In Delphi, Greece, μηδὲν ἄγαν (meden agan) was inscribed on the ancient Temple of Apollo — nothing in excess. Applying the famous principle to the design and structure of social media platforms could reduce a number of their negative effects: their addictive properties, online bullying, depression and lower self-worth, breakdowns in civility and their impact on political polarization, and so forth. Other problems, such as information privacy and the spread of misinformation (leading to all sorts of absurd beliefs, affecting human behaviors from advocacy to violence, with its own impact on polarization) will be more difficult to solve, and will involve proper management rather than UI changes (so they won’t be addressed here). The Social Dilemma, while mostly old news to anyone paying attention to such things, presents a good summary of the challenges and is worth a view for those wanting to begin an investigation.

A new, socially-conscious social media platform — we’ll call it “Delphi” for now — would be crafted to prevent such things to the extent possible, while attempting to preserve the more positive aspects of social media — the access to news and information, the sharing of ideas, exposure to differing views, the humor and entertainment, the preserved connections to people you like but just wouldn’t text or call or see. Because while breaking free and abandoning the platforms completely greatly improves well-being, the invention is as unlikely to disappear quickly as the telephone, so there should be some middle ground — moderation in all things, nothing in excess — between logging off for good and the more poisonous platforms we’re stuck with. People could then decide what works best for them. If you won’t break free, here’s at least something less harmful.

The new platform would do away with likes, comments, and shares. These features drive many of the addictive and depressive elements, as we all know; we obsessively jump back on to see how our engagement is going, and perhaps we can’t help but see this measurement as a measurement of our own self-worth — of our looks, intelligence, accomplishments, whatever the post “topic” might be. Comparing this metric to those of others, seeing how many more likes others get, can only worsen our perceptions of self, especially for young girls. Instagram is toying with removing public like counts, while still allowing users to see theirs in the back end, which is barely helpful. All three features should simply be abolished. With Delphi, one would post a status, photo, video, or link and simply have no idea how many friends saw it or reacted to it. Have you ever simply stopped checking your notifications on current platforms? It is quite freeing, in my experience. You know (suspect) people are seeing a post, but you have no clue how many or what their reactions are. There’s no racing back on to count the likes or reply to a compliment or battle a debater or be hurt by a bully. You’re simply content, as if you had painted a mural somewhere and walked away.

There are of course probable work-arounds here. Obviously, if someone posted a link I wanted to share, I could copy the address and post it myself. (There may be a benefit to forcing people to open a link before sharing it; maybe we’d be more likely to actually read more than the headline before passing the piece on.) This wouldn’t notify the original poster, who would only know (suspect) that I’d stolen the link if they saw my ensuing post. Likewise, there’s nothing to stop people from taking screenshots of posts or copy-pasting text and using such things in their own posts, with commentary. Unless we programmed the platform to detect and prevent this, or detect and hide such things from the original poster. But you get the idea: you usually won’t see any reaction to your content.

Delphi wouldn’t entirely forsake interaction, however. It would replace written communication and emoji reactions with face-to-face communication. There would in fact be one button to be clicked on someone’s post, the calendar button, which would allow someone to request a day, time, and place to meet up or do a built-in video call to chat about the post (a video call request could also be accepted immediately, like FaceTime). The poster could then choose whether to proceed. As everyone has likely noticed, we don’t speak to each other online the way we do in person. We’re generally nastier due to the Online Disinhibition Effect; the normal inhibitions, social cues, and consequences that keep us civil and empathetic in person largely don’t exist. We don’t see each other the same way, because we cannot see each other. Studies show that, compared to verbal communication, we tend to denigrate and dehumanize other people when reading their written disagreements, seeing them as less capable of feeling and reason, which can increase political polarization. We can’t hear tone or see facial expressions, the eyes most important of all, creating fertile ground for both unkindness and misunderstandings. In public discussions, we also tend to put on a show for spectators, perhaps sacrificing kindness for a dunk that will garner likes. So let’s get rid of all that, and force people to talk face-to-face. No comments or messenger or tags or laugh reacts. Not only can this reduce political divisions by placing people in optimal spaces for respectful, empathetic discourse, it can greatly reduce opportunities for bullying.

The goal is to only get notifications (preferably just in-app, not via your phone) for one thing: calendar requests. Perhaps there would also be invitations to events and the like, but that’s the general idea. This means far less time spent on the platform, which is key because light users of social media are far less impacted by the negative effects.

To this end, Delphi would also limit daily use to an hour or so, apart from video calls. No more mindless staring for four hours. Nothing in excess.

