On the Electoral College

There has been quite a bit of talk over the last few years about doing away with the electoral college. The basis for the argument seems to be one of democracy. It is undemocratic for the president to be elected by having a high enough electoral count despite losing the popular vote. Indeed, the way the system currently is set up is very bad, since in many ways it is dishonest and fails to accomplish that which the electoral college was intended.

Currently each of the states is run by the parties (Republican and Democrat). They use their positions of control to ensure that each party must put forward a slate of electors who most people never actually know even so much as the names of. Said slates are then bound to vote for whichever candidate their slate was attached to. In a handful of states, the slate is assigned partially based on a proportion of the popular votes cast, while in the rest it is an all-or-nothing system.

What does this do? It makes people think that they are voting for president, when in reality they are voting for a slate of people that they never even heard of. It also turns the election into a popularity contest where celebrity, demagoguery, and other such plagues of the democracies of the world can bring about their full corrupting effect. The result is such people as FDR getting four terms (the closest the US has come to a totalitarian dictator so far), Kennedy getting elected at all (a corrupt and incompetent president if ever there was one), and most every other president that we've had defeating the few potential good candidates (most of whom lost due to a lack of popular support, despite being the only ones who actually spoke the truth, obeyed the Constitution, and maintained dignity and morality in their campaigns).

How should things work? The electoral college was established to remove the presidency from the realm of petty politics and to elevate it to a more considered, more stable, and more principled manner of choosing. The state legislatures were supposed to decide how their respective states would choose electors, whether the governor would appoint them, the legistlature itself pick them, or the people vote for them by district, at large, or in some other fashion. This would make the choice not one of presidential candidate, but rather one of elector. The election would come down to picking those people who were most respected for their principles and wisdom, for their capacity to judge character and competence, and for their faithfulness to the needs of the people of their state and to the requirements of the Constitution.

How can we go from our current corrupted way of electing presidents to one consistent with the wisdom and foresight of the Founders? My favorite solution would be to have the several states remove the presidential candidates from the ballot altogether, indeed they ought to disallow campaigning for president completely. Rather, they should require that those who wish to take a seat in the electoral college run for that office. Turn the presidential race into an electoral college race. Require that candidates be citizens of the states in which they run and allow the people therein to get to know said candidates well enough that they can make wise choices about who to trust to pick their president. If all works as I hope, then the president would be chosen once more by a thoroughly vetted group of trusted people in accordance with the Constitution. Factional strife, demogoguery, and petty rhetoric would be limited in their impact, while true considered wisdom and though might actually return to the process. Shallow celebrities, blatant criminals, and other typical party candidates would no longer be likely to make the cut, while virtuous statesmen and honest politicians might finally have a chance at winning the presidency.