How To Steal An Election — Electoral College Edition

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Unless you have been living in a cabin deep in the woods with no internet access for the past four years, you know that Donald Trump and his enablers intend to use the Electoral College to steal the 2024 election. They tried in 2020 and failed, but they learned from their mistakes and think they have figured out how to do it right this time. The first step in the process is to convince people that there is a tidal wave of ineligible people voting. The second step is to inundate local election officials with freedom of information requests, which by law have priority, so they are unable to perform their statutory functions. If a lot of them quit because of the pressure, so much the better. Then they can be replaced by unqualified sycophants who will contribute to the chaos on election day.

The United States saw exactly that kind of chaos on election day in 2000 when well organized stooges hired by James Baker descended on Florida to disrupt the counting of ballots. In that case, the so-called Supreme Court stepped in to stop the counting of the votes and declared George W. Bush the winner. That court has since been fortified with more Federalist Society extremists and can be counted on to tilt the scales of justice in favor of the red team once again if asked to do so.

But Trump and his advisers hope it doesn’t get that far. They are counting on a little known provision of the Constitution to throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state has one vote. Since there are more red states than blue states, the vote in the House will be a foregone conclusion. Trump will win, but he is just a stalking horse for the lunatics who have put together the 900+ page Project 2025 that will eviscerate democracy in America — maybe forever.

Why Does America Have An Electoral College?

To understand how we got into this mess, we look to historian Heather Cox Richardson to explain the historical roots of this situation. Many may think what is happening today is unique to this moment, but the reality is that we have been here several times before and the republic has always survived — until now.

In a country of 330 million people in 50 states and Washington, D.C., presidential elections are decided in just a handful of states and it is possible for someone who loses the popular vote to become president, Richardson says. We got to this place thanks to the Electoral College and to two major changes made to it since the ratification of the Constitution. The men who debated how to elect a president in 1787 worried about making sure there were hedges around the strong executive they were creating so that he could not become a king. Some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted Congress to choose the president, but this horrified others who believed that a leader and Congress would collude to take over the government permanently.

Others liked the idea of direct election of the president, but this worried delegates from smaller states who thought that big states would simply be able to name their own favorite sons. It also worried those who pointed out that most voters would have no idea which were the leading men in other states, leaving a national institution, like the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War officers, the power to get its members to support their own leader, thus finding a different way to create a dictator.

The Origin Of The Electoral College

Ultimately, the framers came up with the election of a president by a group of men well known in their states but not currently office-holders, who would meet somewhere other than the seat of government and would disband as soon as the election was over. Each elector in this so-called Electoral College would cast two votes for president. The man with the most votes would be president, and the man with the second number of votes would be vice president — a system that the Twelfth Amendment ended in 1804. The number of electors would be equal to the number of senators and representatives allotted to each state in Congress. If no candidate earned a majority, the House of Representatives would choose the president, with each state delegation casting a single vote. So that is where the idea of making the election into a jumpball in the House this year originated.

In the first two presidential elections, none of this mattered very much, since the electors cast their ballots unanimously for George Washington. But when Washington stepped down, leaders of the newly formed political parties contended for the presidency. In the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams won, but Thomas Jefferson, who led the Democratic-Republicans was keenly aware that had Virginia given him all its electoral votes, rather than splitting them between him and Adams, he would have been president.

Winner Take All

On January 12, 1800, Jefferson wrote to the governor of Virginia, James Monroe, urging him to back a winner-take-all system that awarded all of Virginia’s electoral votes to the person who won the majority of the vote in the state. He admitted that dividing electoral votes by district “would be more likely to be an exact representation of [voters’] diversified sentiments,” but, defending his belief that he was the true popular choice in the country in 1796, said voting by districts “would give a result very different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the US. were they assembled together.” Virginia made the switch.

Alarmed, the Federalists in Massachusetts followed suit to make sure Adams got all their votes, and by 1836, every state but South Carolina, where the legislature continued to choose electors until 1860, had switched to winner take all. This change horrified the so-called Father of the Constitution, James Madison, who worried that the new system would divide the nation geographically and encourage sectional tensions. He wrote in 1823 that voting by district, rather than winner take all, “was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted.” He proposed a constitutional amendment to end winner take all.

But almost immediately, the Electoral College caused a different crisis. In 1824, electors split their votes among four candidates — Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford — and none won a majority in the Electoral College. Although Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, when the election went to the House, the state delegations chose Adams, the son of former president John Adams.

Furious Jackson supporters thought a developing elite had stolen the election, and after they elected Jackson outright in 1828, the new president on December 8, 1829, implored Congress to amend the Constitution to elect presidents by popular vote. “To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate,” he wrote; “it was never designed that their choice should in any case be defeated, either by the intervention of electoral colleges or … the House of Representatives.”

Jackson warned that an election in the House could be corrupted by money or power or ignorance. He also warned that “under the present mode of election a minority may … elect a President,” and such a president could not claim legitimacy. He urged Congress “to amend our system that the office of Chief Magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority.”

Racism Rears Its Ugly Head

By the 1830s, the population of the North was exploding while the South’s was falling behind. The Constitution counted enslaved Americans as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, and direct election of the president would erase that advantage slave states had in the Electoral College. Their leaders were not about to throw that advantage away.

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery (except as punishment for a crime) and scratched out the three-fifths clause, meaning that after the 1870 census, the Southern states would have more power in the Electoral College than they did before the war. In 1876, Republicans lost the popular vote by about 250,000 votes out of 8.3 million cast, but kept control of the White House through the Electoral College. As Jackson had warned, furious Democrats threatened rebellion. They never considered Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, whom they called “Rutherfraud,” a legitimate president.

In 1888, it happened again. Incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million cast, but Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison took the White House thanks to the 36 electoral votes from New York, a state Harrison won by fewer than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Once in office, he and his team set out to skew the Electoral College permanently in their favor. Over twelve months in 1889–1890, they added six new, sparsely populated states to the Union, splitting the territory of Dakota in two and adding North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming while leaving out New Mexico and Arizona, whose inhabitants they expected would vote for Democrats.

Rural vs. Urban

The 20th century brought another wrench to the Electoral College. The growth of cities, made possible thanks to modern industry, including the steel that supported skyscrapers, and transportation and sanitation, created increasing population differences among the different states. The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes.

After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals — more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska — which weakens the power of larger states.

In the 21st century, the earlier problems with the Electoral College have grown until they threaten to establish permanent minority rule. A Republican president hasn’t won the popular vote since voters reelected George W. Bush in 2004, when his popularity was high in the midst of a war. The last Republican who won the popular vote in a normal election cycle was Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, 36 years and nine cycles ago. And yet, Republicans who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College in 2000. George W. Bush won the Electoral College vote over Al Gore, who won the popular vote by about a half a million votes. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes but lost in the Electoral College to Donald Trump.

In part two of this discussion, we will look at what the impact the Electoral College will likely have on the election this November.

Featured photo by Elizabeth Perry (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license)