Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON — In his 2016 election to the presidency, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots but gained the White House by winning a 77-vote majority in the Electoral College. Now, as many Democrats call for abolishing the college, the Supreme Court has issued a unanimous finding that could marginally alter its role in November.

Written by Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee to the court, the ruling casts a shadow over so-called “faithless electors” who vote for a party nominee for president or vice president other than the one who has carried the popular-vote majority in a particular state. There have been about 180 such electors in our history, with little or no impact on any given election.

Kagan’s opinion says any state in a presidential election may require any such electors henceforth to cast their ballots for the candidate winning the majority of the votes in that state. In an extremely close election, their ballots could be decisive, and her ruling holds that by tradition “electors are not free agents; they are to vote for the candidate whom that state’s voters have chosen.” She noted that in the 2016 election “only seven electors across the nation cast faithless votes — the most in a century.” and they had no effect on Trump’s election.

But the decision comes amid heightened public concern over the legitimacy of the coming presidential election, which Trump has already alleged is being “rigged” against his reelection. The Electoral College itself has periodically been assailed by Republicans and Democrats alike along with numerous press critics.

My own 1999 book, “No Way to Pick a President,” includes a chapter called “An Accident Waiting to Happen.” I argued for getting rid of the Electoral College and allowing the popular vote to choose the next president. I noted then that the very term “faithless electors” was “a derogatory appellation” for those who dared to assert their independence, as the Constitution authorized them to do.

“Far from being our elite,” I observed, “today the electors are more often than not political hacks given the task as a minor payoff for loyal service to their party — and given, to boot, a license to gum up the works.” That view mocks what Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, in which he praised the Constitution for entrusting the presidency to “men most capable of analyzing the qualities needed for the office, who make their choices favorable to deliberation.”

In a 1956 colloquy on the Electoral College with then Sen. John Pastore of Rhode Island, Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts said that Pastore’s state was “over-represented in the Electoral College today, based on its population,” and asked him, “Would the senator do away with the two electors which his state has by virtue of the fact that it has two senators of the United States?”

Pastore replied: “I would do away with the whole Electoral College. I would have the people elect the president of the United States on Election Day. I would not care where the candidates came from, whether they came from the North, the South, the West or the East. They are all Americans. We are all one country. I say let us vote for the best man. It is as simple as that. That is my idea of representative government. Everything else beyond that is a gimmick.”

Gimmick or not, the Electoral College remains in existence today as a Rube Goldberg cartoon mechanism that many Americans know little or nothing about. Its chief contribution to our political system is making possible the installation of a president whom a majority of Americans may not want. It is a college without campus or classrooms that never meets, except locally, and sends its results to Congress once every four years for disclosure to the people. It’s a college that should close its doors, and banish faithless electors for good.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.

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