One person, one vote. The EC was established before the pony express.
36
So in 50 years if either of those 2 states flipped to r, how long before the dnc throws a fit to brink back the electoral? I'm not even r and I see this as sore loser mentality and silly.
4
If you look at the vote by county map you will see that Trump won by over 3000 counties he Hillary one by somewhere around 60 populated counties since each of our states have far different needs than the populated coastal communities ie gas prices, environmental, labor needs, pay policies, illegals, lowering wages, which may be fine for the people who hire their maids and gardeners because legals won’t work that cheap ie “ The jobs Americans won’t do”
2
The sub-headline asks the rhetorical question: "But does anyone really think popular vote losers make better presidents?"
Beyond the fact that it's a dumb question because it's impossible to know the answer, it brings to mind another question: in the age of government largess, does anyone believe the people-- most of whom vote based on the question, "What's in it for me and my friends?"-- would make a better choice than the majority in each state acting through their representatives?
It's a pertinent question considering that we may soon have more people dependent on government than those whose income taxes pay for it.
3
Voters in small States want a popular vote, so every vote counts. The real problem is minority voters in predominately Red or Blue States can have absolutely no effect on the Presidential election. Party bosses will lose the ability to deliver the State, but the negative effect packing of the Supreme Court as a result the EC should be overcome
2
Instead of abolishing it, have it actually represent us as it was designed to. We currently 435 for the house meaning that each vote represents roughly 1 million people. The first article of the constitution maxes that number at 30k so the first step is to follow the constitution and add a huge number of people to the house so "we the people" have representation instead of "we the $$$". Secondly, instead of having states do "all or nothing", allocate those electoral college votes based on the majority from each district with the 2 for each senator going to the overall state winner.
The founders feared running the country with "majority rule" so put in place many checks and balances. Unfortunately, in the name of power, we ignore these and descend into chaos.
7
If you want to live in a pure democracy, move. This country was never intended to be one.
9
I understand that the Electoral College empowers rural voters in general, way past what their numbers warrant, and I have no desire to disenfranchise the people of Wyoming but after the College left us with W. Bush and Donald Trump it would seem as though it has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that its hurting the country
9
If you get rid of the Electoral College two things will happen - 1) Candidates will visit only a handful or so of the states within our country and 2) Voters within certain states will realize their votes do not mattert and they will not waste their time going to the voting poll - So, for these two reasons it will never be eliminated - Our Founding Fathers were more wise then what some current day politicians give them credit for.
6
Ah, the intent of the founders, always a tricky issue. The original intent of the founders gave the EC electors the ability to ignore the popular vote in their states and install the loser of their states votes as President. Many states have taken this power away, thus going against the intent of the founding fathers. So, as it stands today, the EC is already nothing like what the founders intended.
4
Ditch the Electoral College. Time to have presidents the majority wants, and end red/rural state over representation that gave us the Trump travesty.
5
You gotta love how Republicans pretend to be so concerned about the relevance of rural voters even as they spend all their time in Washington piling up tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-rich. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
13
Finally some good analysis of the Electoral College issue. Jamelle Bouie puts the usual pundits to shame.
5
So many red herrings in this column. It isn't a question of whether popular vote losers (or winners, for that matter) make better presidents. The framers of the Constitution had very good reasons for creating the Electoral College. Read Federalist No. 68. Don't be a historical ignoramus.
8
@Sabrina Davis-Would you be comfortable if the electors in your state installed the loser of the popular vote in your state as President? The founders gave them the ability to do this.
4
"But does anyone really think popular vote losers make better presidents?"
Bush better than Gore?
Trump better than Clinton?
No and no.
4
The issue isn't the red state-blue state divide. It's rural-urban (and suburban).
Americans are flocking to cities, but the country is run by a conservative rural minority (which votes against their own interests). This works for Republicans but it's undemocratic. It's why we have Trump.
The EC is long past it's expiration date.
6
The antidemocratic Electoral College matters most when the country is polarized, as it is now. When the sides are closer together, it's easier to compromise. The irony is that the Electoral College almost inevitably leads to polarization.
When, as now, politicians are able to ignore certain states, those states never hear differing points of view. Resentments are easy to foment. Distrust is a natural consequence. Moreover, politicians don't have appropriate incentive to cater to the interests of those states.
It seems unlikely that a Constitutional amendment will fix this any time soon. I would suggest, in the interim, that the number of electors for each state be limited to its representation in the House rather than getting an elector for each senator as well. That would move us much closer to democratic outcomes.
I think its also possible that large states might enter pacts to allow for proportional allocation of electors. So California, Texas and Florida might each agree to allocate their electors according to the percentage of votes the candidate won in that state.
It's complicated, but the founders left us with a mess.
3
The same reasoning would eliminate the Senate. Is that what we want? Seems to ignore the basic compromises that made this form of government possible. It was basically a union of independent political entities to stand against a common enemy (England). The standard attack against the US is that it will deteriorate into several political sections from decay within rather than defeat as a united entity. The differences between the States are real and the electoral college recognizes it and seeks compromise. The value of the Union is greater than a majority. Frankly the creators of the Constitution were smarter than any of the present day observers. It is not perfect but it works.
7
An account of the fundamental nature of what this country is right there in its name. We are not England (land of the Anglo people), or Deutschland (land of the Deutsch people). We are the UNITED STATES, meaning we are a group of semi-autonomous political entities united under a federal govt via the Constitution. Our federal govt is a union of states, not a union of people.
States are semi-autonomous polities, and it makes some conceptual sense that the President of the federal govt be elected not by popular rule, but by a scoring system among these sub-entities that conform the federal govt itself. Removing this system entirely would be seen as radical in political terms, and would be unlikely to succeed.
But, this article rightly points out flaws in HOW this electoral system among the states is administered. What is deeply flawed is the winner-takes-all system. We could REFORM the EC, but not do away with it altogether.
States should assign their electors PROPORTIONAL to the breakdown of the popular vote in their state, and not assign all electors to the candidate who, in some cases, won only a slim majority of the popular vote in that state. This would accomplish much the same goals as the author wants, it makes intuitive sense, still conforms to the constitutional principles that are rooted in the founding of the country, and (importantly) would be seen as less politically radical and is therefore likely more feasible than doing away with the EC altogether.
8
The advantages of using the popular vote to decide elections and the presidency is well described in this article.
I discovered the disadvantages while living in Canada.
The province of Quebec has had aspirations of separating from Canada over the past century. In the last few decades Alberta has also talked of separation.
Giving Alberta and Quebec extra "representation" keeps them in Canada, but the popular vote does not always decide who our Prime Minister or Government is.
The advantage to this is the country stays together.
The disadvantage is that the popular vote does not determine our Government or our Prime Minister in Canada.
The U.S. may soon have to reevaluate the same choice.
The founding fathers already made the choice for the U.S. , but it may need to be reexamined.
Don't minimize the risk of your country breaking up.
If it can happen in Canada, it can happen anywhere.
Look up Quebec separation for background on this.
2
Having the electoral college is actually more democratic. Why? Because it forces the candidate to win more contests, in more areas. To use a baseball analogy, if the election outcome were based only on the popular vote total, it would be like making the team with the largest total number of runs during the season the World Series winner.
5
If we abolish the electoral college we will have to change the name of the country from the United States of America to the Chaotic Metropoli of America.
A few historical points: Madison, who Bouie quotes extensively, was from the largest would-be state, Virginia, which was nearly as big as the next two largest states combined, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. So of course he would have favored the popular vote. But even he was unsure if it was a good idea.
A delegate from Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, said it best. From Madison's minutes on the debate over the election of the executive at the Constitutional Convention: "He was agst. a popular election. The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men. He urged the expediency of an appointment of the Executive by Electors to be chosen by the State Executives."
Gerry was largely responsible for the eventual inclusion of the Bill of Rights, the document that has made our constitution pre-eminent in the history of nations in the world. Although he favored the constitution as originally conceived, he never did vote for it because it did not contain a Bill of Rights. For this he suffered excoriation by his friends and enemies alike. We would do well to heed his words.
5
Seems to me his words are against democracy itself. Of the people are uniformed and can not make 'right' choice, why bother to ask them at all? Just rely on the elite, whom he belonged. Basically, he wanted freedom for his class but not for anybody else. And that we should consider valid argument for electoral college?
2
Electors are chosen by random processes that differ from state to state - and they are chosen by political parties which intentionally make it difficult for alternative voices to be heard. How is any of that fair, representational, or democratic?
5
In 2016 when the Electoral College failed to prevent Alexander Hamilton's worst fear from being realized, that is, when it failed to prevent an extremely unfit candidate elected by the "rabble" from becoming President, it was clear that the institution has become useless. It is only a matter of time before the shifting population of the United States overcomes the stasis that the Founding Fathers could not anticipate which privileges a minority rabble above the majority will.
5
For those who think the electoral college somehow protects the interests of states, I remind them that states don't vote, people do. The idea that people are voting to protect the interest of their state is an absurd fiction. People vote to protect their own interests whether those interests are the same as or different from those of other people in their state or of their state as an entity. The election captures the preferences of individuals—not the preferences of state governments. Odd that the party of individualism over government wants to disenfranchise individuals and instead enfranchise 50 state governments.
8
I understand why someone living in a north eastern state such as New York or in one of the pacific coast states such as California would want to dump the Electoral College. They have huge numbers of people and It would marginalize the rest of the country’s say in who is president. During the campaign at least one of Clinton's advisers, as well Bill, told her she should put more time in states such as Michigan. She ignored their advice. But then others advisers, as well as Clinton herself, thought those states were in the bag and bragged about how she was going to bury Trump in a mountain of Electoral votes. There was no talk of getting rid of the College until maybe 24 hours after the election results. What they don't talk about is that Trump took both houses of congress with him and every one of those elections were by popular vote. Trump haters use every excuse they can to deal with her losing the election. But if you read books such as Donna Brazil's book or the book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, you find it isn't the Russians or Electoral college that caused her to lose. It is understandable that Mr. Bouie wants to get rid of the College. But getting rid of the college, and the less populated states say in who leads our country, does not serve the whole nation, only a few highly populated states.
5
1. We are a constitutional republic not a democracy.
2. We are the United States of America, not United People of America. States vote for the President if all. States were intended to have more power than the limited federal government our founders authored.
4
Why can’t Democrat’s win fair & square? Why must you attempt to rig, cheat, usurp the constitution, refuse to update voter rolls as the law requires, allow & encourage non citizens & non eligible voters to vote? If one man, one vote is your cry, why not show a photo ID & guarantee that? Huh?
4
I guess it is time to become democracy
1
@TxRanchGal. What makes a “state” other than an artificial line on the map? What would happen if we redrew these lines into 50 areas with equal GDPs? Imagine Dallas-Fort Worth with 2 senators and the rest of Texas with 2 senators representing third world extraction economies. Just saying,... interesting thought problem.
2
If the outrage surrounding Trump brings true Electoral College reform, then it would worth suffering this fool for just this one term. Hopefully.
1
Jamelle Bouie has totally misstated James Madison's position in Federalist 10. As a NYT columnist he has a high standard to uphold. I was shocked at his fundamental misrepresentation. I have taught that Federalist paper to my A.P. students for a quarter of a century, and Bouie's mischaracterization is simply unacceptble in a featured NYT columnist. I would hope Mr. Bouie would correct and acknowledge his error, after carefully re-reading Fed 10. His credibility depends on it.In the era of serial falsehoods the NYT needs to continue its unrivaled leadership in factual accuracy and responsible journalism.
4
Bla bla bla bla. Ain’t going to happen. The Electoral College is a superior form of Democracy compared to the “popular” vote. Keep pushing this and, in reality, you are pushing for Civil War.
5
the Electoral college doesn't prevent civil wars, as history of the US taught us
3
By all means, get rid of the Electoral College, but make sure that such populous States as New York, Illinois, California, dominated by the leftist radical Democrats and loud-mouthed militant vegans, do not determine the occupant of the White House.
2
Why not? Why low populated States who could not attract more people, should determine who should be in the WH?
2
Again, you've done another great job of spinning pieces of informaiton into a solid argument. But, there's always another side. Nice try.
3
Interesting how every time the D party loses the presidency the EC is questioned.
The D party did not complain when Bill Clinton won the presidency with 43% in 1992.
7
And why should they? It was not just EC that put him in the Presidency, after all he won more votes than any other candidate. Or you are trying to say it would be better if a guy with 40% ended up as the President? I agree the US electoral system has many flaws, and absence of requirement more than 50% of votes is one of them, but it is separate issue from EC. I am for fixing both of these flaws, but I don't think Reps are up to that.
Mafia Don won the 2016 popular vote in 49 states. As Casey Stengel said, "You could look it up." Benedict Donald got his butt kicked in California, and so he lost the overall popular vote. So should we allow California to decide our elections?
The debate over the electoral college--a brilliant but flawed attempt to paper over deep divisions in the Original 13 colonies--really amounts to an argument for secession. The "Union" of our 13 colonies never made sense: that's how we got the 3/5 Compromise and the grandfathering in of the slave trade until 1807, damning millions more to slavery.
Our Civil War proved the "Union" didn't make any sense, and the recent threats of violence by Trump and Iowa's Steve King against opponents prove that it still doesn't.
Those favoring a "national election" don't want small town, rural hicks deciding who runs our government. Those against don't want city slickers calling all the shots.
When are we finally going to admit that our region--call it "Southern North America"--has never worked as a rational political entity. We have held it together with bloodshed and enmity. New Yorkers can't understand how red staters don't grasp the need for massive infrastructure investment, and folks in Missouri can't fathom why anyone would be opposed to teaching Jesus in our public schools and criminalizing abortion.
Everyone agrees this is not working. What's amazing is how few people have the courage to insist we sue for an amicable divorce.
3
Mob Rule, Abolish the EC, Abolish ICE, Open Borders, Lipstick Socialism, 70% Tax Rate. Abolish Cow Farts...
The 2020 Democrat Platform is really shaping up!
7
Reps shaped in 2016 as bigoted cohort that trying to hold on power by any means in the face of losing popular support.
2
Electoral College: the quintessential example of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Sorry your gal didn’t make it in 2016, but let’s not lose our heads in blind rage retaliation. Alas, how that ever-present road to hell continues to be paved with thoughts like these...
3
While it’s true that Republican candidates are often the primary beneficiaries of popular vote/electoral college imbalances, in no way would a popular vote contest be fatal to their chances.
President Obama may have aced the alchemy of the electoral college. But f you look at 2012, he won 65,446,032 votes. Mitt Romney and the next runner up Gary Johnson won a combined 61,865,055 votes. That’s almost a 50/50 popular vote split!
Write a column about repealing part of the law of gravity. I need to lose weight. This conversation is a waste of newsprint.
2
It isn't about Trump, it is about the power elite not getting their way. Every time a Republican wins the Democrats start crying about how the system is broken. Now we want 16 year olds to vote, eliminate the electoral college, stack the supreme court. Give me a break. Suck it up and go win an election. Nominate someone that doesn't make half the country angry and you would have won by a landslide over Trump.
What did Hillary Clinton say to the miners in W. Virginia when they lost their jobs? The same thing Barak Obama told them "It sucks to be you". I am paraphrasing a bit obviously, but pretty much the same message. At least Trump said "it sucks that you are losing your jobs". Now we have virtual 12 year olds proposing a "Green Plan" that is so absurd as to be laughable and a whole party is behind it.
2
The Electoral College is not representative of America's people, and it is not compatible with the basic tenets of democracy,
No wonder Trump and his followers are for the Electoral College. That describes them as well, to a T.
1
Without any thought, Donald Trump is doing our country a great service. The Electoral College has been outmoded for several centuries and was created to placate the south, which had few white, land-holding voters and many more slaves. The southern plantation holders wanted the same voice in the just forming democracy as the northern states, which had few slaves and more whites who were allowed to vote. Since we no longer have slavery, there is no need for the Electoral College. The author and quite a few contributors have correctly pointed out that there are rural populations in states the Electoral College does not favor. Both parties are represented in all our states and each vote needs to count. I believe in democracy and that the will of the people matters. Also, more people would vote if the Electoral College were not a stumbling block to the will of the people. We can do other things to make voting easier and more representative, but abolishing the Electoral College would be good step in the right direction.
2
We can't let the majority rule!
We can't let the minority be ignored!
Instead, let's have the minority rule and the majority be ingored!
We cant let California and New York have influence over Wyoming and Idaho....instead, let's let the people of Wyoming and Idaho have more influence than those of NY and California!
Great system for the Republicans. Helps them and makes no sense.
5
2000 Florida re-count took over a month.
Let's imagine a NATIONAL re-count.
It would set off a civil war.
2
James Michener, an author who served as a presidential elector in 1968, was even blunter. The Electoral College, he wrote, was a “time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation.”
It still is.
Too late.
The time bomb detonated on November 6, 2016.
2
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitution. But laws and . . . . institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimes of their barbarous ancestors."--Thomas Jefferson. . . . The electoral college is an 18th century political anachronism, designed to keep the choice of President in the hands of a wealthy elite, rather than the popular "mob," the common people. It should have been scrapped long ago. . . . The one positive aspect of this overdue controversy is that it has forced the Republicans to reveal openly their anti democratic nature. . . .Openly racist and anti-democratic--they are now America's Fascist Party.
5
The Electoral College protects minority rights. It is a protection against tyranny, and that is in the USA's DNA.
Cokie Roberts: "I think that [The Electoral College] has a very important role in terms of protecting minorities. The founders thought about small states. Keep in mind, they were always against the tyranny of the majority." Full story-and worth the read/listen-from NPR: http://n.pr/2gzCl5Z
Here is the very picture of tyranny, a map that shows the 2016 election BY COUNTY, blue is Dem & Red is Rep: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/countymaprb1024.png
The blue counties would have elected a president for the whole country. (Source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/)
Our founders believed in Checks and Balances (https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/checks-and-balances) and that is what the Electoral College is.
2
@WorkingGuy
CORRECTED LINKS:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/
https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/checks-and-balances
1
Should we have better ideas and policies that a majority of Americans support? We sure should. Everybody, repeat after me, "YES".
How do we do it?
If everybody in four states votes for it, we win. Maybe. But, not for electing the President.
Can we take a short cut?
I thought you would never ask. Yes we can. Here's how. We take over the Senate. Then, the Senate adds 10 justices to the SCOTUS. Bing, bang, boom. Second Amendment Gone. NRA, terrorist organization. Abortion, everywhere. Border open. Wealthy pay their fair share. Fossil fuels allowed only for climate change believers. Trump imprisoned. We'll do the impeachment latter. That's just a formality.
I'm all in. What can I do?
Pay attention to our wording. Gun safety. White Nationalist. Man made, climate changing, poor people dying, something or other. It doesn't matter. You get the idea.
To the Senate.
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ has simple, easy to watch videos that counter all the myths/fears that having a real national popular vote would be some kind of loss vs. great gain to democracy. The bill to give all electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote is gaining ground and "... has been enacted into law in 13 jurisdictions with 181 electoral votes...will take effect when enacted by states with 89 more electoral votes. The bill is currently on the governor's desk in Delaware and New Mexico. It has passed one house in 8 additional states with 72 electoral votes..." including states with Republican controlled legislatures. Some lawmakers are still actually capable of being moved to action when a law or social institution is shown to be as blatantly unfair as the electoral college visibly is. And as far as the EC being a "time bomb," aren't we in the midst of watching its results explode in our nation and the world right now?
1
It's this type of story that ruins the reputation of the media as being politically left instead of neutral.
1
That time bomb went off. We're living with the shrapnel right now.
Modern-day leftists can opine all they want but the reality is that leftists are only concerned with ruthlessly increasing their power to lord over the rest of us who are not as enlightened as they are.
2
I hope it stays where it is because I use it as the reason why I don't vote. When asked I can lapse into a tediously righteous diatribe over it; the experience is sort of like putting oneself in a trance.
Afterward I feel like I need some orange juice and a carb bar.
The reason California and New York has so many people is that people who cannot stand to live in every other state move there.
Liberal people run away from Idaho, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to live in New York and California because that is where they can be themselves and that is where the jobs are.
DUH!
2
@Dejah Why do they keep voting for higher taxes?
"States rights" = fossilized unequally protective laws.
1
The Electoral College is the “ founding Fathers “ version and encapsulation of White Male Supremacy. No wonder the GOP worships it.
3
A "time bomb" - yikes! Exaggerate much?
I wonder if the democratic party will forego its 2020 primary system for a single, nation-wide primary. Winner takes all!
When they do that, maybe I'll support ending the Electoral College. Until then, all this talk is just empty Dem party populism.
