How the Electoral College Can Help Prevent Voter Fraud

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At the Cato Institute, Walter Olson explains a recent study by Cato scholars Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin that outlines the benefits of the Electoral College in presidential elections to help prevent voter fraud (at least sometimes). Olson writes:

The Constitution’s Electoral College arrangement for selecting a president has long been the object of popular and scholarly discontent, for well-known reasons. It sometimes elevates a winner who lost the popular vote, it gives states influence that is not always proportional to the size of their electorates, it encourages candidates to spend time campaigning in a handful of swing states, and so forth.

In a recent Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy, Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin argue that one countervailing advantage of the Electoral College (EC) often goes unappreciated: it reduces the danger that presidential elections will be decided by fraud or misconduct. To begin with, the EC renders fraud in presidential elections unavailing, and thus disincentivizes it, in states where the race is not going to be close enough for it to make a difference. In the 2020 election, only about a half-dozen states were close enough for the Trump campaign to contest after the fact.

What’s more, the latent potential for successful fraud should not be assumed to be evenly distributed among states. Egorov and Sonin argue that states where both parties have significant representation in government are likely to have stronger guardrails against fraud than states dominated by one party. It seems plausible, for example, that “street-level” fraud at particular polling places is better checked if prosecutors, judges, and other officials are drawn from a mix of party backgrounds.

And if the question is one of election subversion from on high—say, the governor, state legislature, or county canvassing board that tries to replace the voters’ choice of candidate with a different one after the fact—such subversion is likely to run into strong obstacles in a “purple” state, as it did with Trump attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

It might be added that to the extent public or judicial scrutiny of election results plays an important role in evaluating fraud claims and deterring election subversion, a system in which that scrutiny can be focused on a handful of states may work more efficiently than one in which every polling place and canvassing board nationwide needs to be scrutinized or recounted from the ground up. Again, the claims of fraud in the 2020 election can serve as an example, since the most straightforward way to reach a conclusion about their merits is to focus on the close states one by one.

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