Think You Really Vote For President? Think Again. ‘Independent Lens’ Documentary Reveals Electoral College Truth

This is the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December following a general election. That can only mean one thing — it’s the day members of the Electoral College meet in their respective States to cast votes for president and vice president.

If you did not know that, join the club. Very, very few Americans understand how the Electoral College functions or why it was created, much less key dates on its calendar. This critical aspect of our government comes under scrutiny in the Oscar-qualified documentary One Person, One Vote? directed by Maximina Juson and produced by Juson and Daresha Kyi. The film from Independent Lens is now streaming via PBS.

“It’s such a complicated system,” Juson tells Deadline. “The more I researched the Electoral College, the more shocked I became that we as Americans are not aware of this and — given this is how we elect the highest official in our land — we deserve this information, understanding, and this knowledge.”

Take this eye-opening fact that may flabbergast voters. “The framers [of the Constitution] gave people no right to elect their president,” as Prof. George Edwards puts it in the film. Instead, voters choose electors, who do the balloting on the date prescribed above. There’s a filter in place, you might say, “a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens,” according to the National Archives.

It’s a winner-take-all system – whichever candidate wins a state’s popular vote earns all that state’s Electoral College votes (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine that have modified systems). The result is that candidates spend “over 90 percent of their time in battleground states,” notes Juson. “You’ve got billions of dollars being poured into battleground states, around presidents getting elected.”

The current system privileges concerns of voters in those swing states. In the film, Jelani Cobb, writer and dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, imagines what it would be like if we had a true national election – not a collection of 50 state elections and the District of Columbia.

“[Candidates] would contest in lots of places,” he observes, “and a wider array of issues would become important to candidates. Now, if there’s an issue that is important in the most populous states of the Union, but not really important in a handful of swing states, we don’t care, generally speaking. And, so, it might make it more democratic in that sense.”

There are 538 electors total – one for each Senator and one for each member of the House of Representatives, plus 3 for the District of Columbia. Given that each state, regardless of its population, starts out with two Electoral College votes (for its senators), the system skews power toward less populous states. The film’s analysis of the numbers allows a clearer picture to emerge:

How could such an undemocratic system be devised for a country that proclaims itself a democracy? It wasn’t by accident. The idea emerged from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as a way to keep Southern slaveholding states in the fold. Fearing dilution of their power, Southern states demanded their slaves be included in population totals (thus increasing their representation in Congress, and their total of Electoral College votes). Under a compromise, slaveholding states were allowed to count each slave as 3/5ths of a person, the infamous “Three-Fifths Compromise.”

As Dean Cobb points out, on a practical level, the system hardly changed post-bellum. Under Jim Crow, Black people were broadly excluded from voting through poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation and other means; however, their numbers afforded the Southern states more representation in Congress and more Electoral College votes.

“One of the things we learned about the New Deal in school, is that FDR was constantly trying to appease the Southern wing of his party, but they don’t tell you why,” Cobb says. “He was so completely beholden to the Southern wing of his party, and it was because the Southern wing had this population that was not only exploited, but their bodies were subsidizing the power of the people who were exploiting them. And, so, there’s a kind of double bind there.”

Cobb adds, “When I talk about the history of the 20th century with my students, the first thing we have to say is that we don’t know what actual policies would’ve passed [Congress] had there been enfranchisement and had the Electoral College not lavished the undue authority that it did on Southern legislatures and legislators.”

In multiple presidential elections in our history, the winner of the most Electoral College votes has failed to win the most actual votes of the people – most recently in 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, and in 2000, when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore. However, there is a way to avoid this conundrum, one explored in the documentary: a number of states and the District of Columbia have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidates wins the popular vote.

The compact would need to attract the support of enough states to cross the 270 electoral vote threshold to have any force; right now, the states and DC backing it account for 209 electoral votes.

“It’s made a lot of progress over the past 10 to 14 years that this initiative has been happening,” Juson comments. “And two states actually have joined since our film was completed… It’s almost two thirds of the way there. Pennsylvania is taking a look at it now.”

Colorado legislators approved the compact in 2019, then it was put to a vote of the people by referendum in 2020, which passed.

Juson emphasizes that her documentary is not partisan in nature. “This film is not about the candidates, it’s about the people. It doesn’t really matter who actually is the candidate,” she says. “I focus on the people and the process and the people who don’t understand the process… Regardless of whether or not you like the candidates in office, we as a people need to understand how our presidential electoral system works so that we can have a discussion and a dialogue around what the future of this system should look like.”

Now that the electors have met on “the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December following a general election” to cast their ballots, we move on to the next important date on the calendar: January 6. That’s when a joint session of Congress will convene to tally the votes.

January 6 – the significance of that day is one everyone remembers.