1
I live in California. My cousin lives in South Dakota. Her vote counts more than mine. That’s Democracy? I don’t think so.
3
Ask Abraham Lincoln, or was he a disaster as well?
one person, one vote!
1
And with Trump, that bomb's fuse was lit.
2
Like so many things in America, the roots of this mess dig deep in the original sin of slavery.
1
If the Electoral College was a time bomb, it detonated in 2016.
1
While we're at it: 2 Senators from South Dakota and 2 from California? Beyond crazy.
1
@Name (required) Fairness. A concept to liberals, more alien, than Mork from Ork.
Better that large states dominate small ones than the reverse. In 2016 the votes of nearly 3,000,000 people were effectively discarded, and they all weren’t all from “large” states. Three million people equals Wyoming’s population five times over. (Not to pick on Wyoming. I have good friends there. It’s beautiful, and it never demanded to be over represented.)
I often read that people get the government they deserve. Well, that’s clearly not true. As a country, we are currently being governed based on where people rather randomly drew state borders in the nineteenth century.
Finally, the Founder’s ultimately decided on an electoral college instead of a popular vote because it protected slave holders in a the south. James Madison wrote:
“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.”
This is what was really at stake.
2
America is cursed by all sorts of Republican electoral hijackings and defects, but the Electoral College issue is just one defect.
What actually gave the Presidency to Dubya in 2000 and the Birther-Liar-In-Chief in 2016 was not the Electoral College, but the voter file purges, voter suppression tactics, voter ID laws, black-box vote counting and and rigged right-wing courts that have eviscerated the Voting Rights Act.
Governor Jeb Bush and his staff purged the Florida voter file long before 2000 Election Day, at which point the Supreme Court decided to stop counting all the Florida votes, especially the minority votes.
https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm
And Trump's 2016 fake victory only happened after Republican-governed state voter ID laws and voter file purges heavily suppressed minority and student voting nationwide.
If the USA had anything remotely resembling comprehensive voting rights...with automatic voter registration, weekend voting, Election Day as a federal holiday, mail-in voting, sufficient and auditable voting machines, the Electoral College would have been LOST by both Dubya and the Birther-Liar-In-Chief.
The Electoral College is archaic and unjust, but it is not the root of America's long-running Republican hijacking and tyranny of the right-wing minority.
The problem is that there is nothing close to a one-person-one-vote principle in the United States today, thanks to the Republican criminal syndicate that can't stand democracy.
6
“It doesn’t matter that Trump won millions of votes in New Jersey or that Hillary Clinton won millions in Texas. If your state is reliably red or blue, you are ignored.”
So everyone is ignored. Okay, if you say so.
The EC blocks on our Democracy. It permits the loser of an election to illegitmately occupy the White House. Since it is against our Democracy it should be abolished.
You mean there’s something wrong with dead slave owners, aka the “founding fathers,” controlling US presidential elections from beyond the grave?
1
The Electoral College, the Supreme Court and the Senate all exist to protect the minority from one person, one vote. Its myopic for liberals to focus on creating "real" democracy. Some day these institutions will protect a minority that is important to democrats.
1
Bill Clinton was elected with only 43% of the popular vote, (versus GHW Bush's 37%, and Perot's 19%). But Clinton won 370 Electoral College votes; 69% of the total. In effect, the Electoral College gave Clinton the appearance of a stronger mandate than he would have had based on popular vote alone.
I wonder how stable our "smooth our transition of power" would be without the stronger sense of a mandate bestowed by the Electoral College. Presidential legitimacy is also a critical component of our standing in the world. What would we be risking without it?
What if a popular vote approach simply encourages more third party "spoilers" like Perot? Are we prepared to be governed by a succession of presidents getting only 35% or 40% of the vote?
1
@Patrick Talley: When three or more candidates split the vote such that none wins a popular majority, it is customary in many places to hold a run-off election between the top two vote-getters to establish majority legitimacy.
1
Here's the thing: it is not ever going to happen. There will never be a successful amendment process to end the Electoral College. Never. So why bother discussing it? While it is vaguely possible that someday two-thirds of both the House and Senate would ratify such an amendment, there is absolutely no way 47 states would ratify it -- there will simply be, at any time, at least 13 states who would not see it as being in their interest to ratify such an amendment.
And don't even talk to me about your Constitutional Convention. C'mon...
3
@Brian Prioleau Flip the Senate. Add 10 liberal justices. Re-write the Constitution from the bench.
Biff, bamm, pooww. Cancel 2A. Arrest Trump. Use your imagination for the remaining 1300 characters.
It's amusing reading the comments about how a popular vote might mean that the candidate with a plurality of votes will be elected--not necessarily the majority. Why is this a bad thing? How is it worse than our current system where the person with neither a majority or plurality ends up winning?
The founders thought the CONGRESS would be the governing body - elected one person one vote. The current Imperial Presidency was not conceived of, so this relatively weak 3rd branch (1 person vs the entire House and Senate and 9 Justices!) used an electoral college to protect minority interests. The way our country currently functions the electoral college is simply a detriment to good government. The sooner it's eliminated the better, along hopefully with limiting presidential powers.
"Whatever its potential merits, it is a plainly undemocratic institution."
United STATES of America or Peoples DEMOCRATIC Collective
The Constitution can be amended. Good luck.
1
Go ahead and keep the electoral college. But then grant States like California the right to secede. California has a full 10% of the entire U.S. population and has the worlds 5th largest economy. Why should our citizens be overruled by a small State like Kentucky? Why should we agree to have our ability to progress curtailed by States that are held back by ignorance and stubbornness? Let the citizens of more backward States determine their destiny without determining ours.
1
@Bodyman. Without California, the Democrats will never win the presidency again, and the nation of California would go bankrupt in one generation.
Please go ahead and do this...
1
I think we should scrap the Electoral College AND the popular vote and only allow citizens who carefully read op-eds all the way through to have the vote. Judging by the comments section here, that would wind up being about 23 or so people.
2
Wow! "A time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation". What a great line Michener wrote. We now have that time bomb in the oval office.
Addressing what the author asked about the person with the second best popular vote being a better president, I think the past twenty years and the Republican winner/losers easily answer that question.
Had Al Gore been president, we might not have had a 9/11 and the stupid wars we are still involved in. Trump is in a class all by himself. Nuff said,
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"But does anyone really think popular vote losers make better presidents?'
What a strange phrase!
Who does define "better"?
And the goal of an election is not to elect a "better" president but the one that a fair voting of the whole USA decides. As long it's the United STATES of America - people of every state must have as much of a voting say as do people of bigger states.
Or eliminate states.
This is best writing anywhere that dispels the Republican myth of the Coastal States and big cities riding roughshod over the heartland.
I wonder if the author knows - he doesn't - that his boy Barrt Seoetoro actually OVERPERFORMED in the electoral college both times.
I also wonder if the author knows - he doesn't - that the states have the power to dissolve the United States, which is why they have also been given power of electors, and used to have power over choosing senators.
States don't have rights. They have powers. Only human beings can have rights.
@Charlesbalpha: Generally speaking, any newly discovered power is legal until it creates enough trouble to motivate regulation.
They would have. One person one vote.
I live in suburban Maryland. The last time this state went for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1988. One of the main reasons for George HW Bush carrying Maryland in 1988 was that Willie Horton committed his carjacking and rape in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Since then this state has been reliably blue, despite large rural populations in the western part of the state and on the eastern shore along the Chesapeake Bay. Until Virginia became a purple state presidential candidates ignored this area of the country. There's no need for the electoral college in the 21st century, so let's trash it.
@Chris because govt workers and their beneficiaries will always vote for the party of govt
The EC can't be eliminated without a constitutional amendment. That will never happen. End of the story.
Every time some folks are unhappy about an election, they attempt to find excuses as to why they lost. Of course it can't be their ideas or candidates !
The Electoral College was created for a reason. The Founders didn't want Mob Rule. They wanted states to have equivalent voices. Not equal, but equivalent. They didn't want a few cities to dominate all the ideas and voices.
The Dems are going to have a more difficult time winning elections the farther left they go. Most folks reject Socialism. People aren't dumb. They can look at history and see where those ideas end up. At the beginning all this free stuff sounds really nice, but at what cost? The more free stuff you get from the government, the more power it wields over you.
The nice thing is that we have a Representative Republic; not Mob Rule. The Founders were very smart coming up with this. It's worked for a very long time.
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Does anyone think popular vote losers and electoral college winners can't be better presidents?
Does anyone think that that Elizabeth Warren, who falsely claimed to be a Native American for her own personal benefit, has any credibility when proposing changes in the U.S. Constitution?
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Eleminating the Electoral College would enable Independent candidates to run without being a Spoiler.
Regardless of the merits, it's a waste of time and energy to wax poetic about abolishing the electoral college. It will never happen because there will never be enough states to ratify the change. Those states will lose if they do. So, dems, you'd better step up your game, and stop obsessing about identity politics: can we have a white male ticket, we need a woman or person of color, and so on and so on. We need the midwest states which are simply more moderate and conservative. Stop with ridiculous ideas that will be rejected by these states, starting with the need for a reparations or transgender bathrooms. Focus on the bread and butter issues that will benefit everybody. The democratic party seems to be drifting towards becoming the party of minorities and women. This is a losing strategy. There simply are not enough minorities and progressive women in the midwestern states that we need to win 270 electoral votes. And young people are not reliable voters. Sorry. As it is, Florida is probably already lost to the Republicans.
I for one am sick of my vote counting for less than a vote in Wyoming or West Virginia, and I'm all for getting rid of the Electoral College. As for Lindsey Graham's latest whine about protecting the votes of rural Americans, I counter with the argument that protecting one diminishes the other, that being the votes of urban Americans. That said, I've stopped listening to Graham ever since he became such a Trump toady he no longer defends his old friend and colleague McCain from Trump's despicable attacks on a dead war hero.
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"Equal protection of the law" is just another fake claim of a nation that cannot get over its creation as a schizoid contrivance providing for liberty to enslave.
It makes no sense to weigh votes in presidential elections according to where in the US voters live.
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@Steve Bolger. Yet you choose to live in that very bad nation...
Interesting
We are not a Democracy, we are a Constitutional Republic. We are the United States of America, not just America. Leave the EC alone; Democrats want uniformity whereas Republicans appreciate States diversity. Wow, what a role reversal!
Too much democracy is a bad thing. Look at early twentieth century Europe where every historical and economic injustice real and imagined had to be settled. Most democratic societies divided between Nazism or at least fascism and Communism. They had solutions. Our Constitution forces us together but only to a point.
Today we are divided between people who think they are Good and those who disagree with them are Evil, emotionally and intellectually incapable looking past their first reaction. People who refuse to grow up.
You have to ask where ideas like giving sixteen year old's the right to vote comes from?
After all this hand-wringing, the real threat to our nation is the 100 million citizens who choose not to vote.
Country seems too large, and two diverse, to have either coast always manage the country.Globalization obliterated much of rural America. Is eliminating middle America a plan ?
There's a certain charm to continuing the electoral college. It reminds us of a better time in the USA when most people were starving and dying of small pox.
Every single time we elected a president who got less votes than his/her opponent, we got a loser as president and the country suffered. Every single time.
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The Founding Father knew what they were doing.
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Yes, I’m in favor of the electoral college. It gives ALL Americans in ALL states a voice, and a meaningful vote. Who paid for this article? The NYT? Or the coastal elites who have lost their minds, and any meaningful influence since Hilly lost.
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How many times will the majority stand for having their will and democracy blocked? After this disaster that put a mentally ill man in the WH, enough is enough. Rural America has been given a greater say and greater representation in our government. They have shown they are unworthy of that privilege and responsibility. The rest of matter too.
The electoral college is brilliant. But like any other idea, that gets in the way of progressives accruing power, it must be abolished. Our founding fathers rightly called one man, one vote demcracy"mob rule" Democracy is 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what is for dinner.not one dem cared when.Clinton was elected with only 43% of the popular vote. So sick of power hungry dems being sore losers.
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Yeah, Jamelle. I say the United States should be ruled by essentially NY and California. After all, take away California's vote in 2016 and Hillary did NOT win the popular vote. This way the non-coastal states and the smaller states will decide they no longer nor will they ever have again much of a chance to have any power or say anymore in the United States and will want to secede causing a second civil war ... the very thing the Founding Fathers realized would happen without the Electoral College.
Funny how the very people who shill the grand "Trump is Putin's stooge" conspiracy are the very same people who advocate the very thing the Russians have been fantasizing over for the last 70 years: the break up of the United States into several weaker countries that can never again stand up to Russia. And I'm sure President Xi would break out a bottle of the bubbly with Vlad for a hearty toast, too.
If I was as loony as many of the progressives out there, I'd almost believe the whole Russia-Trump conspiracy peddled by the Dems -- that already has planted the idea that the entire American electoral system is illegitimate with an illegitimate president -- is actually a brilliant and vast false flag operation under the control of the very same Russian intelligence services to help destroy America from the inside. Russia could never have wanted better.
Electoral College: Affirmative Action for Small States.
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Throughout this whole discussion liberals fail to comprehend one vital significant point----the United States was not formed as a democracy but as a representative republic. Each state was to have some measure of independence and be part of a "group" (republic). Majority rule was expressly avoided to prevent just what Democrats are attempting----consolidated populations controlling government. Perhaps a civics class refresher course is needed for so many............
“Do you want to win? Change the rules”.
Old as...well, humanity itself, probably.
When the Dems lose the Presidential election to Mr. Trump they have a meltdown and try to explain it. Couldn't be that the electorate hated HRC and what the Obamas stood for. No, the problem must be found in the basic rules that govern our elections, enacted by the founders, that are the pride and glory of our democracy. Next thing you know, they will advocate voting by illegals and 16 year olds. These are the same people who also think paying reparations to Black Americans makes sense, and endorse creating safe spaces for college kids The further they move left the better for the country. Mr. Trump will be handed a landslide victory.
Every person’s vote should count: Pete Buttigieg.
The H-E-Double Toothpicks it ain't, if the Dems had won the election, you would not be saying a thing right now. Hilary threw away the election, and you are using the Electoral college as an excuse. He was UNELECTABLE, remember?
3/4 of the states need to accept your change.
What are you offering the small states?
That's what I thought. Next topic.
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I have spent a large portion of my life unlearning the heroism of US history. The Constitutional Convention of 1788,-regardless of what so many lawyers and former justices like Burger said about it, was a desperate attempt to glue back together the colonial federation made to serve them by a tiny minority in the pre-and interwar years. Had they been forced to deal with those America's citizens who chose Canada to remaining in the states, it is possible the awful 3/5ths votes system for slaves, and the ancient electoral college-one of our three or four hit'n'miss ways of electing presidents might have been disposed of. Our Civil War was about one thing:-the fact that the South's tiny vote states ruled the nation as though they were an entitled aristocracy out of English History.
If the flooding and climate change is as severe as predicted this year-it will be a wonder if the USA survives-much less with a system of permanent minority rule, supported by ignorant big city 0.01%percenters who are often Democrats as well as the Fox Noise red necks, sure the feds are out to take their guns and prevent them buying ammo.
All my Australian family warned me about Murdoch-he had already remade Australia in his image-look what they sent their neighbors, in NZ. . . ?
d
Without having voter I.D. laws in every state, ditching the electoral college is obviously a bad joke. It's so easy to vote in my state, a caveman can do it … and probably does.
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More Americans overall vote for Democrats to represent them in the Senate, and in fact 55% of us are currently represented by a Democrat, yet the Republicans control the Senate. 3 million more Americans voted for a Democrat for President. Throw in the Supreme Court where the minority President recently nominated two justices who were confirmed by the minority Senate, after the majority President's nominee wasn't even given a hearing.
So with the alleged goal of making sure the majority does not get too much power, we have a system which instead allows the minority to control all 3 branches of government. To describe this as asinine would be kind.
Why bother lying Jamelle? It's ALL about Trump for you. This type of intellectual dishonesty is typical of the Trump haters. The electoral college is racist. It is antiquated. It is unfair.
This is the kind of opinion piece that is written by somebody either ignorant or dismissive of the constitution. We are not a direct democracy, we are a constitutional republic. A collection of individual states united into a country. The states are what makes America, not the federal government. The electoral college is needed precisely to guard against the shallow thinking of this piece. I'd put my bet on the framers vs Jamelle Bouie in a debate about the merits of the federal system they designed.
Since Republicans have apparently abandoned the Constitution entirely and given presidents the powers of kings, why not simply wait until there's a Dem POTUS and put forth an executive order on the subject? Seemingly, they approve of executive orders for everything else...
Dear Liberals.. We get it, you think the electoral college is unfair and that presidents should be elected by popular vote instead. Check.
Enough words. Enough exercises in political vanity like the the NPVIC which is plainly unconstitutional. Get off your collectivist duffs and do the only thing that could actually accomplish what you claim to want: Present a constitutional amendment for consideration by Congress and the states and let your issue stand up to scrutiny, debate and a VOTE.
Anything less is empty rhetoric. Get on with it.
The people SELECTED to be "electors" for each presidential elections are supposed to seriously decide, for the country, who is to be the next President of the United States. Voters do NOT elect the President of the United States. These electors are supposed to be nonpartisan, objective decision makers, trusted to act in the nation's best interest when THEY vote to decide who will be the next President of the United States. Of course that doesn't happen as called for in the Constitution. For that reason, changes must be made. Electors must not be political. If that cannot be achieved, then the electoral college must be eliminated.
The electoral college, wherein the states, rather than the people, elect Presidents, is an artifact of the original colonies' isolation and petty jealousy. It makes a mockery of the Preamble to the Constitution's first line ("We, the people,...").
If our cities have greater electoral sway than rural areas, it's because, duh, there are more people in cities. Republicans want outsized influence given to rural areas (i.e., fewer people) because they want the minority who support them to have control of our nation. It plays on the rural myth that "country" folks are more virtuous than those wicked city people, and is another reminder that Republicans want power, not democracy.
I'm reminded of the years when the South was able to exert outsized pro-slavery influence because they got 3/5 representation for those to whom they denied citizenship (and every other right), and used as human farm animals.
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@Frank O: Slavery was the "petty jealousy". The US was born schizoid with liberty to enslave, at the behest of Georgia and South Carolina, which threatened to opt out of the new nation otherwise.
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Life without the electoral college, 1999.
By 2001, this nation, leading the world to consensus based on the trends observed by climate scientists, would seed an explosion of renewable energy innovation. Solar, wind, battery technologies would have leaped forward. The utilization of fossil fuels would wane.
The Middle East would have switched its economy from oil based to sun energy production and distribution. Desalination of sea water for human use and agriculture would be powered by solar electricity.
Wars fought for freedom...I mean oil... would be illogical.
Migration due to drought would not be.
And that only gets us to 2009.
rural states already have enough of a power grab with the disproportional power of their senators.
With their full-throated support of gerrymandering, voter suppression and the Electoral College, it becomes clear what it is that Republicans most fear: democracy.
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proportional allocation of electoral college votes is the best answer. this is a states rights issue.
Sure, let's go with the popular vote, but make people qualify to vote. A recent poll showed that 1 out of 5 adults weren't familiar with the Bill of Rights. Should those people be allowed to vote? I think not. Of course, Dems don't want an informed and educated voter base. Informed and educated voters don't believe the promises of almost unlimited free stuff. They understand that everything has to be paid for.
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@Steve: Naturalized citizens tend to know more about the Constitution than native born graduates of US public schools.
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I am not sure why presidential candidates are discussing this, except maybe as applause lines, because the president has no official role in amending the Constitution. It is Congress and state legislatures that must act. If states want to represent the votes of all their citizens, they can distribute their electoral votes proportionally instead of winner take all.
Instead of focusing on a difficult-to achieve constitutional amendment, we should focus on removing arbitrary barriers that make it more difficult for citizens to vote.
It's true that the Electoral College does place a greater weight on more rural states, perhaps too much. However, each state has various challenges based where they geographically lie within the country. The electoral college should change.
An alternative to abolishing it outright would be to look at what Maine does with its electoral votes. Each of the two (2) congressional districts is worth one (1) vote, and whomever wins the popular vote in the state gets the remaining two (2) electoral votes.
This could be a viable compromise to abolishing the EC outright, as it would more closely follow the popular vote while allowing less populous regions of the country with their own geographic issues (farming, flooding, rural broadband access, etc.) to have some input on national elections.
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@LC The other practical advantage to this idea is that it does not require an amendment to the Constitution, but could be enacted either by Federal law or by each of the states individually.