Much of the rest would be similar to what’s used today. We’d have profiles, pages, friends, a feed (the endless scroll problem is solved by the time limit). Abandoning the feed completely has benefits (returning to a world where you have to visit a profile or a page to see what’s happening), such as less depression-inducing peer comparison (look at how beautiful she is, how amazing his life is, and so on), but that could mean that one doesn’t really bother posting at all, knowing (suspecting) only a couple people will visit his or her profile. And one would also be less likely to be exposed to differing views if one has to seek them out. A feed may be necessary to keep some of the positive effects mentioned earlier. But perhaps going in the other direction could help — say, a feed just for pages and news, and a feed for friends, granting the ability to jump back and forth and ignore for a while so-and-so’s incredible trip to Greece.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

“Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom,” President Barack Obama said in March 2009. The statement foreshadowed the appearance of teacher merit pay in Obama’s “Race to the Top” education initiative, which grants federal funds to top performing schools. Performance, of course, is based on standardized testing, and in the flawed Race to the Top, so are teacher salaries. Teacher pay could rise and fall with student test scores.

Rhetoric concerning higher teacher salaries is a good thing. Proponents of merit pay say meager teacher salaries are an injustice, and such a pay system is needed to alleviate the nation’s teacher shortage. However, is linking pay to test scores the best way to “reward excellence”? Do we know, without question, it “can make a difference in the classroom”? The answers, respectively, are no and no. Merit pay is an inefficient and potentially counterproductive way to improve education in American public schools. It fails to motivate teachers to better themselves or remain in the profession, it encourages unhealthy teacher competition and dishonest conduct, and it does not serve well certain groups, like special education students.

Educator Alfie Kohn, author of the brilliant Punished by Rewards, wrote an article in 2003 entitled “The Folly of Merit Pay.” He writes, “No controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any incentive system.” Merit pay simply does not work. It has been implemented here and there for decades, but is always abandoned. A good teacher is intrinsically motivated: he teaches because he enjoys it. She teaches because it betters society. He teaches because it is personally fulfilling. Advocates of merit pay ignore such motivation, but Kohn declares, “Researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that the use of such extrinsic inducements often reduces intrinsic motivation. The more that people are rewarded, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.” Extra cash sounds great, but it is destructive to the inner passions of quality teachers.

Teachers generally rank salaries below too much standardization and unfavorable accountability on their lists of grievances (Kohn, 2003). Educators leave the profession because they are being choked by federal standards and control, and politicians believe linking pay to such problems is a viable solution? Professionals also generally oppose merit pay, disliking its competitive nature. Professor and historian Diane Ravitch writes an incentive “gets everyone thinking about what is good for himself or herself and leads to forgetting about the goals of the organization. It incentivizes short-term thinking and discourages long-term thinking” (Strauss, 2011). Teaching students should not be a game, with big prizes for the winners.

Further, at issue is the distorted view of students performance pay perpetuates. Bill Raabe of the National Education Association says, “We all must be wary of any system that creates a climate where students are viewed as part of the pay equation, rather than young people who deserve a high quality education” (Rosales, 2009). In the current environment of high-stakes tests (which do not really evaluate the quality of teaching at all), merit pay is just another way to encourage educators to “teach to the test,” or worse: cheating. The nation has already seen public school teachers under so much pressure they resort to modifying their students’ scores in order to save their salaries or their jobs.

It is clear that merit pay does not serve young learners, but this is especially true in the case of special education students. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires states that accept federal funding to provide individual educational services to all children with disabilities. While the preeminence of “inclusion” of SPED children in regular classrooms is appropriate, the students are also included in the accountability statues of No Child Left Behind. SPED students are required to meet “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) standards based on high-stakes tests in reading, math, and science, like other students. While some youths with “significant cognitive disabilities” (undefined by federal law) can take alternate assessments, there is a cap on how many students can do so (Yell, Katsiyannas, & Shiner, 2006, p. 35-36). Most special education students must be included in standardized tests.

The abilities and the needs of special education students are too diverse to be put in the box that is a standardized test. SPED students are essentially being asked to perform at their chronological grade level, and for some students that is simply not possible. How does that fit in with a Free Appropriate Public Education, the education program the IDEA guarantees, that focuses on “individualized” plans for the “unique needs” of the student? It does not. Progress is individual, not standardized. Further, linking teacher pay to this unreasonable accountability only makes matters worse. Performance pay will likely punish special education instructors. Each year, SPED students may make steady progress (be it academic, cognitive, social, emotional, etc.), but teachers will see their salaries stagnate or slashed because such gains do not meet federal or state benchmarks. Such an uphill battle will discourage men and women from entering the special education field, meaning fewer quality instructors to serve students with disabilities.

When a school defines the quality of teaching by how well students perform on one test once a year, everyone loses. When pay is in the equation, it’s worse. Obama deserves credit for beginning to phase out NCLB, but merit pay is no way to make public schools more effective. If politicians want to pay good teachers better and weed out poor teachers, their efforts would be better directed at raising salaries across the board and reforming tenure.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

References

Kohn, A. (2003). The Folly of Merit Pay. Retrieved February 19, 2012 from https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/folly-merit-pay/.

