So overall, while the Electoral College may not make much of a difference to the results of our modern elections, it forces our politicians to have a larger scope of the issues facing this country, rather than just focusing on the concerns people in areas with large populations care about. Even when it is against the law for these folks to vote for someone other than what the electoral results in their state indicate, there is always an option to become a faithless elector under the American structure. Sticking to the electoral college format allows us to use electors as intended instead of relying on all of the votes counting. But really, scholars say, consensus is constructed through thousands of small acts over generations. But if youre a voter in the United States, theres a really good chance your vote doesnt count the way you think it does. . This reflects how uncommon it is to reach the Oval Office without winning the popular vote; it has only happened four times in United States history. Why? In a truly national election, parties and candidates would have the incentive to turn out their votes wherever they were, fostering a deeper sense of engagement across the whole population. So what would happen if we got rid of the Electoral College? As a result, Republicans and Republican state governments are incentivized to maintain the current system. The cost of conducting a nationwide recount could be hundreds of millions of dollars, which is money that may not always be in the budget. This imbalance is primarily a 21st century phenomenon and it could, of course, change in the years to come as some states grow and other states shrink in population. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, the Electoral College is unfair. The chances of a recount would increase dramatically with election. Swing or battleground states are mere accidents of geography. Instead of dealing with these complications, a simple majority vote would always speak of the will of the people. If a candidate wins the popular vote in a state, even by a single vote, they get all of that states electoral votes. Blue states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the red states. Every vote would count equally instead. The U.S. Census creates the allocations of electoral votes that each state receives. Do you think this means the system is broken? Eliminating this barrier could mean that some parts of the country never become part of the overall campaign. Stanford, California 94305. Its primary function is to malapportion political power, and it does so indeed, has always done so with strikingly awful. The Electoral College has elected a president who did not win the popular vote twice in the past 20 years, in 2000 and 2016. Today the pact has the support of states and Washington D.C. that total 181 electoral votes, largely those that have gone for Democrats in recent years. We should be talking about other things. Still, Levy said if he had to bet on whether the U.S. will still be using the Electoral College in 20 years he thinks it will. 1. The distinction matters. The framers of the Constitution set up the Electoral College for a number of different reasons. But specifics vary. We already see gridlock and partisanship in Congress that limits the opportunities for collaboration. That, critics say, means devaluing the votes of many non-white voters too. What would happen if the Electoral College was eliminated? Democratic presidential candidates are weighing in too. "The game will not be any longer to be a [politician who is] liberal but be able to appeal to a rural Ohioan," he said. It also stops the distribution process where California gets 55 votes, but a state like Delaware only gets 3. There are over 300 million people currently residing in the United States, but only 538 people actually get to choose who gets to be the president. There were two additional votes for Sanders that were invalidated in Minnesota and one for Kasich in Colorado. Critics of the system would argue that the elections of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are evidence that this impact is no longer present in U.S. politics. Polls conducted by Gallup over the past seven decades, with the most recent being from 2013, clearly show the American public's desire to get rid of the whole system. Without the Electoral College in place, presidential candidates would build platforms that would speak to their base. This is the heart of the problem with the Electoral College. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays and appeals to narrow special interests. Generally, we count on the Republican and Democratic parties to nominate not the best people, but candidates who combine a degree of popular support with the experience and temperament to govern. As we begin the third decade of the 21st century, change benefits the Democrats. Instead of having a regional focus that incorporates specific campaigning elements, there would be a national campaign instead. Do you think that more states or all states should join the compact? Under these laws, which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nations early years, even though it was never raised by the framers states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state. Colin Powell was the primary beneficiary, receiving three votes. Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representationthe three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromiseand guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. # Because the District of Columbia is awarded Electoral College votes under the 23rd Amendment, we include its votes here as if it were a state. 