I get the feeling reading these posts, that no one understands the purpose of the Senate, which is reflected in the Electoral College. The Senate was designed to be the forum for the states, not the people. Senators represent the interests of the state, not the citizens of the state, because state interests can differ from those of the people. This was to prevent states with large populations like New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia from ignoring the interests of states like Delaware and Rhode Island with there much smaller populations.
The number of electors in the Electoral College equals the number of Representatives plus Senators. This is a brilliant design that has worked well for 230 years.
For those who want to eliminate the Electoral College, they should think about eliminating the Senate as well, and have a unicameral legislative body.
red herring argument
@Spartican: The typical US state is controlled by wealthy local real estate interests and their lawyers.
I believe the electoral college in addition to assuring all areas were represented, populated and less populated, that it had the responsibility to vote on whether the elected candidate was of a suitable character. Thus protecting us from a colossal error in judgment - THAT is where it failed
So I did a little research on populations.
The 5 smallest states populations are as follows:
Wyoming - 579,315
Vermont - 623,657
Alaska - 739,795
N. Dakota - 755,393
S. Dakota - 869,660
Total - 3,657,820
What presidential candidate would spend any time or money there when they total 3,567,820 and there are 16 metropolitan areas with equal or greater population?
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Absurd to say Bush wouldn’t have won without the Electoral College. The campaigns would have been run differently and Bush lost by 500 K votes.
It’s like saying, in retrospect, the team the scores the most runs in the World Series was the rightful winner not who won four games. The game would be played differently under those rules.
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If long-standing demographic trends continue, the three largest red states, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, will become increasingly blue, and Republicans may lose their attachment to the Electoral College.
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Banning the electoral college would be a huge, national distraction. Better yet; is to start making rural concerns more front and center. Their life expectancy is lower than wealthier regions, coupled with a declining population. Finally, if country folks can be kinder to city folks and visa versa; perhaps the economic benefits would increase. Wouldn’t it be nice to have more “Rural Tourism” than the city folks flocking to Europe or their other popular; foreign destinations?
@Mark Lyon: US firearms policies discourage foreign tourism here.
I've always thought that Republicans were taking a very short sighted view on the electoral college. They seem to assume that since it has worked for them in the last few elections that this will continue. They forget that there was a real chance that Kerry could have won the electoral college and lost the popular vote in 2004; flip 200,000 votes in Florida from Bush to Kerry and that would have happened .
Right now any Republican votes for President in California or New York carry no weight.
If Texas or Georgia flips blue due to changing demographics then the electoral map for Republicans becomes almost impossible.
A non-partisan option would be to abolish the electoral college starting with the 2028 or 2032 election - far enough out that it could easily cut either way.
You are mistaken if you believe the EC is what the Founding Fathers intended: they did not imagine the "Winner-Take-All" system we currently have in 48 states whereby every member of the College in a given state casts their vote for the majority winner in the state. The states assumed this stance one-by-one vying for state importance...but whether you like the EC or not, what we currently have with winner-take-all is a clear violation of "one person, one vote"
We live in a representative Republic, not a pure democracy. The founders brilliantly established the Electoral College to prevent mob rule with Presidental elections. The Democrats are perfectly fine with doing away with what has worked perfectly for centuries because their voter base is firmly established in the large, culturally elitist cities in the USA that are completely detached from the values of most of the country. Moreover, had HRC won an Electoral College victory and lost the popular vote, you wouldn’t be hearing a thing
about this from the Left.
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OK I will yield that some valid points are made. However, direct democracy is inherently more dangerous than what we have. I don’t see a way around the tyranny of the majority.
As far as direct democracy goes, just look at the Brexit disaster. Direct democracy votes to leave. The legislative branch which requires cooperation and compromise to execute the people’s decision cannot reach a consensus. Chaos results and the population feels betrayed which always breeds more dangerous fixations.
What we have may not be perfect, but it’s the best there is.
@Paul: The US Constitution limits the powers available to ANY majority. The most neglected prohibition it prescribes is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion".
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Giving each state equal seats in the U.S. Senate does far more harm to our political system than the Electoral College. The Republican Party would be far different - for the better - if representation in the Senate was proportional.
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@Fr. Bill: There is only one bona fide mathematical reason for bicameral legislatures: testing for scale-independence, which requires proportionally equal representation in both houses of the legislature.
Eliminating the electoral college gives Democrats a HUGE advantage because all their voters are packed in a few areas and the efforts to get out the vote would be far easier than for Republicans to have them spread out all over the country. Running tv ads, radio, billboards - whatever - in a much fewer number of markets to reach a much larger number of people. Operating campaign offices would cost far less for Democrats on a per vote basis. Talk about an unfair advantage!
Moreover, eliminating the electoral college is backing out on a deal between the states that was fully understood at the time it was made, in a sense predicting exactly what is going on today.
A far better solution would be to have our legislature reconfigured to have three official parties - leftist Democrats, right-wing GOP, and an official third party in the middle (moderates) (ala GB?). Coalitions would be formed and things could get done without vicious swings right and left.
Of course, neither changing the electoral college or the make up of the legislature is going to happen so this is pure hyperbole.
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In 2000 I rode my motorcycle across the country by using mostly backroads and in the course of that ride it became obvious to me the rural America was getting the short end of the economic stick with the one exception of Iowa where there were outward signs of a reasonable standard of living.
While I in theory support the idea of one person - one vote, I do think the electoral college does balance the power a little.
Having said that, we come much closer to one person - one vote with the legislature when there is no Gerrymandering.
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Mr. Bouie goes well beyond the talking points arguments about the electoral college with a thoughtful and well reasoned argument for why it should be abolished. Ultimately the electoral college corrodes democracy and weakens faith in government.
Conservatives who support the electoral college should ask themselves: Why should a Republican in a deep blue state such California (54 EC votes) even bother to cast a ballot for president? Right now the California GOP is close to becoming a non-entity, as are Democratic party operations in deep red states.
These people deserve a voice as well. Eliminating the electoral college, a small step toward a more direct democracy, would give them one.
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The Electoral College is enshrined in the Constitution. Nothing can be done about it without a national consensus. That's not something we have today.
Until we elect our President by direct popular vote, Democrats need to drop discussion of the Electoral College. We need to live with it. The one thing that would propel direct election is turning Texas and Florida blue. Republicans can't win the presidency in 2020 without Texas and would have little or no hope of ever winning the presidency if both Texas and Florida become reliably blue.
Emphasizing elimination of the Electoral College makes it much more difficult for Democrats to win in Texas and Florida. It's time to dump Trump. That requires Democrats to fight to win Texas and Florida.
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If we are going to keep the Electoral College then the 2 EC delegates allotted to each state,due to the 2 Senate votes added per state, must be eliminated to make the states all equally represented by population. And the "winner take all" used by most states also needs to be relegated to the dust bin of history. EC delegates should be assigned to a candidate strictly on a percentage of vote basis (ie. NY instead of getting all 29 electoral votes in 2016 due to Clinton winning the popular vote, the delegates would have been assigned as follows: Clinton - 17 delegates, Trump - 11. I'm not sure if those numbers (all 50 states) would have changed the outcome of the 2016 election or not. But then, we are getting closer to representation of the actual popular vote count (instead of a winner take all), so lets just do away with the EC and be done with it.
Getting rid of the Electoral College would only replace one version of unfairness with another. Now, emphasis is placed on those "key battleground" states with Electoral College importance. Going to a popular vote would transfer that emphasis to large, more-populated states. Wyoming, Nebraska, and Wisconsin would still be outliers.
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Absolutely it should go. We could do without the Senate, too. Just the House. Maybe expand the Supreme Court. Every state gets two senators. Why should representation not reflect the nation's majority? Example: California (almost 40 million) and North Dakota (760,000). With Senate Republican control and a President who lost the popular vote, we have minority rule. This cannot continue and has to be fixed.
What would happen if we kept the Electoral College but allowed for different voices by utilizing Ranked Choice Voting.
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As I recall, the EC was instituted as a safeguard against the people electing an unqualified (for whatever reason) candidate to the presidency. The electors could overrule the people. In 2016, they could have elected (for example) John Kasich, honoring the will of the states in voting for a Republican, but giving a graceful way out for the accidental president who never wanted the job in the first place.
Now, with states having criminalized so-called rogue electors, the system we have now does not meet with the expectations of the founders' institution of the EC.
There is an easy fix to ensure state interests are heard, even without an electoral college:
Have Senators be nominated by state legislatures, rather than popular election. That way they would represent state interests, rather than party political platforms. THAT really was the intention of the Senate in the first place.
That very system of state representation works well in Germany.
Conveniently, the author ignores the "opportunity" for small states, or states with small populations, to have a voice in the outcome--which is surely disporportionate to their population, but validates the notion that we are a nation of states with disparate needs and interests. When you take away that opportunity, just like we have 2 Senators per state--then you reduce the vote to nothing more than tyranny of the majority who are likely to live in big, urban centers on the East and West coasts. And your statement about where the candidates visited simply tries to validate the absurd notion that a candidate has the money and time to visit everywhere, everyone, every small town cafe, every village. Not enough money or time to do that. Statistics cannot describe the emotional attachment we all have to the notion that each state, no matter how small or large, should have a distinct voice in the governance of the nation...and that includes electing he president of the United "States."
Yes it is.
It's all about Trump.
Look, I worked on a project back in 2000 when Gore challenged 4 counties in Florida to contest Bush.
We did a data analysis of those who voted and those who were legally dead. We found over 3500 dead people voted for Gore in those 4 counties and less than 250 for Bush.
In a national popular vote...there is going to be so much fraud and corruption that nobody will have any faith in any of the results and the circus of the last 2 years where Democrats have challenged the legitimacy of Trump's election will be so commonplace...city councilmen are going to need armed escorts to get to/from meetings.
This isn't a nation except that 50 states agreed to become a nation. Those 50 states didn't cede power to some entity thousands of miles away and give up their sovereignty.
I get that the author thinks energy is created and managed from a large federal agency somewhere in mid-town Manhattan..but 90% of the country just wants to be left alone.
Can't we give them that..and leave the multi-tiered system of checks and balances in place?
getting rid of the electoral college is not the answer. In my view, we need to get rid of primaries and implement rank choice voting. This really does insure every vote it counted, and that every vote matters. Electoral college is a really bad compromise instituted in back room trading, but straight popular vote won't work either.
You lost a lot of readers when you immediately make the false claim that #43 & #45 would have lost their respective elections. They ran a campaign under the ‘rules’ at the time of the election and won. Change the rules and you change the campaign. Try for once to be insightful as opposed to being partisan.
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@MTM, if they lost lots of readers every time they made a false claim, they would already have a negative number of readers (if that were possible, lol)
Why on this good planet, would I change what has worked and what our founding fathers knew to be of benefit for the long term? I am uninterested in short-term consequences and that Democrats wish to change a system because they lost an election is completely un-American. The system works. I trust Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, Franklin. I don't trust modern day politicians who don't win.
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How unusual to read a column by Mr. Bouie that isn't full of anger and resentment. But he still misses the point. If you consider presidential election results in democratic countries that have only two significant parties, you find that the result is nearly always close to 50/50. That's not a coincidence. The candidates self-adjust their positions and campaigns so as to maximize influence near the center of the political spectrum. Given such a close split, the final result is basically just a toss-up. And roughly 50% of the electorate will rejoice, no matter what. Thus, in the case of Trump vs. Clinton, when Mr. Bouie writes "Without the Electoral College, neither Trump nor his Republican predecessor George W. Bush would have won the White House..." he may well be wrong. They would have campaigned differently, and could still be winners.
Of course, it goes without saying that there is no correlation whatsoever between who is the winner in a close election and how well the winner governs. Boy, do we see that in the US today!
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Another problem with the EC is that to win the presidency one need only win a couple key states - generally swing states, rather than large states like California and New York.
Throw in a close election (such as 2016 where Trump won by only 76000 votes in three states- Michigan, WIsconsin and Pennsylvania) and you have a REAL possibly of election theft. Especially with hackable touch screen vote machines, one need only hack key precincts or counties in a couple key states and that whole state's Electors get committed to a given candidate
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In my view the interests of the small states are more than adequately represented in the senate where each state, regardless of population sends 2 senators to congress. A fairer system would address the problem of rampant gerrymandering and its voter implications for the House, the Senate and even the Presidency.
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The founders weren't infallible. They were creating the first modern democracy. They created it based on informed guesses and compromises. They created it before scientific polling existed. They created it when slavery existed. They created it when there was no such thing as instant communication.
We have data on effective strategies, the actual will of the populace, mapping technology, rapid travel and communication. We have more than 200 years of information on how the governing structures that they created on guesswork work out in practice.
We can do better.
We can do
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@Mae: The only thing that was particularly "modern" about the US Revolution was to leave God out of the rationale for government, and base its legitimacy on specific limited powers constitutionally delegated to it by the people.
The popular vote was supposed to be reflected in the House, which has given away much of its power to the Presidency.
The Senate should go back to being elected by the state legislatures, since it was always intended to be a body that represents the state governments.
The Presidency has too much power today, and was intended to be a executor of the laws only, not a policy making institution. To that end, the Electoral College makes good sense.
Were the interest of Warren and others to make our government more functional, they would focus on weakening the Presidency and making the House matter more. Today, the House cannot even pass a budget.
One more thing - the states are democracies, but the USA is a federal republic. One person, one vote is not mandatory at every level of a federated government, regardless of what court rulings have mutated the Founders' original intent.
Any bottom 30 state with regard to population that would willingly surrender such enormous powers to the likes of California, New York, Florida, and Texas will deserve everything that it gets.
As it is; no state or government in the history of the world has ever peacefully yielded such power and control over its own destiny on such a whim.
1
It has become almost impossible to pass a Constitutional amendment. There is a better way to bring democracy to American presidential elections. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would require member states to commit to awarding their electoral votes to whomever wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of the results in the Electoral College. It would not take effect until the total electoral college vote of the member states were at least 270. This would insure that the winner of the popular vote would win the election.
This far, states with 181 electoral college votes have joined the Compact. Bills are pending in enough states to get to 270. If your state hasn't joined, write your state representatives urging them to vote to do so.
You can see the status of your state here:
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status
Polls have shown that using the popular vote is supported by large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents.
Here is an article by a Republican politician supporting the compact.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/386588-dont-believe-the-myths-about-a-national-popular-vote
When a voter in Alaska's vote counts more than twice as much as a voter in California's vote in the Electoral College system, something needs to be debated.
Every vote should count the same. Shouldn't it?
Here's an article worth reading from University of North Carolina. The part that addresses the "weighting" system starts on Page 12.
http://bit.ly/2TlME0Q
Getting rid of the electoral college - that chatter dates from Kennedy's defeat of Nixon. Next we shall read that Republicans are determined to balance the federal budget when they have the power to do so.
One option is to increase he size of the House to ratios agreed on in 1910. Then we get a more even per person Electoral College.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/
2
People should be aware that many state legislatures and governors have already supported the National Popular Vote bill, and others are in the process of considering it. You can see an explanation of the bill and the status of your state here: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/. When states with enough votes to win the presidency in the electoral college have adopted it, the winner of the popular vote will automatically win the vote in the EC.
1
It's interesting that people are posting comments that suggest that they haven't taken in Mr. Bouie's thoughtful arguments. The problem, I think, is that Mr. Bouie is right conceptually and on facts, but the tradition of "the Electoral College protects the small/rural states" is deeply embedded in the minds of many voters (who probably were taught just that in high school), so that they assume that whatever Mr. Bouie says is just left wing rhetoric. And of course they're encouraged to think this way by politicians who assume that their own job security is linked to electing presidents from their party. It's hard to get people to re-examine what have become articles of faith.
1
I have been a resident of Oklahoma since 1982 and voted in every presidential election since 1984. During that period, my vote has never been reflected in the selection of the president, regardless of who won the national election. In 2016, 420,000 Oklahomans might as well have stayed home because they voted for Hillary Clinton and all 7 electoral votes were awarded to Donald Trump regardless of their views.
I understand the argument of rural middle-of-the-country states, but their stranglehold is already felt in the Senate, where the ratio of residents to senators is 289,000 to 1 in Wyoming but 19,779,000 to 1 in California. Because every state gets one House representative, those with the minimum still have greater representation than the largest states (in the same example, 578,000:1 vs. 746,000:1). We should have at least one national representative for which the national vote is everywhere equally important.
1
A simple fix. The number of delegates for each state are based on House of Representatives only. No delegates for the Senate for any state.
The disproportionate representation of small states is now corrected for, and the intent of the EC is maintained.
Without the compromise symbolized by the creation of the Electoral College, we literally wouldn't have a Constitution in the United States. Like the Great Compromise of equal representation in the Senate, the smaller, less-populated states would have balked and there wouldn't have been a federal government at all.
Eliminating the Electoral College is nothing less than repealing one of the founding Democratic principles on which the United States was founded. While the so-called "Democratic Socialists" getting so much attention these days would probably like destroying what America is and stands for, the rest of us think the system works pretty well.
The Electoral College strike a balance among the states. Without it, America as we know it would cease to exist.
1
The most compelling reason to support the Electoral College is that it protects the country against mob rule. But with the election of President Trump, we now know that the Electoral College cannot protect us from giving the presidency to a demagogue, and that it actually can facilitate his election. So instead of defending us from the tyranny of the majority, the Electoral College has revealed itself to be a mechanism for imposing the tyranny of the minority--and undemocratic rule--upon the country.
So how do we convince the beneficiaries of this unjust system to cede the power that it gives them? I'm guessing it's not through argument.
1
All Mr. Bouie and like minded supporters need to do is convince two-thirds of both the Senate and the House and three-fourths of the states to agree to his suggestions.
If getting rid of the Electoral College is really such a painfully obvious idea then it ought to be easy enough to get support to do just that.
That is , unless of course Bouie's position is not as obvious or as popular as he would have us believe. One gets the impression from reading Bouie's past writings that anything that he thinks will benefit his preferred politics or policy outcomes is good, regardless of any other impacts.
"...does anyone really think popular vote losers make better presidents?"
Maybe not, but the system would be better served by more efficient and honest elections reflecting the will of voters, however imperfect that result may be.
Anyone who would like to be scared to death about the dangerous power of the Electoral College should read the terrific novel, The Librarian, by Larry Beinhart.
And not only "dangerous" power, but power that could very easily be undermined and subverted. It CAN happen here.
The EC is a clearly antidemocratic device from a time when few citizens were permitted to vote. Women, people of color, people over the age of 18, renters, etc. are all allowed to vote for President now. Vermont and California will still each have two Senators to represent them after the EC is gone so the small states retain a voice. Either you believe in democracy or you don't, which is it?
@Mr. Jones
I believe in a Representative Republic. Is the Electoral College perfect? No.....but neither is Mob Rule.
@TPH
As do I, but why no EC for Senators & the House based on counties in a state. Senators were not directly elected until about 1900, should we go back to that? From what I've read mobs don't usually vote, they riot, burn, loot and in the worse cases lynch people.
Continuing to refer to previous elections is nonsense. Quoting statistics as to who may have "won" the popular vote is irrelavent, since that's not how elections are decided. Trump's strategy was to win the EC, not the popular vote. If the election were decided by popular vote, he probably would have changed that strategy. Many people in CA, for example, would have voted for Trump if the popular vote mattered; under the EC system, why would any Californian vote Republican? Of course, the opposite could be true in strong red states. Dems should be careful what they wish for; they could still lose elections by popular vote. Then, of course, they'd want to switch back to the EC system.
1
@Steve
Rubbish. Trump received almost 4.5 million votes in California.
Which is about as many votes as he received in Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. COMBINED.
Which goes to the heart of one of Bouie's arguments, that rural counties exist in ALL states.
Which supports the other argument, that this will broaden campaigning everywhere, not limit it. The system we have now limits it, because deep red or deep blue states get ignored. In a popular vote, the candidates would need to fight for every vote, everywhere, not just the ones in swing states.
Of course the complete ignorance of facts and logic on this and practically any other issue is a hallmark of the GOP. No surprise then that their support of the EC is rooted in ignorance of it's actual original purpose and illogical arguments for it's continuation.
The FFs had an absolutely clear field in front of them, a thorough knowledge of the history of Empires, Kingdoms, Democracies, Republics, and a pretty keen understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of human beings.
The chose a Democratic Republic to protect us from the lust for power of an aristocracy and the fluid whim of the mob.
Their choices created and sustained the most successful and longest lived Democracy in the long. bloody history of this sad old Earth.
We have no ruling class, but, we had a great many people who think they are or should be; they are kept from seizing complete power by the genius of the Constitution.