Rosales, J. (2009). Pay Based on Test Scores? Retrieved February 19, 2012 from http://www.nea.org/home/36780.html.

Strauss, V. (2011). Ravitch: Why Merit Pay for Teachers Doesn’t Work. Retrieved February 19, 2012 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-why-merit-pay-for-teachers-doesnt-work/2011/03/29/AFn5w9yB_blog.html.

Yell, M. L., Katsiyannas, A., Shiner, J. G. (2006). The No Child Left Behind Act, Adequate Yearly Progress, and Students with Disabilities. Teaching Exceptional Children, 38 (4), 32-39.

I am now two weeks from concluding my first student teaching placement (Visitation School), and my classroom management skills are still being refined. After observing for five days, slowly beginning my integration into a leadership role, I took over completely from my cooperating teacher. While excited to start, initially I had a couple days where I found one 6th grade class (my homeroom) difficult to control. There were times when other classes stepped out of line, naturally, but the consistency with which my homeroom became noisy and rowdy was discouraging.

“They’re your homeroom,” my cooperating teacher reminded me. “They feel more at home in your classroom, and will try to get away with more.”

There were a few instances where students took someone else’s property, or wrote notes to classmates, but the side chatter was the major offense. I would be attempting to teach and each table would have at least someone making conversation, which obviously distracts both those who wish to pay attention and those who don’t care. I would ask them to refocus and quiet themselves, which would work for but a few precious moments. There was one day I remember I felt very much as if the students were controlling me, rather than the other way around, and I made the mistake of hesitating when I could have doled out consequences. I spoke to my cooperating teacher about it during our feedback session, and she emphasized to me that I needed to prove to the students my willingness to enforce the policies, that I have the same authority as any other teacher in the building.

At Visitation, their classroom management system revolves around “tallies,” one of which equals three laps at recess before one can begin play. My homeroom deserved a tally the day I hesitated. I needed to come up with a concrete, consistent way of disciplining disruptive behavior. So I went home and developed a simple system I had thought about a long time ago: behavior management based on soccer. I cut out and laminated a yellow card and a red card. The next day, I sat each class down in the hall before they entered the room, and told them the yellow card would be shown to them as a warning, the red card as tallies. These could be given individually or as a class, and, like soccer, a red card could be given without a yellow card.

The students were surprisingly excited about this. Perhaps turning punishment into a game intrigued them; regardless, it made me wonder if this would work. But it seemed discussing the expectations I had of them, and the enforcement of such expectations, helped a good deal. Further, I was able to overcome my hesitation that day and dole out consequences for inappropriate behavior. My homeroom I gave a yellow card and then a red card, and they walked laps the next day.

My cooperating teacher noted the system would be effective because it was visual for the students. I also found that it allowed me to easily maintain emotional control; instead of raising my voice, I simply raised a card in my hand, and the class refocused. Its visibility allowed me to say nothing at all.

While containing a different purpose and practice, this system draws important elements from the Do It Again system educator Doug Lemov describes, including no administrative follow-up and logical consequences, but most significantly group accountability (Lemov, 2010, p. 192). It holds an entire class responsible for individual actions, and “builds incentives for individuals to behave positively since it makes them accountable to their peers as well as their teacher” (p. 192). Indeed, my classes almost immediately started regulating themselves, keeping themselves accountable for following my expectations (telling each other to be quiet and settle down, for instance, before I had to say anything).

Lemov would perhaps frown upon the yellow card, and point to the behavioral management technique called No Warning (p. 199). He suggests teachers:

• Act early. Try to see the favor you are doing kids in catching off-task behavior early and using a minor intervention of consequence to prevent a major consequence later.
• Act reliably. Be predictably consistent, sufficient to take the variable of how you will react out of the equation and focus students on the action that precipitated your response.
• Act proportionately. Start small when the misbehavior is small; don’t go nuclear unless the situation is nuclear.

I have tried to follow these guidelines to the best of my ability, but Lemov would say the warning is not taking action, only telling students “a certain amount of disobedience will not only be tolerated but is expected” (p. 200). He would say students will get away with what they can until they are warned, and will only refocus and cease their side conversations afterwards. Lemov makes a valid point, and I have indeed seen this happen to a degree. As a whole, however, the system has been effective, and most of my classes do not at all take advantage of their warning. Knowing they can receive a consequence without a warning has helped, perhaps. After a month of using the cards, I have given my homeroom a red card three times. In my other five classes combined during the same period, there have been two yellows and only one red. I have issued a few individual yellows, but no reds.

Perhaps it is counterproductive to have a warning, but I personally feel that since the primary focus of the system is on group accountability, I need to give talkative students a chance to correct their behavior before consequences are doled out for the entire class. Sometimes a reminder is necessary, the reminder that their actions affect their classmates and that they need to refocus. I do not want to punish the students who are not being disruptive along with those who are without issuing some sort of warning that they are on thin ice.

