elected to any number of terms.

To be sure, many delegates also liked the idea of one final check on the popular vote. They wanted to make sure that power would always “flow” to those of “the most diffuse and established character,” to borrow from John Jay, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers; hence these separate “electors” whose sole task was to confirm the final verdict.

Lastly, those who favored the electoral college wanted to preserve some semblance of equality among the states; therefore, the guarantee of a minimum of three votes for each state, one for each senator and one for each representative. The additional idea here is that the electoral college would help assure that a president would have wide support throughout the country, rather than being able to win a national election by dominating a single region.

That is precisely what happened in 1888 when Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by running up huge majorities in the states of the old Confederacy, while losing the electoral college vote to Benjamin Harrison. Of course, it happened again in 2016 when Hillary Clinton took the popular vote by just under 3,000,000 votes, largely because she had won California by almost 4,300,000 votes.

One possible reform idea would be to apportion a state’s electoral votes by congressional district. That would require the protracted messiness of a constitutional amendment. More than that, it would likely take the edge off a clear, if less than overwhelming, presidential victory.

For example, a compilation of the electoral vote by congressional district for the 2024 election reveals that Trump’s win would have been a much more narrow one. He carried thirty of the fifty states, so there are sixty electoral votes right off the bat. Harris took twenty states, plus the District of Columbia, for forty-two electoral votes.

Combing through the state-by-state congressional district vote would add 226 electoral votes to Trump’s column, with 210 going to Harris. A final “result” of 286-252 would have closely approximated the actual popular vote difference. This should not be surprising. It might also suggest that such a “reform” would likely be redundant at best.

In fact, had this been on the books in 2016 Trump would still have won, but by a reduced margin of 277-258 in the electoral college compared to the actual result of 304-227. Once again the typical electoral college boost had kicked into play.

Essentially the same thing happened in 2020, but with a reversed result. Biden’s actual electoral college victory of 306-232 would have been cut to 272-256, if the numbers had been based on the states and congressional districts won by each of the two candidates.

So why not leave well enough alone. By and large, the system works. In fact, in recent elections it has worked just about the way it should work. There will always be a few “battleground” states that will get more attention than others. But those states will seldom be the same from election to election, or certainty from era to era, as citizens freely move from place to place and/or become more–or less–involved in the political process.

Besides, after pouring over congressional district results it becomes quite apparent that only a small percentage of house races are themselves truly competitive. The vast majority of them are blowouts to one degree or another. To assure more uniform competitiveness, should some sort of a NPVIC solution be applied to each state’s congressional districts?

One more “besides” cannot be resisted. It’s a piece of advice to supporters of the NPVIC: beware of what you wish for. For that matter, we all ought to be wary of any president-elect riding into office on the wave of a Stalin-like or Mao-like, let alone a Hitlerian-sized, win in a trumped-up electoral college after states have waived and waved their own electoral votes away and goodbye.

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The featured image is a photograph of Vice President J.D. Vance and President Trump on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.