We have mobs that rise up from time to time only to find themselves unable to force the country into their rut of choice.
Most of the complaints against the Electoral College come from these two frustrated groups who find their ambitions thwarted.
The Constitution, battered and assailed from every direction, is doing precisely what it was designed to do.
Leave it alone.
4
@thelastminstrel
Here here! Well said!
1
Have not read all the comments but I didn't see any discussion of how you make this change. Does anyone think an amendment to the constitution would pass two thirds of the states or that a new constitutional convention would stick only to this subject and not get bogged down with others? I am a longtime resident of Nassau County in NY and our county alone has a greater population than 10 states of the union but obviously we share representation in the Senate with the rest of NYS. Our nation was founded as a compromise in an uncertain and stressful period. As such, the imperfections that you speak of (which I well understand and have the same reaction to) are just part of our system.
This editorial completely ignores a critical fact. Every state has two senators. That alone provides small states (in population) with a "check" on large states.
3
Does anyone think allowing California and NY to dictate the US future and path is a good thing? Our founders knew better
55
@JR
Right now in states where Trump has less than a 45% approval rating, there are 200 electoral votes for the Democrats. Guess the EC isn’t insurmountable hurdle, even if it is unfair.
7
@JR
Why do you ask?
What do the less populated states have to offer America that makes them better?
What is it about Californians or the citizens of New York that would be so disastrous for America? Is it the diversity of people, tolerance of others, openness to new ideas, protecting the environment, a strong economy (California)?
59
@JR Your rhetorical question is based on a false premise — that either NY or California voters overwhelmingly vote for one party or the other. The article already points to the large number of rural voters in California who are denied voice in their votes by the EC.
47
This nation was founded on accepting slavery and denying women the right to vote. We subsequently amended the Constitution to eliminate
both of these evils. It’s time to eliminate the EC so that our individual votes count.
5
Abolish the electoral college? If so, then it's time to establish policy concerning votes. Let's establish that only those that pay taxes are eligible to vote, and if you're a property owner that also pays taxes, your vote counts twice. If you also have a savings account that allows banks to loan our your money, then you votes counts three times.
What I've proposed is absurd....but so is abolishing the electoral college.
Those promoting such change should stop pandering to liberals and progressives that can only win if changes are made.
2
The Constitution was developed as a Confederation of states with competing interests that ultimately led to a compromise of those competing state interests. The founders were learned men who had read Locke, Hobbes, the Bible, Cicero and Plato among others and as a result they knew what worked in the past and what didn't. Democrats are merely soar losers and want to destroy what has worked wonderfully well for 230+ years. They are also intent on destroying the first and second amendments and will make every effort to install progressive leftist postmodern judges into the Federal judiciary.
5
Want to offset the electoral college of 'winner-takes-all-attitude'?
First, get rid of the Senate Majority leader and make the replacement Senate Leader. Second make the winner of the Electoral College the President and whoever he wants (and of course it will always be a 'he') VO. Then make the 2nd place the Senate Leader.
Actually, I got this idea from the current system which seems to be working out just fine for republicans
the EC is a brilliant invention allowing fair representation for all including those in states who are ranches and farms. Nobody is going to change it and it is silly to discuss changing the constitution because you will never get the votes to do it. The effort by the left wing tyranny to eliminate the votes of rural America is disgusting and shows just how ruthless the left has become.
7
"Does anyone believe that popular vote losers make better Presidents?" Yes of course...the 10's of millions of people that voted for that person. I believe that Trump makes a better President than Hillary would have. And I believe that W made a better President than "lock box", "the earth is ending" Al would have. The system is the system. It was designed to make sure that little Rhode Island has a voice just like huge Texas. And yes I do believe it is a good system.
3
Let's remember also the Electoral College was built to give the slave states outsize power because of the 3/5 compromise (slaves weren't people, but they counted 3/5 for Congressional representation).
1
This, more than any other issue currently hyped by progressives Democrats and their operatives in media, is most likely to lead to a real civil war. Abolishing the Electoral College serves only the Democratic Party and its supporters cloistered in the blue, urban hives of the northeast, Chicago, and the west coast. It would disenfranchise the rest of the country from representation in the Executive Branch.
We will not stand for this.
4
If you have a chance, look up who are your electoral representatives, like I did.
Then ask yourself if you want these people voting on your behalf.
Why is it that this only comes up when Democrats lose? Bill Clinton had 8 yrs. Obama had 8 yrs. but no action on this.
Seems the Electoral College is fine as long as Democrats win but not when they lose.
It works the way it is supposed to work.
3
@Karen Tripp "No action on this" - uh, because Clinton and Obama WON the popular vote. Trump did not.
It's why people don't vote. Eliminate the electoral college and you'll have people caring and voting.
2
President Trump weighed in as well: “With the Popular Vote, you go to just the large States — the Cities would end up running the Country.
The more populous coastal areas already DO by sending more tax money the way of the rural areas than those rural areas contribute. Remember "no taxation without representation"? Frankly I'm tired of supporting those in the hinterlands who whine and consistently vote against their own best interests. Away with the electora college, the sop to slave owning states.
1
In 2016 Trump swept the predominantly white rural states. Clinton was popular in larger states with mixed populations. The voters in the 5 most sparsely populated ‘Trump’ states [WY, AL, MT, ND & SD] earned one Electoral vote for 70,771 popular votes; While, the Clinton voters in the 5 most densely populated urban/rural states [CA, NY, IL, NJ & VA] needed more than twice [!] the votes [154,329] to earn the same Electoral vote.
This was and is truly Anti-Democratic. Finally, if you consider that the Trump voters in those states were overwhelmingly white and Clinton voters were of mixed ethnicity and in the urban areas predominantly voters of color, the Electoral system was and is also totally racist.
1
"Whatever its potential merits, it is a plainly undemocratic institution."
Indisputably correct Jamelle. Just as it is indisputably correct that the United States is not a democracy. It's a constitutional republic in which principal decision-making authority is reserved to the individual states - NOT the individual people.
You disagree. Good for you, that is your privilege. To 'fix' it all you need is 38 states to agree with you. Good luck with that.
4
I guess you could say Trump spent millions and found a "side door" through the Electoral College.
OH the Dems wouldn't be calling for elimination of the electoral college if Clinton won. That's the bottom line and always have been. Dems careers live off of states like California NY NJ Washington, and Oregon. That's their bread and butter because of population concentrations. Without them the Dems would be totally washed up and out of business
3
@Bill Cunnane Oregon? Don't forget Illinois. Also, red Florida cancels out blue NY. R's survive on Texas, otherwise washed up and out of business?
Elimination of the electoral college is being driven by one thing...unhappiness about results. Democrats have become the sour grapes party. Don’t get the desired outcome? Rules need to be amended. Don’t like what a speaker is saying? Define his or her topic as hate speech and ban it or burn buildings and loot stores in protest.
3
Stop fomenting anger between Americans. Your candidate lost the election because of a failed message, not because of the electoral college.
5
The obsolescence of the Electoral college was debated when GWB triumphed at the recount. With the “election” of Trump& criminal syndicate his loss in numbers was obvious and evident. The will of the people and the democracy has been overruled by the minority of rural white men and women. There’s no time better than now to abolish the electoral college. It could’ve prevented the dire straits we are in now, the perilous precipice our republic balances on.
Since the Constitution is a living document that saw the fate of slaves as chattels overturned by the Equal protection clause, it is pretty clear that the electoral college no longer represents America, where most citizens dwell in urban and suburban centers and very few engage in agriculture or live on farms, and where our lives are increasingly global and digitized. As much as the GOP of old white men and their supporters of mostly white men want to turn back the dials of time and try to remake society into what they had fondly remembered as, history will march on as well as human progress and interaction. The world is connected, people will intermarry, whether across racial lines or gender lines. Women have awoken to their own awesome power and will never be quieted nor oppressed again.
We can either catch up to the modern world that surpasses the US in many measures or we can be left behind and be one day regarded as a backward society like how we view the theocracies of the Middle East today.
@M
How do you suggest convincing 38 states and 2/3 of Congress to get rid of Electoral college?
Just calling people racist or less advanced won't do the job.
Please tell us what else about the Constitution you want Democrats to overturn - First Amendment rights for conservatives? The elimination of the second amendment? Restrictions on religious liberty? I am not surprised that liberals wish to treat the Constitution as a movie script, to be casually altered to fit the current audience's/majority's sensibilities. To them I say - try Venezuela.
4
@TL How about slavery?
When Democrats lose they want to change the rules. Maybe a look in the mirror would be a better approach.
3
Lol, try getting rid of the electoral college. No amendment will pass, so why not try "the possible, the attainable .... the next best"?
Get the Democrats in the House and Senate and a Democrat as POTUS, and, by simple law, increase the ratio of population to members of House to the same number it was when the House was capped. This would greatly diminish the impact of the EC, and serve almost the same purpose, but it could actually be accomplished.
Next, require uniform voting rules to elect all Federal offices, including voting times and dates and other ballot casting rules, and, finally, the same proportion of voting stations in each congressional district. All CDs will be established by independent, non-partisan boards, subject to judicial oversight, and, where possible, be physically compact and align, where possible, with zip code boundaries.
1
Sen. Warren doesn't go into detail about what she would replace the Electoral College with. Am I hallucinating to suggest an election in which there is a Democratic nominee, a Republican nominee, the usual smaller parties, and Schultz, Bloomberg, Bezos and two more billionaires running, the winner going to the White House with 18% of the popular vote? Oh, you'd have a runoff. Just what we need: an campaign season running into January. Oh, you'd have ranked voting. How long did it take to determine the winning party in the last Australian election? How many Aussies could take one thousand ballots and, on paper, count them up correctly and declare a winner? Those who could actually understand the system. Those who couldn't are trusting that a computer wasn't hacked and the election rigged. How long did it take to determine Bruce Poliquin should no longer be the second rep from Maine a few months ago? Now...let's say you've got yer runoff or yer ranked voting. Here's the final result via one of those methods: O'Rourke 68,126,983; Trump 68,023,444, etc. Yea! Beto wins! Except is there anyone who believes there wouldn't have to be a recount of all 136 million ballots instead of those in one state, as was the case in 2000 or might have occurred in 2004, or a maximum of three states in 2016? You'd have to recount all 50 states. Sen. Warren, please lay out in detail the new system. We already know, and learned in 8th grade, that the old system is not democratic.
2
@Gnirol1,
You mean there could be unintended consequences? Certain that liberals have an answer for all of them that will help ensure continuing Democrat rule.
1
Methinks thou dost protest too much. Of course it's all about Trump. If the election had had the same margin of victory and Hillary had one there would be multiple opinion pieces like this one expounding upon the wisdom of our founders in creating the EC. It is so apparently obvious that Democrats seek to alter or destroy the entire institutional framework of the USA in pursuit of raw political power that it shouldn't have to be said--or require a convoluted word salad arguing that the change would still require candidates to pay close attention to areas that might be neglected, putting into question the other reasons put forth about why the change is needed. The EC, the Senate and the SC are all said to now require elimination as they exist. If done it would be seen generally as favoring Democrats, but of course it would really be an altruistic move favoring everyone. That the NYT publishes such nonsense and defends it is frightening. It is literally turning itself into a propaganda machine for the Democrats, something recently said outloud by liberal newsman Ted Koppel. I will soon cancel my subscription as a result, and once Trump is gone it will suffer from an exodus of subscribers that will demonstrate what a hopeless rag it has become.
5
“It’s not hard to guess why Republicans are riled by Warren’s embrace of a national popular vote.”
And an equally difficult guess as to why Democrats are enthusiastic. Rinse, repeat, fantasize.
1 must pay due respect to Bill O Reilly, a great reporter even if he did not write all those best sellers on his own, when he said that the Left is out to destroy the Constitution, and I would add only: "piecemeal!"First, 1 witnesses assault on the EC, then on freedom of speech enshrined in the Bill of RIGHTS, then on the Second Amendment, right to bear arms.Stacey ABRAMS, desperate for votes in gubernatorial election in Ga., even invited non citizens to come and cast their ballots. Gillibrand, engaged in a "a qui mieux mieux"with others to see who can go further to the left, wants "indocumentados" to be eligible for social security payments.What distinction, privilege is there left for citizens if non citizens, law breakers, r given the benefit of the doubt over we citizens?Dems. seek political power at any cost, and if it means shelving the Constitution, which many on the left regard as invalid anyway since it was written by the Founding Fathers, all of whom were slaveowners, "ainsi soit il!"Do not see 1 mention in the article, otherwise well written despite, to our Anglo Norman forefathers who laid the groundwork for our democratic system at Runnymeade so many centuries ago.We Americans owe them a debt of gratitude!
2
The E.C. apologists claim to fear a tyranny of the majority. That is the lesser of two evils, as now we have the greater evil, a tyranny of the minority.
161
@Ann O. Dyne. And do you think that questioning the motives of others while not addressing their concerns will get you farther?
1
@Ann O. Dyne Really, we have Trump because Hillary was horrible, disliked more than Trump, now that speaks volumes.
2
@Banned by Wonkette
Exactly...
Evidently, Mr. Bouie concedes that CA and NY can determine who's elected President. That figures. Pretending the wisdom behind our system's framing is suddenly irrelevant is a favorite shrug at reality by the new left.
3
The electoral college is in the same category as the Second Amendment. They're both the most hated parts of the Constitution. However neither the electoral college and the Second Amendment are going to be repealed anytime soon.
1
@sharon5101 Slavery was a hated part of the Constitution also.
Be sure to check out the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact ...
Democrats need to win swing states to elect a President. A quasi-socialist agenda is in no way going to accomplish this.
1
Bravo!! Thank you for writing this. And thank you Elizabeth Warren for raising it. Democratic candidates need to embrace this and make it a major issue at all levels.
The president is the executive chief of the federal government, which is a union of states working together. As such the states themselves wield considerable influence in deciding who is elected to that office.
The "popular vote" is not actually a vote for president, it's a mere statistic, a reference to the national breakdown of votes. But voting is, and always has been done, on a state level. Think about how representatives and senators are elected: does the entire country vote for every senator? Every congressperson? No, they don't. Such an idea completely defeats the point. Senators and Representatives are beholden to their constituents, the people who elected them to represent the interests of their state.
It is on behalf of those constituents that congresspeople vote for the president. On behalf of their state, representing the interests and will of their state, they cast a vote for the leader of the federal government that organizes cooperation between all states.
Something so fundamental to the structure of our government and I see so little comprehension of it. It makes me glad that the founding fathers made it so difficult to change our constitution, without that high bar to clear the ignoramuses of this country would've dismantled a Republic that has stood for over two centuries.
@Joel
One must ask whether liberals are merely ignorant on these points or are so mad for power that only total and unobstructed power will do?
First, the Electoral College is a good idea as it protects the least populace states from being totally ignored. Second, it's ludicrous to believe it will be changed as those very same states aren't going to cede their authority to the most populace states by voting to enact that change. So pushing for a change that won't happen, simply out of the emotional tirade of losing the the 2016 election, only insures the Democrats will lose future elections as people vote against that fear in those States.
BTW, California isn't distributing their electoral votes based on the popular vote, initiative, No. 07-0032, was proposed in 2008 and never made it to the ballot. Their belief in their citizens voices being equally heard ends when it may effect the outcome as well. There's no moral pedestal here, only a high horse.
1
George Washington and Benjamin Franklin knew what they were doing- Leave the Electoral College alone!
44
@Accordion
George Washington and Benjamin Franklin lived almost two centuries ago, they could not know what a functioning democracy would need in the 21st century. We must stop clinging to what may have worked centuries ago and devise systems that are adequate to our modern times.
38
@Accordion, George Washington also owned slaves.
But yes, he knew what he was doing. I guess...
13
@Accordion George Washington also owned slaves. Some things can change and do.
8
Ummm. Putting aside any merit or lack of merit, missing is a political analysis of any path to such a constitutional amendment, which requires 3/4's of the states to approve, i.e. 38 states. There are 8 states with 3 electors, and 5 with 4 electors, and solidly Republican/Democrat big states with lots of votes. What is their incentive to approve, seeing more of a candidate from the opposite party? In our fractured, party-driven system, why would either party cede its perceived political advantage? If the Congress cannot act to preserve their own current constitutional power to set the budget and spending, why should anyone expect a better outcome that argues for the best interest of the country in general over political advantage?
"It doesn’t matter that Trump won millions of votes in New Jersey or that Hillary Clinton won millions in Texas. If your state is reliably red or blue, you are ignored." This is simply wrong. The author's claim here has absolutely nothing to do with the Electoral College, and undermines the author's entire thesis. That fact that millions of votes are ignored in this manner is due entirely to state "winner-take-all" statutes that are unfortunately on the books in New Jersey and in Texas. These are state laws that were freely adopted by the legislatures of those states and which could be repealed tomorrow. (As they have been repealed in Maine and Nebraska). They are no part of the Electoral College system that the Founders created, and which the author is challenging in this article. These laws are illogical and pernicious and are the ultimate source of this author's concerns. And were these state "winner-take-all" statutes to be repealed -- which they should be -- virtually all of the author's complaints against the Electoral College would vanish, and quite a few of its claimed benefits would remain.
1
The framers were faced with the problem of convincing a bunch of diverse states to join together in a union. I always figured they gave the small states overweight voting power as an incentive to join the union. Now we have to live with that decision apparently forever.
Unfortunately, decisions such as these are not viewed rationally. It is only viewed as helping one side and hurting the other. You will never see the forest for the trees when you think someone's out to get you and you have something to lose.
1
Why can't we have a rational system that awards the electors in a state based on the proportion of the popular vote in that state? That is the only fair way of doing it. Why should any candidate get all of the electors having won barely half of the popular vote in a state?
The electoral college may be less than an ideal way to select the President but the overriding concern we should have is the tendency for our Presidential selection system to produce such an unqualified candidate as Donald Trump and then for such a candidate to obtain such a large number of votes. If Trump could convince 49% of the voters to support him, an equally unsuitable candidate in the future could convince 51% of the voters to support him (or her). What we really need to change is the Presidential primary system so as better to vet Presidential candidates.
@Gorgias
He's not unsuitable to me and many others. Crass, unconstrained, pugnacious, yes. At the same time, on the big issues, agree with him or not he has followed through and done precisely what he said he would do. Is there any Democrat running that would do the same if elected other than Sanders, who has openly called for fomenting a revolution that would become a political crisis?
1
The electoral college is past it's usefulness. Sure all states need to be represented, and they are by the Senators and Representatives they send to Congress but when you consider the amount of taxes that states like California, New York, Florida and Texas send to the US Treasury, it is only fitting that the popular vote be the vote that determines our President. When my children were growing up, we told them that our household was not 1 person 1 vote. Sure we would consider their concerns and ideas, but at the end of the day, my husband and I had to finance whatever it was they wanted. We got to have the final say. This is similar in my view. States like KY or MS are receiving a much larger % of the tax revenue that is sent by states lke California. California should, in my opinon, have a bigger say in whether coal is king, if California is having to pay for heating subsidies to the unemployed coal miners in KY or for their Black Lung benefits. The electoral college was an effort to level the playing field in 1776. It is not applicable now and needs to GO!
@Virginia Peck
Wow! So should Texas and South Dakota have a bigger say on energy policy based on the vast amounts of oil and gas they produce? Should we discount or eliminate the votes of those in poverty and in government welfare programs, the largest number of which live, by far, in California? You see, by various forms of accounting we can disenfranchise many portions of our country and happily accept dictatorships.
Let's start with the elimination of voter suppression through gerrymandering and voter blocking laws. Those steps would get a far better representation of voter's choices.
In other words, let every voter be heard from and see how that works.
@Steve
Gerrymandering is to some greater extent both a deliberate and natural feature of all democracies. How do you think all the many large majority black Congressional districts were created? Time to dismantle them?
Unmentioned is the fact the Electoral College presents 50 contests, much more difficult to cyber-attack than one popular vote contest.
1
We also have the Senate where a small state with the population of the county where I live gets two senators so rural America is already over represented. As to candidates only campaigning in large states we now have a system where the focus is heavily concentrated in swing states, OH, FL, MI, WI, so clearly popular vote for President would likely require candidates to appeal to at least as broad a population as under the current system. Rural areas currently have a very disproportionate share of political power.
Calling for the end of the electoral college is a waste of time as there's just no way to meet that standard of a new constitutional amendment (two thirds of congress and 3/4 of the states). A far simpler and more achievable way to reduce the inequity of the electoral college and congressional representation would be to reverse the very strange 1911 law limiting total members of the house of representatives to 435, which limits total electors to 535. This would go a long way to reducing the outsized political power of rural states and could be accomplished by passing the repeal through the house and senate and getting the president's signature. If the Democrats keep the house and win back the Senate and White House in 2020 they could do this.