***

During my two student teaching placements this semester, I greatly enjoyed getting to know my students. It was one of the more rewarding aspects of teaching. Introducing myself and my interests in detail on the first day I arrived proved to be an excellent start; I told them I liked history, soccer, drawing, reading, etc. Building relationships was easy, as students seemed fascinated by me and had an endless array of questions about who I was and where I came from.

Art is something I used to connect with students. At both my schools, the first students I got to know were the budding artists, as I was able to observe them sketching in the corners of their notebooks and later ask to see their work. There was one girl at my first placement who drew a new breed of horse on the homeroom whiteboard each morning; a boy at my second placement was drawing incredible fantasy figures every spare second he had. I was the same way when I was their age, so naturally I struck up conversations about their pictures. I tried to take advantage of such an interest by asking students to draw posters of Hindu gods or sketch images next to vocabulary words to aid recall. Not everyone likes to draw, but I like to encourage the skill and at least provide them an opportunity to try. Beyond this, I would use what novels students had with them to learn about their fascinations and engage them, and many were excited I knew The Hunger Games, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. We would discuss our favorite characters and compare such fiction to recent films.

For all my students, I strove to engage them each day with positive behavior, including greeting them by name at the door, drawing with and for them, laughing and joking with them, maintaining a high level of interest in what students were telling me (even if they rambled aimlessly, as they had the tendency to do) and even twice playing soccer with them at recess. The Catholic community of my first placement also provided the chance to worship and pray with my kids, an experience I will not forget.

One of my successes was remaining emotionally cool, giving students a sense of calm, confidence, and control about me. Marzano (2007) writes, “It is important to keep in mind that emotional objectivity does not imply being impersonal with or cool towards students. Rather, it involves keeping a type of emotional distance from the ups and downs of classroom life and not taking students’ outbursts or even students’ direct acts of disobedience personally” (p. 152). Even when I was feeling control slipping away from me, I did my best to be calm, keep my voice low, and correct students in a respectful manner that reminded them they had expectations they needed to meet. Lemov (2010) agrees, writing, “An emotionally constant teacher earns students’ trust in part by having them know he is always under control. Most of all, he knows success is in the long run about a student’s consistent relationship with productive behaviors” (p. 219). Building positive relationships required mutual respect and trust, and emotional constancy was key.

Another technique I emphasized was the demonstration of my passion for social studies, to prove to them the gravity of my personal investment in their success. One lesson from my first placement covered the persecution of Anne Hutchinson in Puritan America; we connected it to modern sexism, such as discrimination against women in terms of wage earnings. Another lesson was about racism, how it originated as a justification for African slavery and how the election of Barack Obama brought forth a surge of openly racist sentiment from part of the U.S. citizenry. I told them repeatedly that we studied history to become dissenters and activists, people who would rise up and destroy sexism and racism. I told them I had a personal stake in their understanding of such material, a personal stake in their future, because they were the ones responsible for changing our society in positive ways. Being the next generation, ending social injustices would soon be up to them.

Marzano (2007) says, “Arguably the quality of the relationships teachers have with students is the keystone of effective management and perhaps even the entirety of teaching” (p. 149). In my observation experiences, I saw burnt out and bitter teachers, who focused their efforts on authoritative control and left positive relationship-building on the sideline. The lack of strong relationships usually meant more chaotic classrooms and more disruptive behavior. As my career begins, I plan to make my stake in student success and my compassion for each person obvious, and stay in the habit.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books. 

References

Lemov, D. (2010). Teach like a champion: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Marzano, R. (2007). The art and science of teaching. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Predicting the future isn’t something I make a habit of. It is a perilous activity, always involving a strong chance of being wrong and looking the fool. Yet sometimes, here and there, conditions unfold around us in a way that gives one enough confidence to hazard a prediction. I believe that Bernie Sanders will win Iowa today.

First, consider that Bernie is at the top of the polls. Polls aren’t always reliable predictors, and he’s neck-and-neck with an opponent in some of them, but it’s a good sign.

To any sensible person, the Electoral College is a severely flawed method of electing our president. Most importantly, it is a system in which the less popular candidate — the person with fewer votes — can win the White House. That absurdity would be enough to throw the Electoral College out and simply use a popular vote to determine the winner. Yet there is more.

It is a system where your vote becomes meaningless, giving no aid to your chosen candidate, if you’re in your state’s political minority; where small states have disproportionate power to determine the winner; where white voters have disproportionate decision-making power compared to voters of color; and where electors, who are supposed to represent the majority of voters in each state, can change their minds and vote for whomever they please. Not even its origins are pure, as slavery and the desire to keep voting power away from ordinary people were factors in its design.

Let’s consider these problems in detail. We’ll also look at the threadbare attempts to justify them.