7. Sixty years later inRay v. Blair, the court ruled the Constitution, including the 12th Amendment, does not bar a political party from requiring electors to sign a pledge to support the nominees of the national convention. They disagreed so strongly that the final system wasnt adopted until the last minute, thrown together by a few delegates in a side room. Abolishing the Electoral College: Since the year 2000, there have been five presidential elections. But heres the important part. It also prevents candidates from going into states where the electorate typically votes for the other party. Warren says she wants to get rid of the Electoral College, and vote for president using a national popular vote. The presidential election in 2016 saw a modern-era record for faithless electors, but five of them came from the Clinton camp. Thanks to the Internet, telephones, email, social media, and every other form of communication that we have today, people can choose for themselves whether a new story has an underlying sinister bias. The party structureswhich, for all their faults, have a vested interest in candidates from the moderate middle who are able to work with Congress and other officials to governhave been sidelined. Maintaining the Electoral College may seem like the most politically expedient position for the Republican Party in the short term, but it may cause significant damage in the long term. This year is the poster child for the need for reform. Fully overhauling the way the president is selected would take a Constitutional amendment, which would require the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states. There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. A number of states have signed onto a pact that guarantees their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote, no matter the outcome in their individual states. Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. Yes. Because the Electoral College is based on the structure of state populations and representation in the House, some people have a vote that carries more weight per delegate than others. By 2019, the median state was Kentucky with 4,467,673 which made it 11% of the population of California, the biggest state in the union with 39,512,223 people. But under this system, those Republican votes might as well not exist. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. "There's no realistic chance of a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College," said Jacob Levy, a professor of political theory at McGill University. Continually updated tools and resources to help move your practice and the legal profession forward during COVID-19 and beyond. Its also the only place where the District of Columbia functions as a state since the 23rd Amendment allocates 3 electors to it. How the Electoral College helps preserve our constitutional system. Of the 700 attempts to fix or abolish the electoral college, this one nearly succeeded In 1969, Congress almost approved a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college,. "How would that work?" To understand why, lets start from the point we make above: the Electoral College system currently benefits Republicans, as two Republican presidents in the last 20 years have been elected despite losing the popular vote and that nearly happened a third time this year. There are also circumstances where a majority of electors might not be available, which would throw the results of the election into the House of Representatives. But dont forget, Bush won the popular vote four years later by three million votes. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. The point is, even accounting for demographic changes, neither party has a built-in advantage under a popular-vote system. Ive spent the past few years obsessively analyzing the Electoral College, trying to understand the concerns of the founding fathers, doing the math from different elections. Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at an organizing event in February. When Americans are polled about the Electoral College, most of them say that they want it to disappear. Learn more here. Theyre swing states. But swing states distort our national priorities, even when the president wins the popular vote. 6. Its complicated, outdated, unrepresentative in a word, undemocratic. And the reasons people think we need to keep the Electoral College the way it is, theyre all wrong. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. Out of those visits, almost 70% of them happened in only four states: North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. LIASSON: It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, so that's not going to happen. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/learning/is-the-electoral-college-a-problem-does-it-need-to-be-fixed.html. 1, that Democrats will win a popular vote every time. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. In the first instance, states could decide to award 2 Electoral College votes (EVs) to the winner of the national popular vote (NPV) and the remainder to the winner of the state. Two of those elections have occurred since 2000. Changing or eliminating the Electoral College can be accomplished only by an amendment to the Constitution, which requires the. However, in the five presidential elections of the 21st century, two ended up with the winner of the popular vote losing the Electoral College. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch. Alternative 2: Two electoral votes to national popular vote winner; remainder apportioned by congressional district, *Each of these races included faithless electors, such that the total of electoral votes, as shown, does not equal 538. This isnt a partisan issue its a fairness issue. "Every vote matters," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in Mississippi on Monday. I wrote a whole book on the subject. Gronke asks. The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully! Keeping the electoral college restricts the voting to acknowledged states only. It wasnt the first time a president won by losing or the second or even the fourth. In part, that is because the Electoral College is constitutionally mandated, and abolishing it would require a constitutional amendment. Hillary Clinton won. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. Which states do matter? But the Constitution and the courts have allowed the states some leeway to make changes to how their Electoral College representatives are chosen. In late September, when the Republican nominee's numbers in the polls saw a significant rise and nearly eliminated Clinton's huge post-convention lead, forecasts still had her snatching the election with 17 more electoral votes than her opponent. States have the power to award their electors however they like. It no longer serves the intended job. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. [2] Both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature are currently controlled by Democrats; however, the 2020 elections shifted both chambers to Republican control. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. This Student Opinion prompt and a related Lesson of the Day will prepare students to participate in our live panel discussion about the Electoral College, on Oct. 22 at 1 p.m. Eastern. Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at an organizing event in February. It said that the Colorado secretary of state erred in removing an elector who cast his vote for then-Ohio Gov. Although he said that the system was far from perfect, it was at least excellent. Nebraska and Maine already award some of their electors to the winners of the congressional districts. Here are the yea and the nay. It probably reduces the cost of presidential campaigns by confining television advertising to the battleground states (and spares the rest of us the tedium of endless repetitive ads). 11. 6. In May, the Washington State Supreme Courtuphelda state election law that said an elector who did not vote for the candidate he pledged to support could be fined up to $1,000 in civil penalties. Abolishing the Electoral College would get rid of this confusing process. 5. As the Washington Post has shown, the four most populous states, California, Texas, Florida and New York are all dramatically underrepresented in todays Electoral College. Democracy is, at its core, about fair, equal representation one person, one vote. That means the information receives an update every 10 years. Candidates focus on swing states because they actually have a chance of flipping them and winning a bucket of electoral votes. Under the current plan, states that join will not activate the compact until enough states have joined to total 270 electoral votes. And sure, the last two times the Electoral College has awarded the White House to the popular-vote loser, its been to the Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000. Jesse Wegman, the author of the Opinion pieces above, is one of the guests on our Oct. 22 live panel for students. A second variation would be to award two Electoral College votes from each state to the winner of the national popular vote and award the remaining electors to the winner of each congressional district (CD). Most Americans would breathe a sigh of relief, I believe, if we had a system capable of choosing the U.S. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Do you support this movement? Nonetheless, it is likely the most viable alternative to the current Electoral College system. Source: Daily Kos Elections. In winner-take-all states, all electoral votes cast for the state are assigned to the candidate who gets the most electoral votes. This has happened five times in American history. "The game will be: Be a liberal to the extent I can maximize votes in major urban centers.". Stanford University. Started in the mid-2000s, the NPVIC is a fairly straightforward system that capitalizes on the constitutional guarantee that states are free to determine the manner in which they award their electoral votes. Map. And finally, Myth 3: The Electoral College protects small states. And thats it. And even when that doesn't happen, Wegman sees another problem with the . hide caption. 7. While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same. And because they created it, its a sacred work of constitutional genius. But get this, the way the Electoral College actually functions today isnt even enshrined in the Constitution. This issue exists in the Electoral College when the rural states face off with the urban ones. Popular vote is a direct vote. The winner of an election should be the person who gets the most votes. ), and the big state-small state divide no longer animates our politics, if it ever did. In 1892, the court upheld inMcPherson v. Blackerthat Congress can set the date nationally for the Electoral College to meet, but it also said that the states could determine how electors were apportioned and chosen. To this day, people are still arguing that Al Gore was the real winner and debating whether the recount in Florida was accurate the state whose electors propelled Bush to the top. FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast have predicted. The Electoral College has given one candidate a majority win in this political structure since 1992, but there have been four times when the winner of the election didnt receive a clear majority of the votes across the entire country. This means that every election, 80 percent of American voters, roughly 100 million people, get ignored. Because the Electoral College is based on the structure of state populations and representation in the House, some people have a vote that carries more weight per delegate than others. In his recent Op-Ed The Electoral College Will Destroy America, Mr. Wegman provides further evidence to support his claim that the Electoral College is unfair: 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. 2? Residents of places like Puerto Rico and Guam would have their votes be counted in the final total, and these locations consistently vote for one party. So if the results of most presidential elections tend to reflect the choice of the people, why do we still have the Electoral College? In the 20th century there were 25 presidential elections and none of them resulted in an Electoral College winner who lost the popular vote. That position, shared by many Republicans, makes it highly unlikely that there would be sufficient support for changing the system. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. As we all know only too well, in practice this archaic system means that the person who wins the most votes may not win the election.
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