2
An important auxiliary point is that state identities as "red", "blue" and "purple" are at present fundamentally tied to the EC system. No one knows how all eligible voters in any state WOULD vote if they knew that ALL their votes actually counted.
I suspect abolishing the electoral college would greatly increase both overall turnout and support for independents. A possible downside (depending on your viewpoint) is that this might herald the beginning of the end of the two-party system.
1
What a great article and a lovely vision of a future governed by democracy.
The electoral college is the original sin of the United States. It was established partly as a sop to rural slave states by giving them inordinate influence on national elections. Today is gives rural states with many people in them who revere the Confederacy more than our country and its ideals inordinate influence on national elections. It is time to eliminate it.
I largely agree with this, but Democrats seem to assume that they are probably going to win from abolishing the electoral college, just because the most recent examples of a divergence between the popular vote versus the electoral college suggest the Democrats do better with the popular vote. I don't think they should be so sure. States like California and New York actually have millions of Republican voters. Republican candidates, however, have little incentive to focus their get-out-the-vote efforts on those voters, and the voters themselves have limited incentive to vote--no matter what, they are going to lose the state. Under national popular voting, however, that changes.
This is also an example where it might be good to be careful what you wish for. For a long time, Republican politics has been dominated by a strain of religious conservatism, because it is common in the southern states where Republicans dominate. But if winning votes from conservatives in places like California and New York becomes newly important to the Republican {arty, it could accelerate the dominance of a strain of secular nationalism, which had little prominence in the time of George W. Bush, but is growing increasingly important in the Republican Party.
2
Many people bemoan the polarization of the country as people of like mind politically cluster together. Abolishing the Electoral College might well help with that. One non-trivial reason I have for not returning to the South where I grew up is the fact that my vote there would have no meaning in presidential races because of the Electoral College. Do away with that and I go home, my vote counts just as all of the conservative voters of California's Central Valley would too. It's a no-brainer that would actually bring our country back together.
1
An interesting question: if the EC did not exist today, and popular vote had been enshrined in the Constitution, would we even be having a discussion suggesting an EC today?
It is also a myth to suggest that Hillary would have won based on popular vote. A) we don’t know how the campaign might have changed. B) we don’t know how voters would have responded (would more or fewer have voted, and by which candidate?) C) Hillary won a plurality, not a majority. Many have suggested that in this scenario, we’d do a runoff, but that would delay the results of the election significantly, as all those absentee and mail in votes would have to be reprinted, another Election Day in a colder part of the year would have to be run, etc.
1
Having moved from California to Washington State to Kansas, I can't remember a time when my vote actually mattered.
1
With the electoral college as is, the rural states aren’t getting a voice, they are getting the only voice.
276
@Daniel As far as I can see, given how t's tariffs have shafted the rural voters, they are not getting ANY voice.
12
@Daniel
What about a Moderate in Massachusetts? Why bother to vote?
2
@Daniel yes if you read why NZ got gun control passed it's because their representatives represented people not AREAS. We are not 200+ years ago, our whole planet and commerce has changed.
19
Yes, the electoral college concept has proven its flaws and should fall by the wayside. A larger problem, however, are elected representatives who seek election and seek to retain office only to attain money, power and benefits. They don’t represent the interests of their constituents, but are tools of the political party and self serving as a result.
Eliminate the outmoded electoral college, but, at the same time, institute term limits. The founding fathers could never have envisioned such an animal as a self-serving, professional politician, and we need to be rid of them.
3
I suggest all readers check out Nate Cohn's opinion piece on the electoral college, as it appears to be more nuanced and better researched.
Cohn points out that the "winner take all" aspect of the electoral college has a bigger impact on campaigns and outcomes than the additional votes that small states get from the electoral college. And that the "winner take all" approach is not required in the electoral college, as Nebraska and Maine already have he option of splitting their electoral college votes.
4
@Peter M
Yes, this was not a well researched piece. How can one write about the problems with the Electoral College and not mention the National Popular Vote compact that is working its way through the states?
1
No, "Getting Rid of the Electoral College Isn’t Just About Trump," it's about a Democratic power grab intended to ensure permanent dominance of American politics.
Mr Bouie's argument rests on a fundamental fallacy, that the United States is a country of a single, consolidated, sovereignty. That simply isn't true--it's a country of fifty individual near-sovereignties that in 1788 and 1789 each agreed to surrender small degrees of their sovereignty over a short list --Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution--of things that are truly of national concern, mostly dealing with the country's military and diplomatic presence in the world. Under the 10th Amendment, that was supposed to be the totality of the cession of sovereignty.
That Amendment was long ago ignored to death. The federal government now feels free to dictate vast swaths of American life and the American economy, and that's among the reasons the Democrats are so determined to kill the Electoral College. The federal government, unconstitutionally, now runs the country, and the Democrats want to run the government--forever.
Megalomania in action. The party equivalent of petty dictators declaring themselves Dictator for Life.
But what I've never understood is why the Democrats are so determined to impose Democratism on the half or so of the population that clearly does not want it. Why do the people of the island of Manhattan want to dictate the lives of the people of the state of Montana? I don't get it.
5
@Henry Miller, Libertarian. Entirely false argument: one person one vote does NOT harm states rights.
2
@Gustav Aschenbach
The population of Manhattan Island is greater than the population of the entire state of Montana. Does that mean that the people of Manhattan should be allowed to dictate the lifestyles of the people of Montana?
"One person, one vote" was never intended to be the case across the vast geographic and cultural diversity of the country. Manhattan and Montana are too different from each other.
With a popular vote, small states would still get two senators. Presently our electoral system is doubly weighted against a popular vote.
3
Au contraire, it’s not hard to guess why Democrats are thrilled by Warren’s embrace of a national popular vote. Without the Electoral College, neither Trump nor his Republican predecessor George W. Bush would have won the White House on their first go-round.
A government by the people & for the people are hollow words as long as millions of votes are not counted and are meaningless.Yes, the Electoral College must go.
1
When the electoral college was established, our forefathers recognized the need to balance big and small and this is an approach that has stood us well for a long time. The author would do well to study more history and not use James Michener as a source.
4
Deep breath.
The argument that elimination of the electoral college decreases representation in rural, small, and sparsely populated states is nonsense. We must remind ourselves that the electoral college elects one office, exclusively; the presidency.
Donald Trump's presidency has (unintentionally) taught us many things about flaws in our governmental system, but one fact it has correctly highlighted is that the president is not a representative. The office is the executive.
Elimination of the EC will not change representation in Congress. Getting rid of it may actually cause Congress to reclaim the powers it has ceded to the presidency over the years. It might well be the master stroke that restores balance to the political system. A down side is difficult to see. Perhaps equally weighted voting is the worst case scenario. Hard to argue against that.
"The Electoral College...was a time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation."
And in 2016 it went off.
What is so depressing is that all Mr. Bouie's arguments are well known to anyone who keeps up with such things. And the argument that everyone's vote should be equal is just common sense to anyone who believes in democracy.
A simpler way to think of it, is the Electoral College, correctly understood, is a lottery. The more lottery tickets (votes) you get, the better chances your chances of winning, but it is no guarantee. Do we want a lottery deciding who should be president?
And let's don't make it a partisan issue. It has favored the Republicans this century but there's nothing inherently Republican about it. In 2004, except for 119,000 votes in Ohio, John Kerry would have been president despite losing the vote of the people by 3 million.
1
Candidates who win a majority of states with a majority of the population make more representative presidents.
I favor the electoral college because it contains corrupt voting processes to a single state. Say the controlling state party manages to effectively repress their political opponents through ballot-harvesting, non-citizen voting, partisan election officials, etc. With a strict nation-wide popular vote, there is no containment. A very corrupt state process can have an unlimited impact on nation-wide offices. Texan voters would then have to have faith in the integrity of California elections, because voting fraud at the state level can have an unlimited national impact. California, being an effectively one-party state, has voting processes like ballot harvesting which my state has rejected. 50 state legislatures running 50 different elections with different rules is a valuable corruption-control feature. Pure popular voting on the national level gives bad states the power to corrupt more than their state's votes. Federalism is a power-balancing feature based on rational mutual distrust and it should not be dismantled. Fortunately, federal officers are sworn to defend the Constitution, which does not allow the electoral college to be taken down without a Constitutional amendment, which is definitely not going to happen this generation.
3
I am a Texan and have no faith in our voting in this state. I firmly believe in getting rid of the EC. It is outmoded, everyone can cast their own vote and can be kept informed by our mass communications, and takes away the right of each citizen to have their vote counted, equally.
We do need election reform, as the Democrats are supporting. That reform should be national in scope. We need to return to a trust in our elections.
Trump has pushed a false narrative of voter fraud. That has been a minor issue with the only notable fraud being by Republicans in a few states. Those cases have been investigated and corrections made. Let's move past that and work on reform in general. One idea is a bipartisan citizen oversight commission with the authority to review and report to Congress and to the people. Congress has been unable to perform this action on themselves.
Ok, so the candidates didn't come to stroke you. Get over yourselves.
The truth of the matter. is that very little legislation that benefits you will hit the floor, let alone be passed. We have 'city states' through which all revenues, state and federal, are strained.
Don't we all know that trickle down doesn't work!
The United States has gotten so big it will fail! Primarily due to a lack of representation for the large percentage of our non-urban population.
I'm not yet talking about the collapse of the middle class.
Here in downstate Illinois, I have very little in common with those from the windy city. Honestly, I don't like their city or even most of them. The sardine life they live, seems to put them all on edge, making of them 'takers' rather than 'givers', and an inability to become team players, imho.
Their greatest export downstate, is crime!
The next civil war to avoid will have a theme similar to that of 1865 and the issue of "states' rights".
Due to a more efficient dissemination of information the issues are more finely focused, to "rural rights".
That movement should come from the corn and bean fields of the great bread basket of the world. They already have the means to grow their own fuel. Their leverage increases by separating themselves from state and federal oversight,$$. Run it like a business, not a welfare state.
Groceries become expensive and people look for a yard big enough to support a garden to offset.
In “Defeat at Appomattox” H. L. Mencken points out that the North would have been far better off had they lost the Civil War. Having won, we are stuck with these thinly populated states which take more in the form of subsidies than they pay in taxes. The advantages to the farmers is that “occasionally, they can go to the Big City, get a decent meal and catchy a racy show”. What we get from the farm states are commodities such as cotton or wheat-things we could just as easily get from Canada or South America. But look what we give up-in exchange for selling us wheat, the farmers get to impose their “dung hill” views and primitive religious beliefs on us city folks through their almost cartoonish representatives in Congress.
I say, let’s apologize to the South-and Southern Illinois if one desires for the whole Civil War thing, say we MIS-spoke, and that they can go after all.
@Fred Shapiro
Our founding fathers wrote in electoral college language to appease the southern ag states so as to give the appearance of national unity and thus a national security.
Which reminds me: What about one or more congressmen (or women) for Washington, D.C.? The fact that D.C. is not a state and has none is another example of flagrant unfairness. I know residents of the District have attempted to repeal the 23rd Amendment in the past. This article would be a great springboard for a renewed focus on this issue-by the press as well as by Washingtonians themselves.
I can’t wait for the smaller Stares to vote their interests against the Electoral College since NY, and CA don’t have enough money and influence.
2
It has been my feelings for many years that something is wrong about the electoral college. Back in high school on the debating club in the 50's a question was assigned: Resolve that the President of the United States be elected by direct vote of the people. Some 60 plus years later this antiquated system is still with us. Oh, yes, some say that the small states will loose power, but whatever happened to the idea of one person one vote. I'll tell you what the small population states have over those of us in crowed cities, with need for restaurant inspections, regular garbage collections to name just a few government needs to respond to. They have land--wide open spaces to stretch out and be. For example, there are approximately 19 persons per square mile in Wyoming, and about 2,000 per person in New Jersey. A U.S. senator in Wyoming has about proportionately 600 times more power that a senator from California. I can live with that, but I find it difficult to accept the present electoral system.
The EC is about balance of power, just like the rest of our government. Our system of checks and balances was specifically designed so that change comes slowly. I see a lot of people getting hung up on "fairness" and "democracy". A pure democracy is mob rule, and while you could say it would be fair for each vote to have the same weight, and a simple majority rules, power in this country would then be concentrated in the coastal population centers. The EC protects the voice of the minority, and ensures that there is no concentration of power.
Abolishing the EC would further divide this country geographically and ideologically. 2 or 3 election cycles, and we would have a completely divided nation, or possibly civil war and 2 separate nations. The consequences are severe, and much deeper than sort-sighted fairness and democracy soundbites.
3
Sounds like a great idea...
Imagine the howls of outrage if Trump were to win the 2020 election with 35% of the popular vote because the dems split hard left/moderate and two viable dem candidates ran for office under a popular vote scheme and split 65%.
1
@Veritas it’s very likely that the Green Party candidate, much like Ross Perot previously, splits the D vote guaranteeing an R EC victory (350-380).
I don’t remember the D party howling when Bill Clinton won the presidency first with 43% then with 49%...
1
The Electoral College is a safeguard against a sitting president declaring the popular vote to be fraudulent and, thereby, claiming a second term via a recount that itself is fraudulent. In the end, the electors elect the president. That is not to say that the electors couldn't go against the popular vote as well, but that seems to me a less likely prospect.
3
"But does anyone really think popular vote losers make better presidents?"
Bill Clinton and Abraham Lincoln are among those who did not have a majority of the popular vote.
Our public education system is failing to teach history. There are reasons why there are two senators from every state and House members by population. Those reasons are still valid today. Anyone who thinks we should have a popular vote system is ignorant of history and therefore does not understand why we must have the system we have in order to exist as one nation.
The Connecticut Compromise/Great Compromise struck a balance between the interests of small population states and large population states. This is exactly what the push for moving to a popular vote is about today, big population states trying to force their will onto the small population states. The small population states of 1787 wouldn't stand for that. They would not join a Union where their votes wouldn't count.
The Founders designed a brilliant system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, it has been damaged over the years. We should repair our government by first repealing the 17th Amendment, and then to reclaim the original limitations of power of the federal government. This will result in the elimination of many functions Washington has usurped from the States.
The arguments today are because whoever wins imposes their views over everyone. We were not designed for that. We were designed to have choices. Restore choices.
5
@Son of the American Revolution
In a nutshell, today's Democrats respect none of our major institutions or constructs. Obama himself started with calling the Constitution flawed for failing to address "social justice," a loose term that can be loosed on anyon. Now the SC, the EC and the Senate are all under attack. Democrats have thoroughly absorbed the idea that they were born to rule and intend to do everything in their power, over time, to ensure that they gain that right never to return it.
@Son of the American Revolution
LIncoln and Clinton both won the popular and electoral vote
So let’s see if I’ve got this right. The supporters of the electoral college think it would be unjust if the interests of rural America were overshadowed by those of the more populous regions, but are OK with the interests of the more populous regions being overshadowed by those of rural America. Just what makes some people’s political interests proportionately more important than others? To be sure, some of the founders were concerned about the “tyranny of the majority,” which, I presume, is why we have representative government rather than a direct democracy. We also have courts to ensure that the rights of some are not taken away by simple majority opinions. I have yet to learn of any intellectual or moral justification for this institution. It was established to appease the states whose populations were swelled by slaves who had no voting rights and who were counted as a fraction of their numbers for census purposes. Does that justification still apply? The reality is that the electoral college simply gives whites proportionally more voting power.
1
@Mikes 547
The "tyranny of the majority" was a key fear by the nation's founders who understood and took seriously the lessons of history. Rural and smaller states don't dominate larger ones. The EC, and the Senate, help create a balance between them and for all voices to be heard. Democrats don't even seem to understand the basic foundations of our nation or to realize that what they are calling for is the destruction of federalism that has allowed us to establish the most powerful, longest lasting democracy on earth.
2
While I am not in favor of the Electoral College, my biggest concern is the process to remove it. It will take an amendment to do so. There are only two ways to get an amendment started, through Congress or through the state legislatures. And to get one ratified, you have to go through the state legislatures, getting 3/4ths of them to agree (i.e., 38 of them).
If we agree that the EC gives more power to small population states (and it clearly does), why would the smaller states ever ratify that amendment? 13 small states could block the proposed amendment from ever becoming part of the Constitution. There are 18 states with fewer than 5 Representatives in Congress. That means they have significantly more per person representation in the EC than the larger states. The number of electors each state gets is one per Representative and one per Senator. So a state with four Representatives gets six electors, a 50% increase in the per person impact. California, with 53 Representatives, gets 55 electors, a less than 2% increase in the per person impact.
I fail to see where six of the smaller states (less than five Representatives) would decide to ratify the amendment. While politics should be about doing what is right; for the politicians, it IS about how much power you have.
1
There is a reason that proponents of the electoral college constantly talk about "cities" and "rural states" and not "voters".
1
@Peter
The reason is federalism. We are a federal republic, quite successfully so. Democrats now believe they can destroy that and somehow grab and retain control forever. Be warned: The destruction of long sustained institutions often bring unintended consequences and unpredictable results.
@Allen
The partial sovereignty of states is a logical component of federalism, but the electoral college as the decider in national elections is not. If anything, it is anti-federal, since it fundamentally undermines national sovereignty.
For those who don't read history, the real reason for the Electoral College (EC) is not to protect rural states or about so-called states' rights (tbh, don't really exist and never actually did; the Supremacy Clause and the 14th Amendment should have put that notion to bed). It was a compromise to get the Southern states in 1787 to sign on (lest they secede - something they threatened to do) because they were afraid that a purely popular vote would override their interest to keep their slaves.
The simplest (and so far from what I've seen the best) choice for completely replacing the Electoral College is the Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) system. The idea of the EC is that the winner of a presidential election should have over 50% of support from something. RCV allows a voter to pick a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice. If no one wins by at least 50% on the 1st choices, the results are recalculated based on the 2nd choice of the lowest scoring candidate, repeating as needed. 3rd choices come into play in the event (usually unlikely) that all 2nd choices have been exhausted and still no one has gotten at least 50%. It's actually less complicated than the EC is, it would allow for someone to win who truly had the majority support nationwide, and the system would eliminate the current problem that candidates really only have to focus on roughly 10 states in order to win, as the EC allows.
1
@JustJeff2
Wrong. Slavery barely entered the debate when the EC was created. After the Civil War, when slavery ended, there was little talk of eliminating it--until now when Democrats have convinced themselves that a federal republic is no longer in their interests and destroyinf and key institutions, along with altering the Constitution, will ensure that they can attain and exercise dictatorial power and control far into the future.
3
It is well documented that the over-representation of thinly populated states in both the US Congress and the Electoral College were concessions made to those states to get them past their concerns that the newly created federal government would not ride roughshod over them. If we do away with the Electoral, College, should we give those states a one time right to leave the Union (without a Civil War), in as much as those states are now losing those inherent protections?
1
How about a compromise? Keep the electoral college, but add extra electoral votes which are given to the winner of the popular vote. The popular vote could be worth a number of electoral votes equal to the largest state + 1, so if California has 55 votes, the popular vote gets 56. While this would not have flipped the 2016 election, it would have easily flipped the 2000 election, and would have also forced candidates to care both about winning rural and urban voters.
Of course it is about Trump, and the fact that he trounced the Democrats so badly in 2016, and will again in 2020. Perhaps if they put as much of their energy into finding candidates and messaging that has a broader appeal to voters as they do trying to undermine them, they would win an election.
5
@Carlos Gonzalez you're saying 3 million people don't matter. somehow, as long as you win, an abstraction matters more than people.
4
@Carlos Gonzalez
You don't understand, they aren't interested in winning, they are concerned with gaining and solidifying the power and control over policies and people they believe they are entitled to based on what they firmly believe is the superiority of their ideas and opinions.
@Gustav Aschenbach
In a federal republic with an EC it depends on where the votes are cast. Neither candidate won an outright majority in 2016 and outside of California Trump won both the popular vote, the EC and a far greater number of Congressional districts which are appropriated by population. Take the time to look around the world where coalitions have to be formed to establish governmentss. Do they have better results? Are electors more satisfied with them? Why is the first reaction to any perceived loss of power by Democrats to destroy the foundations of our nation?
In a true democracy: (1) People are allowed to select their leaders, (2) the majority vote wins and (3) all votes carry equal weight. With the Electoral College system in effect, none of these elements apply to the United States so it shouldn't be called a democracy.