The votes of the political minority become worthless, leading to a victor with fewer votes than the loser

When we vote in presidential elections, we’re not actually voting for the candidates. We’re voting on whether to award decision-making power to Democratic or Republican electors. 538 people will cast their votes and the candidate who receives a majority of 270 votes will win. The electors are chosen by the political parties at state conventions, through committees, or by the presidential candidates. It depends on the state. The electors could be anyone, but are usually involved with the parties or are close allies. In 2016, for instance, electors included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Jr. Since they are chosen for their loyalty, they typically (though not always, as we will see) vote for the party that chose them.

The central problem with this system is that most all states are all-or-nothing when electors are awarded. (Only a couple states, Maine and Nebraska, have acted on this unfairness and divided up electors based on their popular votes.) As a candidate, winning by a single citizen vote grants you all the electors from the state. 

Imagine you live in Missouri. Let’s say in 2020 you vote Republican, but the Democratic candidate wins the state; the majority of Missourians voted Blue. All of Missouri’s 10 electors are then awarded to the Democratic candidate. When that happens, your vote does absolutely nothing to help your chosen candidate win the White House. It has no value. Only the votes of the political majority in the state influence who wins, by securing electors. It’s as if you never voted at all — it might as well have been 100% of Missourians voting Blue. As a Republican, wouldn’t you rather have your vote matter as much as all the Democratic votes in Missouri? For instance, 1 million Republican votes pushing the Republican candidate toward victory alongside the, say, 1.5 million Democratic votes pushing the Democratic candidate forward? Versus zero electors for the Republican candidate and 10 electors for the Democrat?

In terms of real contribution to a candidate’s victory, the outcomes can be broken down, and compared to a popular vote, in this way:

State Electoral College victor: contribution (electors)
State Electoral College loser: no contribution (no electors)

State popular vote victor: contribution (votes)
State popular vote loser: contribution (votes)

Under a popular vote, however, your vote won’t become meaningless if you’re in the political minority in your state. It will offer an actual contribution to your favored candidate. It will be worth the same as the vote of someone in the political majority. The Electoral College simply does not award equal value to each vote (see more examples below), whereas the popular vote does, by allowing the votes of the political minority to influence the final outcome. That’s better for voters, as it gives votes equal power. It’s also better for candidates, as the loser in each state would actually get something for his or her efforts. He or she would keep the earned votes, moving forward in his or her popular vote count. Instead of getting zero electors — no progress at all.

But why, one may ask, does this really matter? When it comes to determining who wins a state and gets its electors, all votes are of equal value. The majority wins, earning the right to give all the electors to its chosen candidate. How exactly is this unfair?

It’s unfair because, when all the states operate under such a system, it can lead to the candidate with fewer votes winning the White House. It’s a winner-take-all distribution of electors, each state’s political minority votes are ignored — but those votes can add up. 66 million Americans may choose the politician you support, but the other candidate may win with just 63 million votes. That’s what happened in 2016. It also happened in the race of 2000, as well as in 1876 and 1888. It simply isn’t fair or just for a candidate with fewer votes to win. It is mathematically possible, in fact, to win just 21.8% of the popular vote and win the presidency. While very unlikely, it is possible. That would mean, for example, a winner with 28 million votes and a loser with 101 million! This is absurd and unfair on its face. The candidate with the most votes should be the victor, as is the case with every other political race in the United States, and as is standard practice among the majority of the world’s democracies.

The lack of fairness and unequal value of citizen votes go deeper, however.

Small states and white power

Under the Electoral College, your vote is worth less in big states. For instance, Texas, with 28.7 million people and 38 electors, has one elector for every 755,000 people. But Wyoming, with 578,000 people and 3 electors, has one elector for every 193,000 people. In other words, each Wyoming voter has a bigger influence over who wins the presidency than each Texas voter. 4% of the U.S. population, for instance, in small states, has 8% of the electors. Why not 4%, to keep votes equal? (For those who think all this was the intent of the Founders, to give more power to smaller states, we’ll address that later on.)

To make things even, Texas would need many more electors. As would other big states. You have to look at changing population data and frequently adjust electors, as the government is supposed to do based on the census and House representation — it just doesn’t do it very well. It would be better to do away with the Electoral College entirely, because under a popular vote the vote of someone from Wyoming would be precisely equal to the vote of a Texan. Each would be one vote out of the 130 million or so cast. No adjustments needed.

It also just so happens that less populous states tend to be very white, and more populous states more diverse, meaning disproportionate white decision-making power overall.

Relatedly, it’s important to note that the political minority in each state, which will become inconsequential to the presidential race, is sometimes dominated by racial minorities, or at least most voters of color will belong to it. As Bob Wing writes, because “in almost every election white Republicans out-vote [blacks, most all Democrats] in every Southern state and every border state except Maryland,” the “Electoral College result was the same as if African Americans in the South had not voted at all.”

