Why Getting the Most Votes Matters
Majority
rule shapes our lives — except when it comes to electing the president.
By Jesse Wegman
Mr.
Wegman is a member of the editorial board.
- Dec. 13, 2020, 3:10 p.m. ET
As the 538 members of the Electoral
College gather on Monday to carry out their constitutional duty and officially
elect Joe Biden as the nation’s 46th president and Kamala Harris as his vice
president, we are confronted again with the jarring reminder that it could
easily have gone the other way. We came within a hairbreadth of re-electing a
man who finished more than seven million votes behind his opponent — and we
nearly repeated the shock of 2016, when Donald Trump took office after coming
in a distant second in the balloting.
No other election in the country is run
like this. But why not? That question has been nagging at me for the past few
years, particularly in the weeks since Election Day, as I’ve watched with
morbid fascination the ludicrous effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to use the
Electoral College to subvert the will of the majority of American voters and
overturn an election that he lost.
The obvious answer is that, for the
most part, we abide by the principle of majority rule.
From the time we are old enough to
count, we are taught that the bigger number beats the smaller number. It is the
essence of fairness. It dictates outcomes in all areas of life, from politics
to sports to cattle auctions. It’s decisive even in institutions whose purpose
is to serve as a buffer against the majority.
“Take the Supreme
Court,” said Akhil Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School. “No one
thinks that when it’s 5 to 4, the four win and the five lose. Everyone
understands that five beats four. It goes without saying.”
But the principle is especially
important in elections. Why? Boil it down to three pillars of democratic
self-governance: equality, legitimacy and accountability. We ignore them at our
peril. And yet they are being ignored right now by millions of Americans, not
to mention hundreds of high-ranking elected officials of one of our two major
political parties.
It occurred to me that in this moment,
a defense of the concept of majority rule can no longer go without saying.
First, and most fundamental: Majority
rule is the only rule that treats all people as political equals. “That’s
actually enormously important,” said Richard Primus, a professor at the
University of Michigan law school. Any other rule inevitably treats certain
votes as worth more than others. Sometimes that’s what we want, as when we
require criminal juries to be unanimous in voting to convict. In that case,
“there is one error that we prefer to the other error,” Mr. Primus said. “We
want to make false convictions very difficult, much more rare than false
acquittals.”
But in an election for the president,
he said, there is no “morally relevant criterion” for departing from majority
rule. Voters in one part of the country are no wiser or more worthy than voters
in another. And yet the votes of those in certain states always matter more.
“What could possibly justify that?” Mr. Primus asked.
This is not just an
abstract numerical concern. When people’s votes are treated as unequal, it’s a
short jump to treating people as unequal. Put another way, it’s not enough to
say that we’re all equal before the law; we also must be able to have an equal
say in the choice of the representatives who make and enforce the laws.
There is a second reason majority rule
is critical: It bestows legitimacy on the system. A representative government
only works when its citizens see the electoral process as fair.
When that legitimacy is absent, when
people perceive — often accurately — that their vote doesn’t matter, they will
eventually reject the system.
“If we’re going to rule ourselves,
we’re going to be ruled by majorities,” said Astra Taylor, an author and
democracy activist. “There’s a stability in that idea. There’s a sense of the
people deciding for themselves and buying in. That stability is incredibly
valuable. The alternative is one in which we’re being ruled by something which
is outside of us, whether a dictator or a technocracy or an algorithm.”
Finally, majority rule ensures
electoral accountability. As the economist Amartya Sen put it, democracies don’t have famines. A government that
doesn’t have to earn the support of a majority of its citizens, or at least a
plurality, is not truly accountable to them, and has no incentive to represent
their interests or provide for their needs. This opens the door to neglect,
corruption and abuse of power. (Talk to the millions of Californians ignored by
President Trump during wildfire season.) “If someone has to run for
re-election, they have to put attention into running things well,” Mr. Amar
said. “If they don’t, they will lose elections.”
The benefits of majority rule aren’t
just a preoccupation for liberals like me, still stewing over the elections of
2000 and 2016. On election night 2012, when it appeared briefly that Mitt
Romney might win the national popular vote but not the Electoral College,
Donald Trump tweeted, “The
electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” A little while later, he
tweeted, “More votes equals a loss … revolution!”
He deleted that
second one, but he needn’t have. He was only expressing a gut feeling everyone
can recognize: The person who gets the most votes should win. If you doubt
that, consider that the essence of the case Mr. Trump and his backers are
making in every state where they are challenging the result is that the
president won more votes than Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump made the same argument in
2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million, yet insisted that
he had actually won it “if you deduct the millions of people who voted
illegally.”
That both claims are
laughably false is beside the point. Mr. Trump knows that in a democracy, real
legitimacy comes from winning more votes than the other guy (or woman).
Of course, everyone is a fan of
majority rule until they realize they can win without it. In the last 20 years,
Republicans have been gifted the White House while losing the popular vote
twice, and it came distressingly close to happening for a third time this year.
So it’s no surprise that in that period, the commitment of Republicans to
majority rule, along with other democratic norms, has plummeted. A report by
an international team of political
scientists found a steep drop in Republican support for things
like free and fair elections, and the respectful treatment of political
opponents. The party’s rhetoric “is closer to authoritarian parties” in Eastern
Europe, the report found.
For modern Republicans, democracy has
become a foreign language. “We’re not a democracy,” Senator Mike Lee of
Utah tweeted in October, in what has become a disturbingly
common refrain among conservatives. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty,
peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank
democracy can thwart that.”
Notice how, in Mr. Lee’s telling, “democracy” morphs into “rank democracy.” What does he mean by “rank democracy”? Presumably, what James Madison referred to as direct or “pure” democracy, the form of self-rule in which people vote directly on the laws that govern them.
But there is no such thing as “rank democracy” when it comes to
elections. The term is nothing more than a modern Republican euphemism for
majority rule.
Speaking of the founders, Republicans
love to invoke them in support of their stiff-arming of democracy. Perhaps they
forgot what those founders actually said.
“The fundamental maxim of republican
government,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 22, “requires that the sense of the
majority should prevail.”
James Madison, who is often cited for
his warnings about the threats of popular majorities, changed his tune after
spending several decades watching the American system of government he designed
play out in practice. “No government of human device and human administration
can be perfect,” Madison wrote in 1834. But
republican government is “the best of all governments, because the least imperfect,”
and “the vital principle of republican government is … the will of the
majority.”
Thomas Jefferson, in his first Inaugural Address, said the “sacred principle” is that “the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail.” In the same breath he emphasized that political minorities also have rights that require protection. Those protections exist in the design of our government and in the guarantees of the Constitution, as applied by the courts. The point is that minorities can be protected at the same time that majorities elect leaders to represent us in the first place.
Joe Biden will be the
next president because he won the Electoral College. But he should really have
the job because he won the most votes.