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Two weeks ago, I asserted in this space that, in the 2000 presidential election, bad design cost Al Gore the White House. A few of you wrote in to complain that the focus of that post—the misdesign of ballots—was too narrow, and ignored a far more fundamental design flaw in the way Americans pick their president: the Electoral College.
That’s a legitimate gripe. In fact, the Electoral College, cobbled together by a small committee chosen from the men who gathered in Philadelphia to draft the U.S. Constitution in 1787, is a design disaster. It’s complicated, unpredictable, and doesn’t function the way it was meant to.
“Our electoral system is just absurdly complex and distanced from its original design and the political world it was designed for,” says Alexander Keyssar, Harvard historian and author of a book entitled Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?
“The Electoral College as it functions today is the most glaring reminder of many that our democracy is not fair, not equal and not representative,” argues Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board and author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College. “No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason.”
Five times in U.S. history, the Electoral College has produced presidents who failed to carry the popular vote. In 2000, the Electoral College enabled George W. Bush to claim the presidency because (with help from those badly designed ballots) he won Florida, a crucial swing state, by 537 votes—even though Gore carried the popular vote by 543,895 votes. In 2016, the Electoral College handed the presidency to Donald Trump even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million.
As Americans go to the polls today, Joe Biden leads Trump by an average of more than 7 percentage points in the 10 most recent reliable public opinion polls, according to NBC News. That’s well ahead of where Clinton stood against Trump in the last days of the 2016 race. But political analyst Nate Silver cautions that Trump could win the Electoral College again because “projected margins in the tipping-point states are considerably tighter than the margins in the national popular vote.”
The Electoral College was unpopular almost from the moment it was adopted, and has been a source of discontent for two centuries. There have been more than 700 attempts to amend or abolish it. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 58% of Americans favor amending the Constitution to require that the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins, while 40% prefer to keep the current system.
Trump himself once denounced the Electoral College as a “disaster for democracy.” (He now calls it “genius”).
How did Americans end up with such a convoluted system for choosing the occupant of their most important public office? And can it be redesigned?
The answer to the first question is complex and troubling. As Keyssar told Harvard Magazine, the Founding Fathers couldn’t agree on how to choose the president. There were no models for democracy on the scale they envisioned.
James Madison favored a national popular vote. But others feared ordinary citizens wouldn’t have sufficient information or education to make enlightened decisions about a national leader. A second idea was to let Congress choose the president. But that risked making the executive branch beholden to the legislative branch and defeating the whole idea of separation of powers. A third solution was to let state legislatures make the choice.
In the end, the matter was left to a “Committee on Unfinished Parts,” which settled on a compromise design political scientist Robert Alexander describes as “a Frankenstein’s monster” that combined elements of all three approaches.
The Founders envisioned representatives to the Electoral College as men of property, education and political experience. But electors would be convened for the sole purpose of selecting the president and vice-president. States were afforded representation in the body equal to their membership in the House and Senate, and state legislatures were granted authority to choose electors and allocate their votes as they saw fit.
All these parameters conspired to make the Electoral College a dysfunctional design. The formula for deciding how many electors to assign to each state was especially problematic because it replicated the abhorrent three-fifths compromise used to distribute seats in the House. To appease the free white residents of southern states, enslaved Black people were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of allocating representatives and electors, even though slaves were denied the right to vote. Wegman told the New York Times Daily podcast that southern states exploited that provision to perpetuate segregation long after Black Americans were granted the right to vote.
Nor did the Founders anticipate the rise of political parties and how, by the 1830s, the logic of partisan competition would drive nearly all states to adopt winner-take-all rules in which the candidate who won the majority of a state’s popular vote would be awarded all that state’s electoral votes. That development shaped the modern political landscape in which candidates campaign almost exclusively in a handful of “battleground” states where small shifts in voting results can determine Electoral College outcomes. Other states are reduced to “spectator” status.
In 1969, the House voted by an overwhelming 338 to 70 in favor of a constitutional amendment to dismantle the Electoral College, but a cadre of Southern segregationists blocked the bill with an epic filibuster in the Senate. That’s the closest America has ever come to an Electoral College redesign.
More recently, 15 states and the District of Columbia have endorsed an proposal called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement that pledges them to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote. It’s a clever workaround that doesn’t require rewriting the Constitution. But so far signatories of the compact control a combined 196 electoral votes, far short of the 270 votes needed for a majority in the Electoral College.
