Nobody understands the Electoral College.

I was reminded of this when the Reno Gazette-Journal asked Assemblywomen Teresa Benitez-Thompson and Jill Tolles about Assembly Bill 186, which seeks to add Nevada to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Their response wasn’t hugely surprising — they oppose the measure because, as long as candidates vie for Nevada’s Electoral College votes, #WeMatter — but both their and the Gazette-Journal’s understanding of what the Electoral College is supposed to do was disappointing.

Here’s what the Gazette-Journal thinks:

[The] system awards states one presidential vote for each of its congressional delegates. The idea is to give smaller states greater power to pick the president, who might otherwise be elected solely via votes tallied in densely populated coastal states such as California and New York.

To borrow a phrase from H. L. Mencken, that explanation is clear, simple, and wrong. If the Electoral College wasn’t supposed to do that, though, then what was it supposed to do?

To start with, the American people were never supposed to elect the president.

At the time, this wasn’t particularly unusual. Prior to the American Revolution, as Sydney George Fisher’s The Struggle for American Independence points out, most colonial governors were originally appointed by the king. There was a catch, however — each governor’s salary was paid for by their colonial legislature. It didn’t take long for colonial legislatures to realize that they could hold their royal governor’s salary hostage in exchange for various concessions. After the Revolution, these former colonies largely kept the same system intact, but instead of their governors being appointed by the king, they were instead selected by the legislatures that were responsible for their salaries. Federalist No. 39 described this as each governor being “indirectly [elected] from the choice of the people,” and proposed a similar system for selecting presidents.

So, if presidents should not directly elected, how should the president be selected?

In Federalist No. 68, Alexander Hamilton laid out a suggestion — let the people elect the Electors of the Electoral College, who, in turn, would learn about each candidate and select the best person for president. Additionally, prohibit members of Congress or any other federal employee from serving in the Electoral College.

This proposed system was supposed to have several benefits. First, the reason for prohibiting anyone already in federal service from serving as an elector was to prevent the president from being beholden to any specific federal entity, whether that was Congress, the Judiciary, or the military. Instead, the president was supposed to be accountable only to the people, only indirectly — this would ensure that the president didn’t follow every whim that passed through the public fancy.

Clearly our Founding Fathers would not have been impressed with social media.

Additionally, as a rather entertaining series of Laws & Sausages comics explains (don’t scoff - the comics are written by Greg Weiner, PhD, from Georgetown University), the United States was simply too large for the people to get to know any presidential candidate, so it made practical sense to keep presidential selection localized to a small number of electors. This was a perfectly reasonable concern to have in the late 18th century — as the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States illustrates, it took weeks to get from one end of the country to the other.

Finally, the proposed system piggy-backed on two previously established compromises already baked into the Constitution. First, the Connecticut Compromise already established a balance in representation between more and less populous states — there would be a bicameral legislature, in which each state would get two senators and a number of representatives proportionate to their population. Secondly, the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise would count each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation. Putting the two together, Hamilton recommended that each state get as many Electoral College representatives as they had in Congress.

If the purpose was to give smaller states greater power to pick the president, the Electoral College would look more like the Senate, where each state has the same number of senators. Instead, smaller states had just as much power to pick the president as they did in Congress — no more and no less.

Unfortunately, the Electoral College, as implemented, had and still has one crucial flaw: Each state is responsible for deciding how their electors are appointed.

When the Electoral College system was first proposed, many of its authors imagined a system of districts selecting each Elector, similar to the congressional districts used to select each member of Congress. Alexander Hamilton even proposed a constitutional amendment to that effect in 1802. Unfortunately, fewer than five states ever tried that. Instead, most state legislatures assigned themselves the privilege of selecting their state’s apportioned electors. Later, as political parties developed, states realized they would have greater power in the presidential selection process if all of their electors were available on a winner-take-all basis. By 1824, a majority of electors were chosen via the winner-take-all system we presently take for granted.

This was something the Founding Fathers neither anticipated, celebrated, nor approved of. After the election of 1824, James Madison advocated for a similar amendment to the one Hamilton had proposed in 1802. His request, however, went nowhere.

In less than 40 years, the Electoral College had already gone awry and changed into something its designers loathed.

That didn’t mean it went away.