Faithless electors

After state residents vote for electors, the electors can essentially vote for whomever they want, in many states at least. “There are 32 states (plus the District of Columbia) that require electors to vote for a pledged candidate. Most of those states (19 plus DC) nonetheless do not provide for any penalty or any mechanism to prevent the deviant vote from counting as cast. Four states provide a penalty of some sort for a deviant vote, and 11 states provide for the vote to be canceled and the elector replaced…”

Now, electors are chosen specifically because of their loyalty, and “faithless electors” are extremely rare, but that doesn’t mean they will always vote for the candidate you elected them to vote for. There have been 85 electors in U.S. history that abstained or changed their vote on a whim. Sometimes for racist reasons, on accident, etc. Even more changed their votes after a candidate died — perhaps the voters would have liked to select another option themselves. Even if rare, all this should not be possible or legal. It is yet another way the Electoral College has built-in unfairness — imagine the will of a state’s political majority being ignored.

(All this used to be worse, in fact. Early on, some state legislatures appointed electors, meaning whatever party controlled a legislature simply selected people who would pick its favored presidential candidate. How voters cast their ballots did not matter.)

* * *

Won’t a popular vote give too much power to big states and cities?

Let’s turn now to the arguments against a popular vote, usually heard from conservatives. A common one is that big states, or big cities, will “have too much power.” Rural areas and less populous states and towns will supposedly have less.

This misunderstands power. States don’t vote. Cities don’t vote. People do. If we’re speaking solely about power, about influence, where you live does not matter. The vote of someone in Eudora, Kansas, is worth the same as someone in New York, New York.

This argument is typically posited by those who think that because some big, populous states like California and New York are liberal, this will mean liberal rule. (Conservative Texas, the second-most populous state, and sometimes-conservative swing states like Florida [third-most populous] and Pennsylvania [fifth-most populous] are ignored.) Likewise, because a majority of Americans today live in cities, and cities tend to be more liberal than small towns, this will result in the same. The concern for rural America and small states is really a concern for Republican power.

But obviously, in a direct election each person’s vote is of equal weight and importance, regardless and independent of where you live. 63% of Americans live in cities, so it is true that most voters will be living and voting in cities, but it cannot be said the small town voter has a weaker voice than the city dweller. Their votes have identical sway over who will be president. In the same way, a voter in a populous coastal state has no more influence than one in Arkansas.

No conservative looks with dismay at the direct election of his Democratic governor or congresswoman and says, “She only won because the small towns don’t have a voice. We have to find a way to diminish the power of the big cities!” No one complains that X area has too many people and too many liberals and argues some system should fix this. No one cries, “Tyranny of the majority! Mob rule!” They say, “She got the most votes, seems fair.” Why? Because one understands that the vote of the rural citizen is worth the same as the vote of an urban citizen, but if there happens to be more people living in cities in your state, or if there are more liberals in your state, so be it. That’s the freedom to live where you wish, believe what you wish, and have a vote worth the same as everyone else’s.

Think about the popular vote in past elections. About half of Americans vote Republican, about half vote Democrat. One candidate gets a few hundred thousand or few million more. It will be exactly the same if the popular vote determined the winner rather than the Electoral College — where you live is irrelevant. What matters is the final vote tally.

It’s not enough to simply complain that the United States is too liberal. And therefore we must preserve the Electoral College. That’s really what this argument boils down to. It’s not an argument at all. Unfair structures can’t be justified because they serve one political party. Whoever can win the most American votes should be president, no matter what party they come from.

But won’t candidates only pander to big states and cities?

This is a different question, and it has merit. It is true that where candidates campaign will change with the implementation of a popular vote. Conservatives warn that candidates will spend most of their time in the big cities and big states, and ignore rural places. This is likely true, as candidates (of both parties) will want to reach as many voters as possible in the time they have to garner support.

Yet this carries no weight as an argument against a popular vote, because the Electoral College has a very similar problem. Candidates focus their attention on swing states.

There’s a reason Democrats don’t typically campaign very hard in conservative Texas and Republicans don’t campaign hard in liberal California. Instead, they campaign in states that are more evenly divided ideologically, states that sometimes go Blue and sometimes go Red. They focus also on swing states with a decent number of electors. The majority of campaign events are in just six states. Unless you live in one of these places, like Ohio, Florida, or Pennsylvania, your vote isn’t as vital to victory and your state won’t get as much pandering. The voters in swing states are vastly more important, their votes much more valuable than elsewhere.

How candidates focusing on a handful of swing states might be so much better than candidates focusing on more populous areas is never explained by Electoral College supporters. It seems like a fair trade, but with a popular vote we also get the candidate with the most support always winning, votes of equal worth, and no higher-ups to ignore the will of the people.