6
@Clark Landrum
From reading comments like this one that are so common here, it appears that few liberals ever had to take a civics class. We are not and never were a "true democracy." That was something our founders, keenly aware of history, wanted very much to avoid. We are a federal republic with the institutions like the EC established to preserve it. Democrats want to destroy it. Be careful what you wish for.
1
Actually, it isn’t called a democracy, it is called a Republic, as in “and for the Republic for which it stands”.
1
@Clark Landrum it never has been.
We are a Republic. You should have learned this in primary school. The founders, in their wisdom, saw that democracies ALWAYS FAIL. As soon as the public sees they can vote them selves largess from the treasury, it’s over.
1
The issue is not the Electoral College. The issue is the winner-take-all protocol existing in 48 of the 50 states. Were electors chosen on a proportional basis, we would not be having a debate about it.
Assuming we believe the electors should represent the popular vote in each state, the next issue is one of execution: how do we change the process in all the states to reflect proportional voting for the problem would be exacerbated if, say, California went proportional while the ten smallest states remained winner-take-all.
Democrats don't want to "make rural America go away," we want to address the tyranny of a minority that is currently, and increasingly, manifested in a man who is perpetually "angry," overly entitled despite having lived his entire existence in privilege, completely unwilling to compromise, share power, play by the rules, and has an insatiable appetite for material possessions and is willing to profit by any means necessary. If those characteristics define a minority of the population, is that America?
It's not only the Electoral College that is driving us toward a tyranny of the minority, it's also the Senate, where states like Wyoming, with a population of approximately 600,000, have the same representational power as California, with a population of approximately 40 million. Those aren't simply numbers, they're Americans.
6
Two points come to mind when reading this article. First, the observation that the states do not share interests is spot on. Perhaps they never did, but the chasm is more acute than in the past. As a California transplant (and San Francisco to boot), I feel very little in common with the native Georgians who surround me. I cannot wait to return to the West Coast in a few short years. Second, the Electoral College issue will only become more inflamed when Trump once again loses the popular vote but is reelected in 2020. Three times in twenty years with an occupant of the White House who is in the electoral minority will bring the issue and resentment to head.
2
The article says it is easy to see why Republicans want the electoral college, that without it, Trump and Bush would not have won.
Conversely, but not mentioned, is that the Democrats hate the electoral college because they lose when the entire country has some say in a national election. At least that is their excuse.
It might be noted that if Hillary had been paying attention and actually campaigned in all states across the county, she could very possibly have won. Everyone knows how the system works. Hillary just chose to ignor it.
Both sides are right in some ways. But the idea that three states could easily take control of the entire country is not what the founders had in mind. For the liberal bastions to expect states to vote against their own interests is absurd.
1
Sure, Dems hate the system because it worked, so far against them, but if the system favor one party vs. another, how could be such system fair? And I don't buy the argument, that if Hillary campaigned in all states, she would win. She could win some votes in solid conservative states, that would be helpful, if the President elected by popular vote, but it would be a waste of time under electoral college. She could not win such state and few more supporters made no difference. If anything, electoral college discourage campaigning in 'hopeless' states.
1
Sort of true, but only Hillary seemed to think that Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were hopeless, considering Obama had won them twice.
@Maddock631 it also points out that trump ignored those states; ergo, all a man like him need do is display a narcissistic, entitled, "angry", bigoted personality and the vote is locked up?
I would like to see the editorial writer consider the Maine solution. Maine divides its electors proportionately according to who wins its popular vote. Maine chose to do this, which did not require a Constitutional amendment nor a change to the electoral.
And how should he consider that? Only thing is worse than electoral college, is the electoral college where some states are splitting votes and other don't. And without Constitutional amendment that's exactly what will happened.
1
Please study the thought process and the reasoning behind the electoral college as designed and agreed to by the Founding Fathers (FF) of our country. The FF reasoning for the electoral definitely applies today. A couple of big states, which are presently populated overwhelmingly by Democrats, want to rule the country in every Presidential election. What is going on here is a power grab for permanent one party rule, a dictatorship, by the Democrats. The reason the Democrats want to go to a popular vote is the very reason the Electoral College was put into place and made part of our Constitution. The Electoral College levels the playing field and allows all the States to have a chance to be heard and not be overwhelmed by a few large States. If the Democrats somehow manage to change America and get rid of the Electoral College then I think we should get rid of the 50 States as well and change the name of our country too. We will no longer call ourselves the United States of America. What the name should be is up for grabs because the new country will no longer look like the old country with open borders and no states or a rational and fair system of electing leaders.
2
We heard same argument several times during the history. Every time when people wanted more say in the State affair, we hear this argument be it grated voting right to women, to black, or choosing the Senators in general election. Our election process now is much more open to general public that it was at time of Founding Fathers, who actually wanted to keep in place tyranny of minorities, because they themselves were the part of minority. It is same reason why reps want to keep the Electoral college.
Except electoral college is anything but fair, it it also obvious that you have no research on the topic
No one likes the Electoral College, except perhaps those who were elected because of it. No one likes gerrymandering, except those doing the gerrymandering. No one likes the filibuster, except those doing the filibustering.
5
Spot on.
Campaigning nationally on the Electoral Vote is dumb politics. It won't win you new states and may cost you states you need.
If you want reform, elect a House and Senate that wants reform. Then get rid of the filibuster, which is a far more important form of minority control than the Electoral College. Then, with your congressional majority double or triple the size of the House. Which is better for the House; Congresspeople today have districts far too large for them to truly 'represent the people'. But beyond that the expansion also expands the number of Electoral College electors and greatly diminishes the proportion of the votes that are allocated based on the number of states instead of the number of people. You end up with some overweighting towards the smaller states, but arguably a little of that is a good thing.
At the end of the day, very little is just about Trump, and that’s exactly right.
I keep reading about rural areas being represented and the Electoral College encourages this.
Today, we have access to more news, internet, all in real time. We are in fact overwhelmed with knowledge- and have quick access to it.
Seems to me the Electoral College is outdated. Times change and we need to adapt.
Sorry but I still don't buy into the Electoral College, the same as the purpose of Daylight Savings Time. Guess I am just too practical and love the KISS method- Keep It Simple Stupid or
"majority knows best".
This is all absurd. One person - one vote. What Is going on? Each person gets a vote and the total number of votes determines who or what wins. What is wrong with people? It’s about voting, not weighing the amount of votes by some equation determined by acreage or geographic location or state...
1
I’ve been harping on this point regularly lately in my comments, but one common trait (besides the obvious: hypocrisy) that I always detect in contemporary GOP arguments is that it’s not what they say that you should pay attention to, but what they *don’t* say.
I’d like to hear just one prominent backer of keeping the Electoral College in place explain why the 3/5ths rule for counting black slaves in southern states for purposes of allotting Electoral College votes was a good idea, and how that same logic applies today, since that’s the basis of our Electoral College system.
2
@David Walker. The 3/5 compromise was made to limit the political power of slave states. The slave states wanted to claim slaves as part of their population to increase their power under apportionment.
The 3/5 compromise was a GREAT thing. It hurt slave states as much as possible politically.
Typical Democratic strategy.
And I would suppose that we mothball the Senate next.
If our leaders can do no better than cobble together urban voters and a patchwork of minority grievances, let them continue to suffer with our beautiful and flawed system.
I am beyond sick and tired of the Left ripping up everything in sight in the name of progress.
5
@Stuart, As an urban voter I resent your denigration.
It's crazy. It's completely CRAZY to allow rural voters' votes to outweigh mine. It's outrageous, an antiquated system that has allowed conservatives to dominate through privileging country folk. It's un-American.
1
This is ONE country. I want my vote to count as much as anyone else's. Not more, not less.
When the electoral college violates that, we end up with an imbecile or worse.
Those who want a Gerrymandered fake presidency "Of The Minority" must be enjoying the 17 year war, the accompanying deaths, the trillions in debt, the banking crash, all from "W", that other Einstein appointment by the electoral college.
Just wait until its latest betrayal "Of The People", the lying Trump! gets even more worked up in his delusions of imbecilic grandeur.
1
Is there much difference between tyranny of the 48% of voters as opposed to the tyranny of 52%! 4% difference. While frustration within that 4% is understandable. A 4% difference between minority and majority should not be devastating to our democracy. It just leads to lots of reactionary whining and useless babbling.
The Electoral College was the product of 18th Century rivalries and fears. It's obsolete and damaging. Let's dump it. (And while we're at it, let's take a hard look at the Senate, too.)
3
First, do no harm! Before performing surgery on the Constitution, with unintended consequences, let's see the parties offer candidates with broader appeal.
Isn't popular vote supposed to show the width of appeal?
Thank God our Founding Fathers were smart enough to realize that they designed our country to be a Republic and not a Democracy. Perhaps Mr. Bouie should spend some time reading the Federalist Papers and De Tocqueville to understand that they wanted to avoid the Tyranny of the Majority. This threat was best exemplified by the destruction of French Institutions during the Reign of Terror. Do not think for a moment that your devotion to the DNC is guided by some belief that they will always serve the public good. FDR was a Democrat and he imprisoned American citizens without any Due Process. No thank you Mr. Bouie. I prefer the institutions that were established nearly 250 years ago. They have worked and we don't need misguided fools to tamper with it.
3
They wanted Tyranny of minority, because they belonged to this minority. I still don't see the good argument why the Tyranny of minority is better than the Tyranny of majority?
1
Suddenly everyone wants to get rid of the electoral college.
Why? Specifically, why is the electoral college failing?
What aspect of the electoral college, encoded into the Constitution of the US, requires change?
How will we go about making that change? A constitutional convention? That would be overrun by corporations buying everyone in attendance.
It is easy to pump out some words on the keyboard and push it up to the NY Times website.
It would be fantastically difficult to change the constitution for the better in today's world where corporations buy what they want in every corner of government activity.
The Constitution was written before corporations existed.
It would not be possible to write that document today.
Let's say you were a representative at that Jamelle. What would happen when Haliburton left $25 million under your door at your hotel?
Would you then encode in the new constitution that:
Haliburton get permanent, no-bid contracts in the next war they ask for?
Probably.
2
We are always lecturing other countries about democracy and even launch deadly, expensive regime change wars to bring democracy to those countries (or at least that's the official line), yet here we seem to have no problems letting the person who gets the fewer amounts of votes be the winner.
The office I'm referring to is the President OF the United States. Not the President of Nebraska or Iowa or NY. It is our only true national office, where everyone within the country votes for that person, all others being selected at the state level. Therefore, everyones vote should count equally for this office. A governor of a state is a state-wide office elected by all the people of that state with equal voting power. Would it be acceptable for some counties within that state to have less or more voting power? Of course not. The same analogy can be extrapolated to the country, where counties are replaced by the states and the office of governor is replaced by the presidency. It's the same principle. If any other country chose their president the way we do we would be either sending in the Marines to teach them about democracy or at least Jimmy Carter and a U.N. delegation.
2
The easiest way to fix it would be to award the electoral votes in proportion to the actual votes, rather than winner take all.
I agree with the suggestion that we keep the Electoral College but get rid of the winner-take-all awarding of electoral votes. If votes were awarded pro-rata in each state, the popular vote would always select the winner, but small states would still be crucial in close elections. Problem solved.
1
@GimmeSomeTruth, How do you do pro rata mathematically precisely in states with only 3 or 4 Elecrtors? And that still leaves voters in small states with many times the voice of voters in California, Texas, Florida or New York.
The arguments for the Electoral College are made by Republicans because they fear losing power. No doubt, they would (and will) take up the opposing arguments if (and when) the politics on the ground change, which they likely will someday.
More importantly, under Bush and Trump, the nation has been lead by a president that the majority of voters did not want. That fundamentally counter to the notion of democracy and trumps all other arguments.
I invite Republicans to consider how they would feel if Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders were elected by a minority of the vote? Still like that Electoral College?
1
It seems to me that the problem could be resolved by eliminating the "winner takes all" aspect of the electoral college.
The winner of a states presidential vote gets all of the electoral votes, even if it was a close race. If electoral votes were awarded proportionately, with fractions rounded off in favor of the biggest vote getter, the results would be a much closer reflection of the popular vote.
Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by only a handful of votes, yet 100% of the electoral votes went to her opponent. I don't see how is a democratic outcome at all.
3
I have a lot more faith in the collective judgement of all the nation’s voters taken together than I do of the voters in the handful of swing states that can disproportionately influence the results of an election. The elections of 2000 and 2016 confirms my belief.
2
I would never not vote, it's my right and my duty as a citizen, however the EC has always made me feel that my vote didn't count. I also think that by eliminating, the EC more people would go out and vote.
2
One problem for sure:
"Without the Electoral College, neither Trump nor his Republican predecessor George W. Bush would have won the White House on their first go-round. "
This isn't based in reality. Without the EC, the campaigns would no doubt have been different. Trump says he would have won by a BIGGER margin if it were by popular vote. Maybe he would have. Maybe millions of Republicans in CA and NY would have come out to vote if they knew that their vote would be counted. We have no way of knowing.
You can't make definite claims about what would have happened without "factor X," in any given scenario. I'm 100% in favor of abolishing the EC, but it doesn't help to make disingenuous claims about what would have happened without it.
1
Perhaps this question of an electoral college starts with one's concept of oneself. Do you think of yourself essentially as a US citizen who happens at the moment to be living in one of its subdivisions called states? I do. Some, on the other hand, think of themselves essentially as citizens of some state, which (with reservations) belongs to some politically conjoined Union.
2
The United States is a federal republic. It is right there in the name. united STATES.
States entered into the union on the basis of having a reasonable say on things like electing a president.
In the early republic, the interests small states like Rhode Island and Delaware were protected against the giants Virginia and New York. Now many of the small states are in the upper plains.
If the electoral college were eliminated, they would be more like provinces than sovereign states, and having no real say on matters of policy, would be justified in immediately withdrawing from a union that would ignore and govern them.
1
As explained by the Founders in many of their writings, the fundamental purpose of the structure of the election process is to ensure that the passions of a few highly populated areas cannot dominate the politics of the entire republic.
When someone well versed in the Contitution says United States, that persons understands the term to refer to fifty equal political entites, united in a federal republic.
When a left wing progressive Democrats says United States, they refer to something that does not exist - a single national entity.
The tyranny of the majority is a real phenomenon, as the current exercise proves.
The only time we hear about eliminating the Electoral College is when the left has lost.
We never hear such folly from centrists or those on the right.
Only from the shrill left.
It is their right to be shrill.
And it is the right of the rest oif us to ensure that they can - never - abuse the rest of us.
6
According to the founders, Ayn Rand - and any other woman - doesn't have a right to vote.
According to the founders, chattel slavery is legal. And on top of that, slaves (who are not allowed to vote) are counted as 3/5 of a person for representative purposes.
So obviously the 'wisdom' of the founders has its limits.
I once spent a week in the fascinating city of Themopolis WY while my daughter and a friend attended a dinosaur dig nearby. So I read magazines at the library, hung out at the coffee shop and asked questions. One question was that I saw fenced acreage but no cattle. Well, the cattle are moved around but since this area is so dry, it can only support one cow per twenty acres. Having come from a background in agriculture, I started doing the math. Basically one rancher had to own half of Wyoming to make enough money to support himself. After more questions I learned the answer. Subsidies. We pay these ranchers for an unsustainable lifestyle. Yes, here I am on the eastern coast any I am paying people to play cowboy. This has gone on because of influence senators have in rural states. The great central area of our country can or do not pull their weight and as politicians flock to Iowa for their vote, I think, who cares about what people in Iowa think?
1
The discussion over the Presidential Electoral College v. Popular Vote seems to take place in a vacuum absent other balancing factors in our political system.
For example the Senate, with 2 senators from each state (Wyoming with 577,000 people compared to California with 39 million people) is hardly a "one person, one vote" system either. So to have 2 of the 3 elected branches of the federal government potentially more impacted by rural small population states skews the political system in that direction.
Then when you combine this result with the system for selection of each Supreme Court justice (nominated by a President not elected by the majority of the population and confirmed by Senate not elected by a majority of the population) you end up with a political system that in no way represents the views of America.
Time to consider a serious effort to change our Presidential election to a popular vote while leaving the Senate as is.
4
I would like to see the popular vote include all citizens, those US citizens in Puerto Rico, USVI, Guam, etc are citizens and their vote should be counted.
1
As a Democrat who has lived in Idaho for the past 23 years, my presidential vote has never mattered. After every presidential election I have sworn never to vote again, but fortunately I consider my vote to count ONLY in showing about a third of the state votes as democrats.
3
Stop your whining. If Al Gore had carried his home state of Tennessee in the 2000 election, Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court would not have mattered one bit. Similarly, if Hillary Clinton had actively campaigned in the Midwest in the week leading up to Election Day instead of taking victory laps on the two coasts, she would have handily beaten Donald Trump (come on, can you think of an easier opponent?) Democrats and Republicans both know the rules of the game and apparently Republicans are just better at winning elections. Constantly carping about the popular vote is like a football team complaining they had more yards of total offense but still lost because they couldn't put points on the board.
6
I didn't vote in the 2016 election because of the electoral college. Here are some facts:
1) I vote absentee in California, my last state of residence. CA votes overwhelmingly blue, my vote (which is also blue) won't make an ounce of difference. If I were to vote red, it would change nothing. The electoral college dictates that "swing state" voters have much more power in their vote than I do. That is undemocratic. the fact that the phrase "swing state" even exists points to the larger problem at hand: that candidates only have to court certain demographics of people, and they can ignore the rest as inconsequential.
2) At the bottom of my ballot, in print so tiny I needed a magnifying glass to read it, there is one little sentence: "This ballot will only be counted in the event of a run-off." When is there EVER a run-off in California? In other words, I could spend hours poring over ballot initiatives and reading up on candidates, spend the $10 it costs to mail in my ballot, and it won't even be counted. So why bother?
Our election system is usually dysfunctional and frequently corrupt, thanks to gerrymandering and citizens united. The Electoral College only compounds the problem.
3
The Electoral College is must go so that people vote directly on the Executive officers. It is only just that the persons with he most votes wins an election. Nothing else can stand any longer. The electoral college is a leftover remnant of the founding fathers assertion that "man is not wise enough to govern himself" that they used to justify Representative government, lifetime appointment for Judges, and the Electoral college. We must get rid of all three of these anachronisms and finally get to an Actual Democracy: The right of citizens to directly vote for the laws under which they live, to directly vote for the President, Vice President, and directly vote for the Judiciary shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State. See assocactualdemocracy.com
3
@Roger Duronio The tyranny of the majority is the reason that the EC exists. The founders knew that in a pure Democracy, the majority can vote to take away the right, assets, and lives of the minority. Look at the current efforts by the Democrat tyrannical left now to steal money from others because they did well in life. We have a constitutional Republic, not a Democracy, and I'll fight to preserve it.
1
It is not about better presidents. It is about giving smaller states a fairer say in this country's politics.
Maybe its time to carve up the country in a manner in which each state has the same population or do away with the electoral college all togather.
1
@sbanicki He actually didn't say anything about it being better presidents. He said it turns us into individual voters and not states where candidates have to win votes over the entire country rather than a few swing states. Smaller states actually have a disproportional say in the country's politics. 2 senators for every state is not democratic.
2
The electoral college does not do what it's defenders claim--assure that rural voters have the same voice in the selection of a president that urban voters have. I have close ties to two states, Kansas where I was born and raised and Illinois where I now live. Both are major agricultural states. Illinois is ranked 6th in the nation for agricultural receipts, $9.7 billion. Kansas is 7th with agricultural receipts of $9.5 billion.
But in the electoral college, the vote of a Kansan, most of whom do not live in rural areas, is worth nearly a third more than the vote of an Illinois rural voter. It takes four Illinois voters to equal three Kansas ones. How do we allow this, while claiming that all citizens have equal rights?
5
As I have previously stated, the entire concept of states rights, which lies at the heart of opposition to a popular vote, is a historical anachronism. America was formed by the unification of 13 separate nations. Residents considered themselves Virginians or New Yorkers, or Rhode Islanders, not Americans. The residents were also different, coming from different Europeans, often having fundamentally different religious beliefs. When asked to form one nation, smaller nations balked fearing they would lose all power to the larger nations. Various compromises were used to preserve "states" rights that were actually "nation's rights." As the nation grew, new states often were arbitrarily created, not based upon differences in the citizenry or natural boundaries.
Had there not been 13 separate nations, we might not have a bicameral legislature and we most likely would not have only one body's representation based upon population. Politicians use this, an other outdated principles, to justify political objectives, not because of any real concern for "originalism."
