The “already-exists” argument in favor of the electoral college

I have noticed a common type of argument made by those who support the US’s current electoral college system and oppose efforts like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). I will dub each of the individual members in this general category of arguments an “already-exists” argument. These are arguments centered around a problem that would, or potentially could, happen if we got rid of the current winner-take-all system in the electoral college and replaced it with a national popular vote, but which, crucially, ignore the fact that this problem not only already exists under the current system (hence the category’s name), but is in fact either as bad or even worse currently than it would be under the NPVIC. Of course, this point is ignored because if those making this argument acknowledged it, it would invalidate their argument against the NPVIC.

There are many examples of these fallacious arguments: my personal favorite is that a candidate could potentially win under the NPVIC with just a plurality of the popular vote (see here for a recent example). Obviously, not only is this very much a real problem under our current system, it is worse under the current system than it would be under the NPVIC. But that doesn’t stop opponents of the NPVIC from trotting it out to support their position.

There are other bogus arguments used by electoral college-defenders that are already-exists arguments as well: for example, the argument that the results would be vulnerable to fraud ignores the fact that this is quite also possible under the current system, meaning that this problem also already exists. Moreover, and in keeping with the plurality argument, this argument also fails to acknowledge that altering the results of an election with vote fraud of some sort is easier in a system like the current one, where winning a state by a single vote gets you all of its electoral votes, compared to a NPVIC system, where you would need to wipe out a lead that would probably be at least a million votes to actually change who won.

Here are some additional “already-exists” arguments that are made in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the current winner-take-all Electoral College system:

• “The US is not a democracy!” This is true, of course, but what the US is is a constitutional republic, meaning that the public at large is supposed to vote on who our leaders should be. The basic concept of a vote is supposed to mean that it is a popularity contest so that the candidate with the most votes should win — this is how elections for all-non-president elected offices in the United States work. Indeed, we already are voting on who are leaders should be, but all the Electoral College (in its current form) does is distort those votes, in part by ignoring those cast for the losing candidates in every state.
• Candidates would ignore most of the country: Of course, they already do ignore most of the country, because most Americans do not live in swing states. So this argument does ignore that most of the country is being ignored under the current system. Furthermore, by definition, areas of the country containing most voters would have to get the most attention, regardless of whether they were in swing states or not. Defenses of the current system as making candidates focus on swing states that are supposedly a “microcosm” of the US as a whole ignore that there is no better representation of the US as a whole than the US as a whole, and candidates would need to focus on the entire country if the state-level winner-take-all rule of the Electoral College were eliminated.
• Under a national popular vote we would potentially have to conduct national recounts: again, under the current winner-take-all system, this problem already exists: state-level recounts are often necessary when a given state is decided by a tiny margin, rendering the issue of who will win that state unclear. The odds of a state being decided by a very narrow margin small enough to necessitate a recount (e.g. Florida in 2000) are much higher compared to the odds of the entire country’s popular vote being decided by such a margin. After all, in 2000, Gore lost Florida by only 537 votes despite receiving over half a million more votes nationally than Bush. Clearly, we would have far fewer potentially necessary recounts if we only decided the winner of the election based on one geographic region (the entire United States) rather than 51 (each of the 50 states and DC separately).