However, with a significant number of Americans still living outside big cities, attention will likely still be paid to rural voters — especially, one might assume, by the Republican candidate. Nearly 40% of the nation living in small towns and small states isn’t something wisely ignored. Wherever the parties shift most of their attention, there is every reason to think Blue candidates will want to solidify their win by courting Blue voters in small towns and states, and Red candidates will want to ensure theirs by courting Red voters in big cities and states. Even if the rural voting bloc didn’t matter and couldn’t sway the election (it would and could), one might ask how a handful of big states and cities alone determining the outcome of the election is so much worse than a few swing states doing the same in the Electoral College system.

Likewise, the fear that a president, plotting reelection, will better serve the interests of big states and cities seems about as reasonable as fear that he or she would better serve the interests of the swing states today. One is hardly riskier than the other.

But didn’t the Founders see good reason for the Electoral College?

First, it’s important to note that invoking the Founding Fathers doesn’t automatically justified flawed governmental systems. The Founders were not perfect, and many of the policies and institutions they decreed in the Constitution are now gone.

Even before the Constitution, the Founders’ Articles of Confederation were scrapped after just seven years. Later, the Twelfth Amendment got rid of a system where the losing presidential candidate automatically became vice president — a reform of the Electoral College. Our senators were elected by the state legislatures, not we the people, until 1913 (Amendment 17 overturned clauses from Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution). Only in 1856 did the last state, North Carolina, do away with property requirements to vote for members of the House of Representatives, allowing the poor to participate. The Three-Fifths Compromise (the Enumeration Clause of the Constitution), which valued slaves less than full people for political representation purposes, is gone, and today people of color, women, and people without property can vote thanks to various amendments. There were no term limits for the president until 1951 (Amendment 22) — apparently an executive without term limits didn’t give the Founders nightmares of tyranny.

The Founders were very concerned about keeping political power away from ordinary people, who might take away their riches and privileges. They wanted the wealthy few, like themselves, to make the decisions. See How the Founding Fathers Protected Their Own Wealth and Power.

The Electoral College, at its heart, was a compromise between Congress selecting the president and the citizenry doing so. The people would choose the people to choose the president. Alexander Hamilton wrote that the “sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.” He thought “a small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”

Yet the Founders did not anticipate that states would pass winner-take-all elector policies, and some wanted it abolished. The Constitution and its writers did not establish such a mechanism. States did, and only after the Constitution, which established the Electoral College, was written. In 1789, only three states had such laws, according to the Institute for Research on Presidential Elections. It wasn’t until 1836 that every state (save one, which held out until after the Civil War) adopted a winner-take-all law; they sought more attention from candidates by offering all electors to the victor, they wanted their chosen sons to win more electors, and so forth. Before (and alongside) the winner-take-all laws, states were divided into districts and the people in each district would elect an elector (meaning a state’s electors could be divided up among candidates). Alternatively, state legislatures would choose the electors, meaning citizens did not vote for the president in any way, even indirectly! James Madison wrote that “the district mode was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted; & was exchanged for the general ticket [winner-take-all] & the legislative election” later on. He suggested a Constitutional amendment (“The election of Presidential Electors by districts, is an amendment very proper to be brought forward…”) and Hamilton drafted it.

Still, among Founders and states, it was an anti-democratic era. Some Americans prefer more democratic systems, and don’t cling to tradition — especially tradition as awful and unfair as the Electoral College — for its own sake. Some want positive changes to the way government functions and broadened democratic participation, to improve upon and make better what the Founders started, as we have so many times before.

Now, it’s often posited that the Founding Fathers established the Electoral College to make sure small states had more power to determine who won the White House. As we saw above, votes in smaller states are worth more than in big ones.

Even if the argument that “we need the Electoral College so small states can actually help choose the president” made sense in a bygone era where people viewed themselves as Virginians or New Yorkers, not Americans (but rather as part of an alliance called the United States), it makes no sense today. People now see themselves as simply Americans — as American citizens together choosing an American president. Why should where you live determine the power of your vote? Why not simply have everyone’s vote be equal?

More significantly, it cannot be said that strengthening smaller states was a serious concern to the Founders at the Constitutional Convention. They seemed to accept that smaller states would simply have fewer voters and thus less influence. Legal historian Paul Finkleman writes that

in all the debates over the executive at the Constitutional Convention, this issue [of giving more power to small states] never came up. Indeed, the opposite argument received more attention. At one point the Convention considered allowing the state governors to choose the president but backed away from this in part because it would allow the small states to choose one of their own.

In other words, they weren’t looking out for the little guy. Political scientist George C. Edwards III calls this whole idea a “myth,” stressing: “Remember what the country looked like in 1787: The important division was between states that relied on slavery and those that didn’t, not between large and small states.”

Slavery’s influence

The Electoral College is also an echo of white supremacy and slavery.