5
@Disillusioned
No, you are going in the wrong direction.
We should restore meaningful federalism and send power back to states and localities.
NY can do what is best for NY and Idaho what is best for Idaho.
One size does not fit all.
Federalism enhances liberty by allowing us to vote with our feet.
1
The Electoral College seems to represent the sq ft rather than representing the People.
1
I live in an extremely rural area and I don't even need to bother to vote for president because the state is so red. If we eliminated the electoral college, my vote for president would matter. When people argue that the electoral college protects rural America's voice, they mean that it protects rural America's voice to vote Republican.
In addition, the electoral college does not work as intended. The electors are not supposed to be the rubber stamp that red states have made them. The Founders believed the electors would protect America from men like Trump. The electoral college has allowed two horrific presidents in my lifetime and a middle east war that should never have happened. It needs to go.
10
How about reaching out to rural America and listening to the real problems of people who are not keyboard warriors. It's not like only Republican Presidents have won the general elections over the years. Hillary ignored the areas where Trump made multiple visits and he won, go figure.
I have mixed feeling on this topic. Eliminating the electoral college wi;; make Republican votes in NY and California and Democratic votes in Mississippi and Kansas worth some and that is a big plus. Having been a Republican in NY where I vote in national elections was worthless and now living in swing state Florida my level of political engagement is much higher. But my concern is would the new system just elect the president of California, NY, Texas and Florida? The electoral college gives a little extra juice to small states both Republican like Wyoming, but also Democratic like Rhode Island and Delaware. We are a republic of 50 states and the few largest ones already have disproportionate power, this change would only make that worse.
1
@Todd, How about we in NY just keep all the federal tax money we collect except maybe what we decide to pay for the War Department and spend it on our own state needs?
Fine for academic political discussion. But as an amendment requires the approval of the Legislatures of 38 states, "it just ain't gonna happen".
And as for these "interstate compacts" where States direct their electoral college electors to vote based on the national vote, and not their own state's vote, there is something plainly repugnant to having the electors vote for someone other than who won their state election for President.
Besides, any effort to effectively change the Constitution without going through the Amendment process, or a Constitutional Convention, is itself unconstitutional. Reminds me of the "line item veto". A generation ago, many candidates, particularly conservative candidates, advocated the Executive being able to pick apart a general funding budget bill, passed in its entirety by Congress, and veto only parts while signing the rest into law. The first time it ever happened, the Federal Courts bounced that as unconstitutional as well. And now you never hear about it any more.
3
Fabulously flawed argument. For those wanting to rid us of the Electoral College, educate yourselves on Simpson’s Paradox, a situation where elements of a whole indicate one trend, but the aggregate demonstrates the opposite. As in a tennis match, it is possible to win more points, but lose the match. When this happens, the loser never claims to have won. And yes, that scoring system bubbles the best to the top.
2
It’s really just about fairness, about one person one vote. In Wyoming, there are 217,000 people per electoral vote (672,000 people and 3 electoral votes). In California there are 673,000 people per electoral vote ( 37 million people divided by 55 electoral votes). Do you think that’s fair? The electoral college is wildly undemocratic.
3
The National Popular Vote Compact solves this without an amendment (an insuperable obstacle). The NPVC keeps the Electoral College and pledges your state's electors to the presidential candidate with the highest NATIONAL popular vote count. Perfectly constitutional. So far 12 states and D.C. (together worth 181 electoral votes) have enacted it. 280 electoral votes are needed. Urge your state's legislature to enact it if they still have not.
3
@Unconvinced
The NPVC is unconstitutional on it's face. The states are attempting to nullify the electoral college. The electors are not bound by the constitution to vote for anyone, hence they can't be bound by the state. Also, states can't enter pacts with each other.
It's also voter disenfranchisement on a massive scale. A candidate theoretically could win a state by 300,000 votes and the electoral votes be given to his or her opponent who barely wins the popular vote.
Ludicrous!
1
Because the Senate already gives an outsized portion of power to its voters for each less populous state, and because the executive branch holds an outsized power advantage of three branches of government because of the DOJ, it makes sense to end the electoral college.
Two out of three sets the table for majority rule without deadlock--one of the reasons we have three branches and not two or four. Currently the minorities of population control two out of the three of branches of government, which is why so many issues: gun control, abortion, infrastructure improvements are written for the minority and by the minority. #Undemocratic
4
Getting rid of electoral college (EC) is to give losers a reason to hope that the outcome could favor the urban areas of the country. USA is a vast country with variable population density. In addition there is a herd mentality in our democracy and people think more along party lines than independently. Yes it would be ideal to have a president that wins the EC, a majority of the states and win the popular vote but that very infrequently does not happen and that is therefore not a valid reason to get rid of it.
I would have liked Albert Gore to have won the 2000 presidential elections and our country not gone the terribly wrong path that it did. But not winning ones home state was Gore's biggest drawback. It just did not seem right. On the other hand Trump did not win his home state of NY but won more states across the middle and won key swing states including Florida and he has demonstrated that he can have a different style of governing after never before having had any experience in any elected office.
So far the instances of a president not winning the popular vote but winning electoral college are few and far between. The outcome of the 2000 election certainly hurt the country but the surprise victory of Trump has not been so far regrettable though it unleashed a severe new epidemic of TDS, Trump derangement syndrome. To be fair USA has done well domestically and globally during leadership of Trump. If Trump does win reelection it would be a vindication of the EC.
2
Election by popular vote in a country as diverse and complex as the US would be a nightmare. Much easier to corrupt the vote by directly affecting the election. Recounts would need to be nationwide, long and complicted. In additon to its other attributes the EC buffers and reduces the impact from these types of malfeasance.
3
When I ran for US President in the mock election held by my eighth-grade class in 1968, the centerpiece of my platform was direct election by the people. (That's because neither me nor my opponent was able to figure out how to win "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Turns out that neither did the adults.) Sure enough I won the popular vote but my opponent won the electoral college vote.
1
Notice that not one comment has rebutted the Mathematical arguments the writer has made. Facts are stubborn. Numbers don't lie. The Electoral College needs to go.
10
It's the principle of the thing: one person, one vote. While we're at it, let's get rid of the Senate (and cut costs): the battle over State's rights was decided by the Civil War.
1
@Joe
Eliminate the senate? I can almost hear Tarkin saying:
"The last vestiges of the Old Republic are being swept away."
How did that turn out for Tarkin?
Democracy does not equal "one person, one vote". We should be able to vote for all acceptable candidates in ranked order. That would be democracy too, and it would really change who runs for President and why.
The Electoral College has delivered 2 of the worst presidents in US history in under 20 years. Enough of this - whoever gets the most votes, wins the office.
6
I really, really hope that everyone who desires better leadership and political ethics in our federal government expends all of their energy over the next year and a half kvetching about the undesirability of the Electoral College. That's really going to get us places.
It's a fine thing to pursue if you want, but in off years, because a constitutional amendment will decades to succeed, if it ever does (about which I am skeptical; I also respect the constitutional structure that established the College, and the history and complex negotiation and dealmaking that resulted in it as well as other checks and balances.) Meanwhile, there's a critical election to focus on NOW. C'mon, people, get real!
2
With all the important issues facing the country, why are calls for abolishing the Electoral College suddenly on the tongues of Democratic candidates and on the keyboards of opinion writers? Of course, the EC should be eliminated, but there is zero chance of that happening. The necessary constitutional amendment would require a vote of 2/3 in each house of Congress and the approval of 38 states, and that is simply unattainable. The self-interest of over-represented small states and the GOP insures that. The presidential campaign should be entirely focused on things that a president could actually affect, not this distraction. The discussion could actually be harmful to Democrats. To the extent that elimination of the EC is presented (inaccurately) as an assault on rural voters by the big “blue” cities, support for the change by Democrats may give rural voters another motivation not to vote for them. Let’s move on to more important things.
2
In view of the current allegations of meddling, by Russians or anyone else, the Electoral College creates a threat to National Security. By virtue of its capacity to shift the results of the Elections and so determine who becomes President, it actually makes it much easier to interfere. Any party trying to influence the outcome only needs to focus its efforts on [the behavior of] the voters in a small number of counties in a few States. I believe this is a very powerful argument to push for its abolition.
6
Americans have very poor knowledge about the history of the United States .About the same knowledge that they have about the rest of the world's history. Few Americans have read their constitution and even less are able to understand it. Even less the historical process and inspiration behind it .Most don't even know or understand some of the words like "inalienable rights " . They don't know that this is a French word and that it refers to God. Not the US constitution.
2
Republicans will be for abolishing the electoral college when Texas becomes a blue state. We will likely often have minority "elected" presidents imposing taxation without representation and other policies opposed by the majority of Americans on the states that bear the lion's share of actually funding America until it does.
Candidates will still campaign on rural issues important to tens of millions of Americans regardless of state boundaries. They will be less likely to distort and impose policies requiring the rest of us to subsidize tiny special interests such as ethanol and coal mining that are empowered by the electoral college.
The only arguments that can support the disenfranchisement of millions of Repubs in CA and millions of Dems in red states require ignoring the value and dignity of individuals' rights and participation in governance; the basis of our Republic.
Are we really to worry about the interests of rural states being disempowered when the majority of the senate, the body that appoints the third branch of gov't, is appointed by about 25% of the electorate? I resent being ruled by North & South Dakota, Montana & Wyoming.
The founders' compromise with slavery set a course away from democracy. It should be addressed with some of the same vigor as slavery or our revolution before the majority ruled by a minority, that now seeks even to prevent them from voting– rebels.
3
The electoral college can work if electors are allocated to each candidate based on the percentage of the popular vote each receives. If a state has 8 electoral votes and the Republican received 55% of the total vote in the state he or she would get 4.4 electoral votes. Even if my candidate is in the minority my vote still counts. If he is in the majority he gets a bigger percentage of the electors and my vote counts more. That is democracy in a constitutional republic.
2
If Democrats were demanding that the winner of the majority of the popular vote be elected, there would be some credibility to their argument. Instead they argue that the winner of a plurality should win, citing 2000 and 2016 as outrageous examples in which the winner of the plurality of the popular vote did not get anywhere near a majority in the electoral college.
Hillary's 48% plurality over Trump's 46.2% was hardly a respectable plurality. Consider this: her overvote was in California, where 60% of the ballots did not have a single Republican candidate other than Trump. Not that the GOP did not win, but for 60% of the population there was no Republican choice on the ballot. They could chose whichever of the two Democrats running for the Senate was least objectionable or either of the two Democrat House members. Democrats eliminating the party primaries was one of the most brilliant and effective mechanisms for disenfranchising Republicans as possible.
If all of the solid red states followed suit, Hillary would have had a much lower overcount.
2
I think a compromise that could work would be to select 2 electors from each state based upon the totals from each state and the others on a Congressional District basis. It would produce a different result from the current system under many scenarios.
There is no disputing the slave legacy of the 2 Senator system and the Electoral College, but a straight popular vote system would impose a tyranny of its own.
2
The whole debate would be over if we retained the EC but moved away from the winner takes all. If EC votes by State were allocated proportionate to the respective popular votes we would have both - EC and each vote counting.
4
Not quite. Cause small states still get more electors per Citizen than big states.
2
Three quarters of states would need to agree to amend the constitution in order to get rid of the Electoral College.
Jamelle gave a great argument as to why the Electoral College is undemocratic.
Such arguments are easy to make but they are totally irrelevant to any practical effort to get rid of the Electoral College.
To get rid of the Electoral College you will have to convince the majority of states which have below average population that their voters should give up some of their power and give it to voters in more populated states. That will be kind of hard.
3
Without the Electoral College, CA would determine the winner of the national election every four years. The small States would never see a presidential candidate.
2
100% incorrect.
The author overlooks the symbiotic relationship between our two-party system, the electoral college, and American federalism. Eliminating the electoral college will inevitably (it’s already happening) open the door to attacks on the undemocratic distribution of Senate seats among the states, and the eventual elimination or reduction to irrelevancy of America’s version of the House of Lords, which will in turn open the door to our founders’ greatest fear: unchecked democracy and the loss of minority rights, property rights, and God knows what else. I would urge great restraint and appreciation for the genius of our constitution. The game is to win 270 electoral votes, and it’s no mean achievement. Not winning the popular vote, especially when they are almost wholly concentrated in a single state (Clinton’s popular majority was almost entirely thanks to California), is akin to a baseball team getting more hits but less runs—and both sides know it’s the runs that count.
3
Credit to Elizabeth Warren for suggesting doing it the RIGHT WAY which is by CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. This movement to give electors to the popular vote winner against the votes of individual states under the current system is vile. If you don't like the electoral college, then do it the right way.
2
One point that has been ignored by the abolish the Electoral College is that each of the 50 States and the District of Columbia hold POPULAR VOTE elections. It is THE WINNER of these states and DC who receive the total number of electors.
In the most recent election, Secretary Clinton won the popular vote in the States of California, Illinois, and New York by approximately 6 million votes, whereas Mr. Trump won the popular vote in the remaining 47 States and DC by approximately 3 million votes.
Yes, Secretary Clinton won the majority of the popular vote, but Mr. Trump took the vast majority of the American land mass. The Democratic vote is thus concentrated in a handful of States and could (by the reckoning of this author and those who think like him) skew an election; as appears to have happened in 2016.
Methinks that the Founders recognized this potentially contentious issue and the Founders devised the Electoral College for times much like we are living in at the present.
4
This is a great subject for a high school debate. Arguments can go on forever.
3
Good article. Rural states have 2 senators, the same as more populous states, and we can keep that. As far as campaigning throughout the country, I don’t see that as very important, in any scheme of things—it’s not as if there’s no media. Time for a president elected by the people!
2
@Rose Anne
Our Sovietized hate-Trump mass-media is "no media". Stalin didn't have it this good.
Do rural America's farmers have a lot of power right now with Trump's haphazard tariff war, Senator Graham?
When rural America increases the amount of money they spend on prisons by leaps and bounds and slashes public education budgets-is rural America really voting in its own interest?
When rural America is dying from opioid addiction, and Trump put his public relations person on the committee - is rural America being served and protected?
When women and girls are attacked and bullied into bearing babies from their attackers - or even when they just can't go to the doctor because they can't afford it- is rural America safe?
I think the popular vote should help restore the decency,the opportunity, and quality-of-life, that rural America should get used to.
7
I appreciates Jamelle’s more persuasive tone in this column. I’m sympathetic to his case against the Electoral College and I think he has a partial point about *parts* of states having similarities to parts of other states, but I’m not sold on a national popular vote because it undermines the states. I don’t get when Jamelle makes a distinction between states and voters.
America is a collection of independent states bound together by a Constitution that delegated power to a federal government. Today, there is no “national election”. States hold elections and we vote for a president to lead the union of states.
Undermining states with Jamelle’s logic precedes a path that congruently undermines our representative republic. Jamelle might like a unitary system, but erasing borders for a romanticized wholesome nationalization of elections would marginalize voices and suppress dissent until a backlash occurs.
However, here’s a proposal that would align with much, not all, of what Jamelle writes and it wouldn’t require constitutional changes: abolish the electors, keep the electoral votes and reward by congressional district won (candidates would campaign in more places). This could be federally mandated or states could be incentivized to opt-in. It’s the closest to a win-win for all parties.
That said, the EC isn’t the only problem. The primary system needs to be overhauled, and the presidency demoted to a co-equal branch: it’d help make elections less of a beauty pageant.
3
As we have seen a lot recently, our election systems’ flaws are exposed only in close elections. You would have to do a 100% recount.
A hanging chad in Palm Beach County would no longer determine the way all votes in Florida are counted, which is a good thing.
But, if the nationwide totals were close and every ballot counted, you would probably be better off holding a new election than try to definitively determine how scores of millions of people across the country voted.
If it comes to pass, I think it would boost election turnout on all sides and be a plus for Democracy.
1
North and South Dakota have four senators for a million and a half people while New York and California have four senators for sixty million people. Considering the senate's power to seat judges and block laws passed out of the house that it doesn't care for, the electoral college must be the least of America's problems when it comes to honouring the popular vote.
8
Thank you.
1
The ten smallest and mostly-rural states have ¼ the population of the largest state, California, yet they receive 2.5 more Electors per resident: 33 Electors for 10 million residents, versus 55 Electors for 40 million residents in the Golden State. 33 Electors multiplied four times for population increase is 132. Fairness requires that California be given an additional 77 Electoral votes, i.e., 132 minus 55. Or its population must be reduced to 16 million residents by the creation of two new states containing the other 24 million residents and 77 Electors. Do the math of proportionality, with E for Elector and R for 1 million residents: If 33E/10R = 55E/xR, then x = 16R. 40R/16R = 2.5, the loss multiplier for current California voters against voters from small states in a Presidential election. In simple terms: If you want your vote for President to truly matter, move to Montana or Vermont. If you are a single-issue voter and that issue is guns, pick either state.
4
A constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college would be impossible to get ratified by the required 3/4 of the states. The smaller states would be voting to reduce their clout - will never happen.
2
@Dan: You are probably right, but when you think about it, no single small state gets any clout from their three electoral votes. It's actually the big states with a lot of electoral votes that everyone obsesses about. Complicated business...
2
It is the Senate that ensures states with small populations are given a voice equal to large states in order to prevent a tyranny of the populous states. The House is where the more populous states have more representation. It was a genius compromise to have legislation pass both and be signed by the President in order to become law.
However, all of these positions are only on the ballot in the states or districts they represent. The President and Vice President are on every ballot in the nation. Each of the elections for representatives and senators are won or lost by the number of votes, period. So, why isn’t this true for the President and VP? I can’t think of a good reason.
Thank you, Mr. Bowie, for this and your other well researched opinion pieces since you recently began at the NYT.
One other thing I would like to see. I would like to be able to vote for Vice President separately, not have to vote for a “ticket”. Instead of political calculations by a candidate on how to get more votes in strategic ways, voters would vote for VP as they would for President. I guarantee we wouldn’t end up with Dan Quayle or Sarah Palin as VP possibilities. If you don’t mind, please consider an essay on the history of how this form of selection came to be.
5
@Scott Keller: Originally, wasn't the vice president the one who came in second? That way you could easily end up with a president and vice president from opposing parties. That would represent the real mind of the country...
2
I believe you are correct, but I’m not sure how that system transformed into what we have today. Since the VP is a Constitutional office, why are we the people not really allowed to vote for who we want to have in that office separately?
2
Yes the Electoral College is undemocratic and for a good reason. We are not a democracy. We are a republic. The Founders understood the danger of mob rule that a democracy can create. Then as now they recognized that small states still should have a voice. No way do we want CA & NY controlling future elections.
2
@Once From Rome: Bouie explained why CA and NY wouldn't control elections in a popular vote system. It's in the 12th paragraph. Being a republic has nothing to do with having leaders selected by a minority of voters: it's about the system of having representatives elected from the population, who then meet and make decisions, rather than having decisions made by the whole population at once, like in a New England town meeting. We are supposed to be a democratic republic: except by those in the minority, who prefer an undemocratic republic, if that keeps them in power.
9
@Once From Rome,
The right is fond of counterposing "democracy" and "republic." But they are not opposites, but two complementary systems.
The idea that "small states" would be tyrannized by larger ones is complete nonsense, as is well explained in the article.
Instead, the reality is that the majority of American citizens are now being tyrannized by a despot elected by a minority.
If that seems fair to you, you aren't talking about a republic or a democracy, but an autocracy.
You wrote: “No way do we want NY and CA controlling future elections.”
Did you not read the column before writing this? As Mr. Bouie discussed, NY and CA would not ‘control future elections’, as many people in these states would vote for the opposing candidate. You wouldn’t ‘win California’ and get all their votes, and even if you did...well, read the column and refute that point.
But more than that, I think this would drive up turnout in every state, since every vote would literally count. Whether you are a conservative in CA or a liberal in WV, your vote would count and you could cast a ballot knowing that your voice would be heard. What’s wrong with that?
I commend you for a well argued piece. What I cannot understand is why Democrats waste so much energy trying to rig institutions to their own benefit instead of working at winning elections the old-fashioned way. Trump has been a great disappointment and it is true that many saw it coming, but the demand for a recount started on election night. Hillary has made a new career out of making accusations and avoiding blame. Just think what all this energy could have been directed toward, so many problems, so much wasted money. Persuading people to vote for the Democrats should be the sole focus now. Michael Moore, Bernie and many others have seen what was missed in 2016. Instead of crying over spilled milk in Beverly Hills, Hillary could have devoted herself to better understanding the needs of mid-westerners. She could have set up an office in Cleveland or Detroit and mastered the terrain. Instead of charging people $500 to hear her whine, she could have used her foundation's money to retrain single mothers or whatever. Has anything been done of late to persuade rural whites that the Democrats care? I mean, except for seeking to prosecute folks for misusing pronouns as they do in the UK. We need the Electoral College like a hole in the head but the ship is sinking and there are more pressing matters, surely.