With the sole exceptions of the Twelfth Amendment, which amended the original Electoral College framework to allow electors to vote separately for president and vice-president (without its passage, Hillary Clinton, as the second-place Electoral College vote recipient, would have been our vice-president), and the Twenty-Third Amendment, which granted the District of Columbia electors, the Electoral College has gone largely untouched. Because of that, state legislatures, as part of their power to appoint electors “in such manner as [they] may direct,” can require that electors pledge to vote in a certain way. Nevada, for example, currently requires electors to sign two pledges promising they will only vote for the president or vice-president that received the highest number of votes in the state.

That, per Ray v. Blair, is absolutely allowed. What the Supreme Court has not weighed in on, however, is whether states can throw out the ballots of electors after they’re cast.

Faithless electors — electors who vote their own way after they solemnly pinky swear to vote as their state legislature instructs — have been a part of American history since the very beginning, including in our last presidential election. Were it not for Roger MacBride, a faithless elector who voted for the Libertarian Party ticket in 1972, Toni Nathan would not have been the first woman to receive an electoral vote.

However, many states, Nevada included, have laws in place to prevent such practices. Two states — Colorado and Washington — are currently facing legal challenges to their laws preventing faithless electors. The argument against such laws is straightforward: States can certainly choose how electors are appointed, but, once they’re appointed, electors have the right to cast their ballots as they see fit.

That, incidentally, is a good reason to oppose Assembly Bill 186 — it’s probably unconstitutional. We can ask electors to sign pledges promising they’ll vote for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates that received the most votes throughout the country, but there may be no legal way to compel them to do so. Even so, just because the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is the Windows ME of electoral reform (a lazy attempt at building modern electoral infrastructure on a foundation that was barely sufficient generations ago), that doesn’t mean the Electoral College is good for smaller states, Nevada, or the country.

It’s true that the Electoral College does give smaller states, on average, more of a say in the presidential election process than larger states. Wyoming, for example, has three electors and a population of under 600,000, which means each elector from Wyoming represents fewer than 200,000 Wyomingians. Texas, meanwhile, despite having a population of over 28,000,000, has only 38 electors, which means each elector from Texas represents over 750,000 Texans. However, as much as that say might translate into electoral votes, it does not translate into presidential visits. Two-thirds of all presidential campaign events in 2016 happened in only six states, and, as much as #WeMatter, Nevada wasn’t one of the six. Several states, including overrepresented Wyoming, weren’t visited once by a presidential or vice-presidential candidate. By contrast, despite having over 70 percent of our electorate located entirely within Clark County, despite rural Nevada usually voting 80-20 Republican, Gov. Sisolak and Sen. Cortez-Masto — Democrats both, and both running for statewide office — visited rural Nevada at least once in 2016.

Why? Because a rural Nevadan’s vote counts the same as an urban Nevadan’s vote. In our current winner-take-all system, however, states such as Wyoming are considered “safe.” What’s the point of visiting Wyoming? They’re going to elect a Republican anyway. Similarly, there’s no point visiting California and its deeply Democratic majority, either. Consequently, all of the attention falls on so-called swing states — states that are about as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat.

Nevada’s historically been one of those states, though, so surely the Electoral College and its winner-take-all system is good for us — right? If you’re selling ads, sure. Las Vegas was 4th in campaign advertising spending at one point during the 2016 campaign season. However, is there a single person who thinks introducing national money, along with national polarization and national political messaging, has benefited Nevadans?

Okay, a single Nevadan that isn’t receiving that money right now, or hoping to receive it in the near future?

As for the country, it’s clear our current electoral system is unbalanced. Gas prices are higher at the pump than they should be because Iowa (first in the primaries!) likes their corn subsidies and every major party’s candidate panders to Iowa’s voters first. Meanwhile, Florida, home of Florida Man, gets more presidential campaign visits than any other state. The entire reason the country knows who Sheldon Adelson is isn’t because he’s rich and funds Republicans. Lots of people do that. What makes Adelson special is he funds Republicans in a swing state, which means Adelson’s issues become the nation’s issues, one way or another.

In order to fix this mess, we need to follow the examples set by the Founding Fathers. When Alexander Hamilton and James Madison saw that the Electoral College was failing, they didn’t try to route around the damage. They faced the problem head on and tried to amend the Constitution to fix it.

They failed because the Electoral College can’t be fixed. Let’s do the right thing and amend the Constitution to get rid of it instead.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].