As the Constitution was formed in the late 1780s, Southern politicians and slave-owners at the Convention had a problem: Northerners were going to get more seats in the House of Representatives (which were to be determined by population) if blacks weren’t counted as people. Southern states had sizable populations, but large portions were disenfranchised slaves and freemen (South Carolina, for instance, was nearly 50% black).

This prompted slave-owners, most of whom considered blacks by nature somewhere between animals and whites, to push for slaves to be counted as fully human for political purposes. They needed blacks for greater representative power for Southern states. Northern states, also seeking an advantaged position, opposed counting slaves as people. This odd reversal brought about the Three-Fifths Compromise most of us know, which determined an African American would be worth three-fifths of a person.

The Electoral College was largely a solution to the same problem. True, as we saw, it served to keep power out of the hands of ordinary people and in the hands of the elites, but race and slavery unquestionably influenced its inception. As the Electoral College Primer put it, Southerners feared “the loss in relative influence of the South because of its large nonvoting slave population.” They were afraid the direct election of the president would put them at a numerical disadvantage. To put it bluntly, Southerners were upset their states didn’t have more white people. A popular vote had to be avoided.

For example, Hugh Williamson of North Carolina remarked at the Convention, during debate on a popular election of the president: “The people will be sure to vote for some man in their own State, and the largest State will be sure to succede [sic]. This will not be Virga. however. Her slaves will have no suffrage.” Williamson saw that states with high populations had an advantage in choosing the president. But a great number of people in Virginia were slaves. Would this mean that Virginia and other slave states didn’t have the numbers of whites to affect the presidential election as much as the large Northern states?

The writer of the Constitution, slave-owner and future American president James Madison, thought so. He said that

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty…

The question for Southerners was: How could one make the total population count for something, even though much of the population couldn’t vote? How could black bodies be used to increase Southern political power? Counting slaves helped put more Southerners in the House of Representatives, and now counting them in the apportionment of electors would help put more Southerners in the White House.

Thus, Southerners pushed for the Electoral College. The number of electors would be based on how many members of Congress each state possessed — which recall was affected by counting a black American as three-fifths of a person. Each state would have one elector per representative in the House, plus two for the state’s two senators (today we have 435 + 100 + 3 for D.C. = 538). In this way, the number of electors was still based on population (not the whole population, though, as blacks were not counted as full persons), even though a massive part of the America population in 1787 could not vote. The greater a state’s population, the more House reps it had, and thus the more electors it had. Southern electoral power was secure.

This worked out pretty well for the racists. “For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency,” notes Akhil Reed Amar. The advantage didn’t go unnoticed. Massachusetts congressman Samuel Thatcher complained in 1803, “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.”

Tyrants and imbeciles

At times, it’s suggested that the electors serve an important function: if the people select a dangerous or unqualified candidate — like an authoritarian or a fool — to be the party nominee, the electors can pick someone else and save the nation. Hamilton said, “The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Obviously, looking at Donald Trump, the Electoral College is just as likely to put an immoral doofus in the White House than keep one out. Trump may not fit that description to you, but some day a candidate may come along who does. And since the electors are chosen for their loyalty, they are unlikely to stop such a candidate, even if they have the power to be faithless. We might as well simply let the people decide.

It is a strange thing indeed that some people insist a popular vote will lead to dictatorship, ignoring the majority of the world’s democracies that directly elect their executive officer. They have not plunged into totalitarianism. Popular vote simply doesn’t get rid of checks and balances, co-equal branches, a constitution, the rule of law, and other aspects of free societies. These things are not incompatible.

France has had direct elections since 1965 (de Gaulle). Finland since 1994 (Ahtisaari). Portugal since 1918 (Pais). Poland since 1990 (Wałęsa). Why aren’t these nations run by despots by now? Why do even conservative institutes rank nations like Ireland, Finland, and Austria higher up on a “Human Freedom Index” than the United States? How is this possible, if direct elections of the executive lead to tyranny?

There are many factors that cause dictatorship and ruin, but simply giving the White House to whomever gets the most votes is not necessarily one of them.

Modern motives

We close by stating the obvious. There remains strong support for the Electoral College among conservatives because it has recently aided Republican candidates like Bush (2000) and Trump (2016). If the GOP lost presidential elections due to the Electoral College after winning the popular vote, like the other party does, they’d perhaps see its unfair nature.

The popular vote, in an increasingly diverse, liberal country, doesn’t serve conservative interests. Republicans have won the popular vote just once since and including the 1992 election. Conservatives are worried that if the Electoral College vanishes and each citizen has a vote of equal power, their days are numbered. Better to preserve an outdated, anti-democratic system than benefits you than reform your platform and policies to change people’s minds about you and strengthen your support. True, the popular vote may serve Democratic interests. Fairness serves Democratic interests. But, unlike unfairness, which Republicans seek to preserve, fairness is what’s right. Giving the candidate with the most votes the presidency is what’s right.

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