This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

During a presidential election, there's rarely more focus on the specific mechanisms

of the Electoral College, that long-standing way American states choose the next

president, but is the institution itself racist?

Does it privilege small and rural states over those with major cities?

On this election day, Cato's John Samples details some of the arguments for and against the way Americans choose a president.

This is a moment in which people are focused on the election.

People are concerned about when we might know who the winner of the election is and there is this continued or should say

stronger emphasis right now on the electoral college as an institution.

And from what I've read, a lot of people think that

because the electoral college was instituted,

or so the story goes, was instituted in many ways to put up a guardrail to protect the interests of slave-owning

states so long ago that that gives us a better reason than we would otherwise have to eliminate

it and to replace it with some sort of national popular vote. Just as that story exists, what do you make of that

claim? So the most interesting person on this, the claim is what it is. There's the first question of, you know, the way of

electing the president through state electors is a system that doesn't work much like it was designed to.

So in many ways that whole institution has changed a lot on the ground in practical terms. So you have in a sense a different institution. So it's

become something different and you can, in other words, it's not,

doesn't function the same way to protect even small states,

really.

So that's one thing.

...