More design news below.
Clay Chandler
— clay.chandler@fortune.com
NEWS BY DESIGN
A tram car in Rotterdam charged through a barrier at the end of the line, hurtling over the end of a bridge. But the car, which was empty except for the driver, was saved from falling as it was propped up by a sculpture of whale tails installed at the end of the bridge by architect Maarten Struijs. The sculpture is called Saved by a Whale’s Tale.
A team from Stanford University’s design institute—the d.school—have been working with government officials to design systems to help poll staff work efficiently and safely. The d.school’s work also intends to prevent voters from growing disenfranchised with an increasingly fraught voting system.
In Mississippi, voters today will decide whether to adopt the new state flag picked by a commission created this summer to replace the state’s 126-year-old flag that featured a Confederate emblem. The new design, picked from thousands of public submissions, features a magnolia flower surrounded by stars and the words “In God We Trust.” If it’s rejected, the old flag won’t return, but it’s back to the drawing board on new designs.
As England enters a new four-week lockdown, the U.K.’s contact-tracing app, built on software designed by Apple and Google, is receiving software updates that could make it more effective. A previous version was perhaps too sensitive to privacy, with designers deciding not to collect user contact information, so health workers couldn’t follow up with suspected cases. The standards for determining who counts as a “close contact” are also being updated, expanding the net to capture more potential cases early.
Apple introduced a new iPhone feature through a software update that turns the entire back panel into a tap-sensitive function button. Users can program what functions they want the back panel to perform. As an Android user, I’ve always been frustrated by the iPhone’s dearth of function buttons, so this seems like a neat solution that doesn’t disrupt Apple’s single button design.
A collapsible, pocket-sized gas mask designed to protect protesters from tear gas was awarded Bronze in the student category of the U.S.-based International Design Excellence Awards. The mask, which protects wearers against the effects of tear gas for up to 15 minutes, was designed using Hong Kong as a case study. Last year, around 16,000 gas canisters were deployed in Hong Kong during a six-month window as protests gripped the city.
Enjoy this thought-investigation into what a $590 scratch-and-sniff T-shirt, designed by French fashion house Lanvin, is worth during a year of complete economic upheaval. Never mind, as theTimes points out, the irony of releasing a scented shirt that can only be smelled at close proximity in a year when social distancing is vogue and anosmia is trending.
EVENTS BY DESIGN
November
The AIGA Design Conference is being hosted online November 9-14. The event, hosted by the U.S. professional association for design, is pitching “building bridges” as the theme for its festival
Canada’s annual graphic design fest, DesignThinkers, is running online this year, November 10-21—the first time in the event’s 20-year history that it hasn’t been held in person.
Dubai’s inaugural architecture festival, d3 Architecture Festival, will run November 11-13 on the sidelines of Dubai Design Week. The event will focus on sustainability—an existential issue for the desert city.
Barcelona Design Week, bringing together architecture, tech, industrial and graphic design, is being held both online and on-site November 17-26.
Hong Kong’s Business of Design Week (BODW), billed as “Asia’s premier annual” event on design, will be in person and online from November 30 until December 5. Like many others, the event looks to provide guidance in a pandemic era.
December
Seoul Design Festival, a celebration of South Korea’s young designers and upstart design brands, is running December 9-13.
The National Gallery of Victoria’s art, design, and architecture exhibition, the NGV Triennial, will run from December 19 to April 18, 2021 in Melbourne, Australia.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
“I don’t think there is any scenario in the future in which fashion will exist online only…Fashion is a physical object: We’ll never be able to entirely digitize it, the way Spotify did with music or Netflix did with movies. But fashion needs to embrace digital if it is to survive.”
Fast Company interviewed four fashion aficionados on how the pandemic has altered the industry. José Neves, the CEO of online fashion retailer Farfetch, which connects customers to global boutiques, is advocating for an embrace of digital elements—such as showrooms and marketplaces. Steven Kolb, CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America adds that independent fashion designers are now more willing to work with major buyers previously shunned as too mainstream—like Amazon—to help shift unsold stockpiles.
This week’s edition of BxD was curated by Eamon Barrett. Email him tips and ideas at eamon.barrett@fortune.com