3
(1) Non-swing states have a natural advantage in Congress because they have long-term senators/representatives who wield more power. The electoral college balances out this imbalance by giving disproportional power to swing states.
(2) A national campaign would require magnitudes more in campaign funding and give more power to the donor class. One inconvenient truth for liberals (I am one of them) is that in the last presidential election, it was the Democratic candidate (Clinton) whose pockets were lined with political donations. The Republican candidate (Trump) won on fewer financial resources and a more innovative campaign. This may have only been possible because of the electoral college, and as much as I disagree with the current president, I don't consider that part of the system to be a problem, but rather an ingenious solution to a problem.
1
@Luke,
There has never been a president whose power diminished the influence of the small states.
The simple fact is that the states don't need special representation in the White House as states.
But the majority of the voters do, and the Electoral College takes away the right of the majority of the people to decide who should represent them.
4
@Luke Stephenson: I don't think the electoral college balances anything: your idea of the power of long-term senators and representatives is interesting, but I don't think it's at all quantifiable. At any given time there are only a few really powerful legislative leaders, hardly representing all or even many of the non-swing states.
Maybe if elections got more expensive, the donor class would go broke. An unintended benefit! No, seriously, that is another problem, we need to get a handle on campaign financing, but disenfranchising large swathes of voters to keep elections manageable is probably not the best way to go about it.
1
Since getting rid of the Electoral College would be a very heavy political life, how about diffusing its influence by expanding the number of Representatives in the House, which would mean more will accrue to more populous states and raise their Electoral Vote totals?
The current static number of Representatives is not codified in the Constitution anywhere, having only been legislated in 1929 through the Apportionment Act. It is difficult to imagine our Constitution's drafters being comfortable with each representative encompassing three quarters of a million people; the Constitution simply called for no more than one for every 30,000 persons (imagine if we went back to that standard). But the House could be doubled or even tripled and it would have the salutary effect of bringing Representatives closer to their voters again, as well as diluting the small state power of the Electoral College.
6
@Glenn,
That would accomplish nothing, as the Senate is also an undemocratic institution, with specific responsibilities that the House cannot control.
1
If the electoral college is so effective why is it that the United States is the only democratic nation that uses such a system? Without it, there would be no gerrymandering. There would be no system in which a candidate can receive 1 fewer vote in a state and lose all of that state's electoral votes. The amendment that promulgated the electoral college should be repealed in order to make this nation a true democracy. Another step that should be taken is abolishing the 2 senators per state provision. Population determines the number of House members in each state. There is no reason why that should not be applied to the Senate. It is ludicrous that Wyoming and Alaska have the same number of senators as California and New York. It's like having one school district with a student:teacher ratio of 20:1 while another school district with a student:teacher ratio of 2000:1.
5
@nzierler: Actually gerrymandering is something else. It pertains to the drawing of electoral districts within states for the election of congressional representatives, and state legislators. It's a pernicious thing, but it doesn't relate to the Electoral College. And the electoral college wasn't established by an amendment, it's right in the Constitution. It would take an amendment to abolish it or change it, which could be done by the usual amendment process.
Other than that, you are pretty much right.
1
The problem is not the Electoral College but the existence of states as autonomous units of governance instead of just administrative units, similar to state counties.
Both states and the Electoral College are intertwined.
You want to get rid of the Electoral College, then re-define the nature of states.
I doubt the latter will happen, making the former just as unlikely.
1
@Joshua,
The states are not autonomous units.
There is great variety within them, as the writer has pointed out.
@Joshua Schwartz: There was a major revision of how we elect Senators, for instance, without any redefinition of the nature of the states. The electoral college could be abolished or revised (for instance, a uniform method of selecting electors proportionally to the popular vote in each state could make the electoral college results match the popular vote extremely closely), without any further changes in the definition of the states...
1
The reality is that when a group gets a privilege, they would do anything to justify and keep it. If the electoral college votes were assigned proportional to the number of vowels in a state's name, we would have heard the same impassioned (and preposterous) arguments from the states and political party who benefited.
The small (and unfair) gain the current system gives to the small states is not the main problem or benefit. The real practical issue is that with a winner take all system, the so called swing states get all the attention and power, while voters on other states are counted on as props and cash generators.
If Republicans are sincere about the merits of the Electoral College, why don't they choose their nominee using the same system with winner take all on each state.
2
As the article makes clear presidential candidates and their party's money, like in every other election in every other country where voting is on some geographic basis, will get funneled into those places where they have a genuine chance of success - the swing states/districts/electorates.
The views of small states, and of States in general when State's rights want to be considered, are already given voice in the Senate.
On the other hand the Electoral College has no need to replicate that structure again and allow a minority of Americans to rule over a majority. The principle of one person, one vote should be given voice in the Presidential election where the President represents the people of the nation as a whole, not just the small states, or even some states. States should have no role to play in the mechanics of the presidential election.
2
Your arguments were unconvincing.
The Electoral College may not be democratic, but do not forget that we do not live in a democracy; the USA is a republic and for good reasons.
We need to keep the electoral college.
2
@emeany,
The United States is a democratic republic.
The two terms are not opposites.
Jamelle Bouie raises some good points but I still think that I want to keep the Electoral College system, even though it meant that my own preferred candidate lost the 2016 presidential election. Bouie invokes Reynolds v Sims but not in a compelling way. The electoral votes don't come from the people, they come from the states - and our system is a federal republic. Similarly, the two senators per state enshrined in the US Constitution represent the equality of the fifty states themselves, not the equality of each individual inhabitant of those states. Bouie led with the Elizabeth Warren quote "“I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and to make sure that vote gets counted" and I couldn't help but laugh to see a current presidential candidate in 2019 advocating for the ratification of the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments. She won't find me, or many other Americans, arguing against any of those!
"Getting Rid of the Electoral College Isn’t Just About Trump"
Getting rid of Trump isn't just about the electoral college.
1
How about we collect federal taxes from citizens in proportion to their representation in the federal government? Good news, DC residents, no federal taxes! Californian's will get a big discount. Maybe Wyoming could sell California one of their senators to avoid the taxes. That seems like the sort of free market solution Republicans like.
8
@Dismayed Taxpayer: I haven't quite figured out the ramifications, but it sounds like a plan.
1
I’m on board
There are a number of social choice results that demonstrate that any voting system can produce perverse outcomes.
So, while there's some natural appeal to eliminating the electoral college, doing so does not necessarily produce a system that must be fairer. For example, eliminating the electoral college without a requirement that the winner need a majority of the votes cast makes it easier for a third or even fourth party candidate to help produce a perverse outcome. Let's say that polls show that the Republican candidate will lose by a small margin. That candidate (or a PAC supporting that candidate) may decide to run ads in Democratic areas touting the Green Party candidate. Now, the Republican might win with a plurality.
If there's a requirement that the winner needs a majority of the popular vote, third party candidates could ensure that no candidate gets a majority in some years. The Republicans could run ads enticing people to vote for the Libertarian candidate to ensure that there is a runoff. After all, it's hard to get Democrats to the polls even once. Imagine trying to get Democrats to turn out twice!
Or, electoral votes could be awarded proportionally.
Or, electoral votes could be based only on the size of its House delegation.
Of course, each of those latter systems are also subject to criticism and able to produce their own perverse outcomes.
Any voting system can produce perverse outcomes. But, that's not to say that the system cannot be made fairer.
@John: Well, we already see third party spoilers, sometimes boosted by a supposed opponent for tactical reasons, so that wouldn't be new. It's true that every voting system seems to produce possible perverse out comes, but this particular system has produced a couple of perverse outcomes in recent memory, and they have both been really super-perverse. States have been electing governors by plain old popular vote forever, and we don't hear about crazy results -- maybe there have been some, but they must be very uncommon, in spite of the mathematical possibilities of it happening.
1
@John Bergstrom
If you define a perverse outcome as the winner garners only a plurality rather than a majority, which would seem to be a fair definition in a democracy, the instances are not as uncommon as you might think in races for governor.
In 2010-2011, 28% of the races for governor were won with only a plurality.
In fact, the trend has been growing steadily since World War II.
Check out this article from fairvote.org
https://www.fairvote.org/election-wonk-growing-trend-of-plurality-wins-in-governors-races
My son is registered in Maryland, a state who's electoral ballots have been for the Democrats. When I asked him if he had voted, he said that on election day he was working south of the Pentagon and it would be a couple of hours to his poling place. Since his vote for president would be for the majority in Maryland and the EC votes would be the same with or without his vote, he didn't bother. So the local candidates missed out on his vote. If the popular vote was the only vote for president, he would have driven and voted.
3
I won't go into countering Bouie's argument to eliminate the Electoral College - its in institution so embedded in our nation's psyche as a republic of states it will never be abolished.
Rather, I would propose two reforms that don't require amending the Constitution yet would make for a more relevant House of Representatives and thus Electoral College.
1. Expand the size of the House. It is self-imposed by Congress limiting the House to 435 members. The limit in the Constitution is no less than 30,000 people per district which would equate to a +10,000 House members. That's too big. But, at 60,000 people per district, that would be +5,000 House members. This would be truly representative. And, unlike in 1790, there is no constraint of travel or of representatives having to meet in one place. Put the House on line. And the Senate too.
2. Make the Electoral College based on the winner in each district with the winner of the state getting the 2 electoral votes based on the Senate. With +5,000 Electoral votes, 3rd party candidates would be viable, thus shaking up the system. In cases of no clear winner, the top 3 candidates go to House, thus making the peoples' representatives arbiters of the tone and legislative agenda of a new president, unlike the vague promises we get now.
We should be creative in working with the genius of the Founding Fathers and use the Constitution as written to advance greater democracy in our Republic.
5
I agree there should be more districts which would dilute the effects of gerrymandering. Also, I would suggest. Each two year congressional cycle have only ONE budget. Congress would only meet six months per year. Congressman would be limited in their travel budgets to get rid of all the commuting time wasted. Congress would not be permitted to adjourn or collect paychecks or address any other resolutions until the budget were completed first.
2
@Will Eigo
Brilliant suggestions! Aside from having Congress focus on the massive budget of the US, your proposal would result in a part time legislature that would allow real people, not just lawyers and the flunkies of the rich, to serve in the House. Further, it would act as a check on the endless churn of Congress feeling compelled to pass a law for every passing fancy. Constrained time would be a true focus to consider and pass laws that address real issues confronting the nation.
2
As someone who has lived in a red rural state most of my life, I have given up on my voice being heard at a national level.
Even in primaries, I rarely get to vote for my first or even second choice, since the primary election reaches my state so late.
I always vote, but I also always know that my liberal voice will never count in a presidential election. One person and one vote will only happen for me if we get rid of the electoral college.
9
It's all very interesting to talk about the unfairness of the Electoral College system, but it's one of the many problems in our government that would require a constitutional amendment to change. That means it needs a 2/3 vote in Congress AND approval by 3/4 of the states. And THAT means that it won't happen if just 13 states don't want it.
There are more than 13 states that are happy with the way the system is now, so that will never happen.
A more useful thing for reformers to concentrate on would be to amend the Constitution to lower the bar for amending the Constitution. This is so high that it's almost impossible to achieve. Many states amend their constitutions by a simple majority vote, which is too low. Some appropriate compromise could be found, and since both parties have things about the Constitution they'd like to see changed, an amendment to do that might have enough support to succeed.
1
What about Congress ? A party can get a majority of the 435 seats but get less votes than the other party overall. Does that mean you get rid of Congressional seats ?
Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election so per "democratic standards" she should have won the office. However, of the people who voted for president, more of them voted for someone other than HRC so per the numbers this means that a minority of voters would have chosen the nation's leader in a system of popular vote. In the hypothetical case of three candidates for president, where two get 32% of the popular vote and one gets 36%, do we really think that "democracy" is served by giving the Presidency to the winner of plurality? This is clearly minority rule.
Winning the Electoral College requires getting a majority of the EC votes.
We no not live in the democracy called America, we live in the republic called the United States.
3
"of the people who voted for president, more of them voted for someone other than HRC"
True, roughly 70.4 million people voted for someone other than HRC. And 72.3 million voted for someone other than 45. So what is your point, exactly?
4
The Presidency is the ONE, the ONE, office that ostensibly represent the nation. Why should there be a regional over-weighting for the only national office?
On top of that, the Electoral College was developed at a time when the only voters were basically white, male, landowners; women were disenfranchised and slaves were weighed as 3/5th of a vote as a nod to slaveholders. This is the origin of the Electoral College. Time to do away with inherently unfair systems.
7
Does the president represent the people or the states?
Is it truly fair that a vote from Wyoming counts as much as 33 votes from California? The interests of states with fewer people are already well-protected in the Senate.
The Electoral College is a holdover from a time when not even senators were elected by popular vote.
The presidential election is our only nation-wide election. The president and his back-up are our only nationally elected representatives. So does the president represent the people or the states?
In a national popular election every vote would carry equal value and every voter would count equally.
4
@Bill
The President represents the country. Not the states. Not the individual voters.
The president is elected by the states. The original and existing precept is: the states combined themselves to become a union. That union of states, not people, would have a president to execute the laws made by Congress.
We're a democracy. Votes represent individuals as in "an individual's right to vote." But here in Oklahoma, we are so completely RED that my vote is a tiny flatulent event in the Oklahoma wind! I go out and vote in a dedicated manner every time - - knowing that it is a wisp, a fleeting moment, that has no meaning or existence in the universe! That's extremely frustrating.
How many voters don't vote simply because they know that the Electoral College swallows up their votes if they vote on the "wrong" side - - so why bother? In a truly democratic national vote election, the notion - - and I do mean notion - - that "every vote counts" would suddenly be true!!! I'm betting participation would skyrocket.
5
The "genius of the framers" line is bogus: The framers imagined each elector would think and make an independent decision.
Winner-take-all states were not envisioned by our framers, and only came up decades later by states trying to make themselves more critical to the election.
Anyone who cites the "genius of the founders" to defend the electoral college is either disingenuous or needs to study their country's history a little closer.
4
Recent demographic patterns have made the EC selection of president a partisan issue, as it consistently overvalues votes cast for one party and undervalues votes cast for the other. But the problem is deeper than partisan politics. The EC disenfranchises not only the Dem majority, but all voters who reside in states that are reliably red or reliably blue. This means that swing-state residents -- fewer than one in five Americans -- select the U.S. president; the rest of us are merely spectators.
3
We wouldn't have the United States without the Electoral College. The EC made sure large, populous states wouldn't dominate small states. If we used the popular vote the "flyover" part of the country wouldn't have much of a say in the nations politics.
Keep the EC. It works.
4
An interesting angle on this story might be found in answering the question: Of the Democratic nominees who are members of Congress, what has been their record on this issue prior to announcing?
Yes, but fixing the Electoral College is not enough.
The U.S. Senate also needs fixing.
The top ten U.S. States hold 50% of the national population.
That means that one half of the country gets 20 votes in the Senate, while the other half of the country gets 80 votes.
That's why we don't have national health care.
That's why we don't have gun control.
That's why we are doomed by climate change.
7
As an outsider looking in it I would argue that it is the Senate (the more powerful half of an alleged equal branch of your government) that is intended to provide protection for low-population states, and that each US citizen should have an equal vote for president. Perhaps the hesitancy to abolish the electoral college is due to the considerable power that successive Congresses have ceded to the president making him the de facto ruler.
1
Small rural states already have an enormous advantage in politics, two U.S. Senators.
5
The popular vote for president is just a straw vote that serves no purpose except to inform state legislators about the popularity of presidential candidates. Now that we have polls, we should take the names of presidential candidates off the ballot. This would prevent the popularity of presidential candidates from influencing the real vote that really counts—the vote for congressional and state representatives and state, county and municipal officials.
This would take much of the money out of politics. Presidential candidates could limit their campaign to an appearance before state legislatures—the bodies that determine who becomes president by instructing their appointed elector how to vote.
Candidates would not have to organize campaign offices in the various states, spend billions on ads and marketing. Instead of thousands of campaign stops, talk show appearances and multiple candidate debates, a candidate could make personal contact with every voter whose opinion counts by making one stop at each of the 50 state capitol buildings. Candidates would need billionaire backers or PACs, just airfare to state capitals.
There would be only 535 ballots to count and no hanging chad fiascos.
1
This makes a lot of sense. In fact the electoral college is exactly what is needed to elect the leader of all the states. The presidency is a special position, as the head of a collection of states, It is not the head of individual voters. A governor, not a president, is the leader of a collection of individual voters. it is the state. That's the legal framework, and the crux of the matter. In our origins, each state had to be asked and convinced to join the federal system. Each state, led by the governor, acts much like an individual. and votes for it's federal leader, the president. Each state has it's own unique set of priorities based on it's resources, strengths, weaknesses, business climate, and culture. The electoral college is a reasonable way to determine which presidential candidate will get that state's "single" vote ( weighted by the electoral college calculations). That's the way it was intended, and the way it should stay.
Mark,
Your view of the states is as antiquated as the EC itself.
They are far from homogeneous in their makeup.
If they were, every statewide election would be won with 100% of the vote.
The EC not only produces a tyranny of the minority over the majority nationally, but within each state as well, with all of its electoral votes going to one candidate.
1
@Jerry Engelbach
Why do you think we should have presidents on the state ballots if the vote they get don't count?
What make you think my view of states is antiquated? Why do you think states or antiquated. The federal government only has powers ceded to them by the states. Only states can amend the Constitution. Only representatives of states can introduce legislation and enact laws.
The majority rules in states.
The purpose of the electoral college was to indirectly elect the president by using wisemen to make the selection. It never had anything to do with rural versus urban. It was to prevent demagogues. Well, in its post 12th amendment iteration it has failed, obviously.
4
Delaware is very small land-wise. Our population is about 967,171 people and we get 3 electoral votes.
Now let's look at California. California has about 39.56 million people and 55 electoral votes.
So what's the big deal? If you do the math, 39,560,00 people (potential voters) divided by 55 electoral votes for California = 719,272.73 In other words, for every 719,272.73 people in California there is 1 electoral vote. If you divide the 967,171 people in Delaware by 3 electoral votes, you find that for every 322,390.33 Delaware people there is 1 electoral vote. Looking at the Electoral College that way, every Delaware voter is worth 2.23 California voters.
Now that should make Delaware people feel better, given our insecurity about being such a small state. But is that really fair? Well, if that doesn't help, you fixate on that .73 of a California voter and the .33 of a Delaware voter. Maybe that will take your mind off of the insanity of the Electoral College.
2
In New York State, the rural counties tend Republican. The big city and its immediate suburbs tend liberal Democrat. Is the author implying that residents of rural New York would prefer to see more power concentrated in NYC? I don't think so.
Interesting that the writer says
It undermines the principle of “one person, one vote,” affirmed in 1964 by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims — a key part of the civil and voting rights revolution of that decade.
So, are we saying that something in the Constitution is unconstitutional? B/c a court 180 years later says so? That's pretty funny.
While I dispute Jamelle's belief that the EC doesn't help rural voters, it's intent (like the Senate) was to ensure small states don't get bulldozed by the large ones. Without the EC, No non-coastal state save Texas and Illinois would be worth a campaign stop or any candidate's attention. So...count me in the EC's camp.
1
Jim,
What is, let us say, "anti-constituional" is the system that allocates all of a state's electoral votes to one candidate.
That was never the intent of the EC. Electors were supposed to be free to make their own choices.
1
@Jim R. You should read some history. The electoral college was produced by an effort to get the slave holding states to agree to come into the union. I am pretty sure that argument is gone.
Getting rid of the electoral college has nothing to do with Trump, is an awful idea that would accomplish the opposite of what the proponents claim, and, thankfully, will not be happening.
3
I favor the electoral college.
And just as important, I dismiss the significance of a disconnect between the popular vote and the electoral college result. Imagine if a 7-game world series resulted in one team winning the world series, but the other team winning the total number of runs.
In such a situation, everyone would rightly say, that the world series is a contest in which winning the required number of games is the key metric, even if one game is won in an incredibly lopsided manner. Winning a single game by 20 runs is not sufficient. You have to be the best team on the majority of days to win the world series.
To be elected president, you must win the contest in enough states to push you over the top. Winning super big in one state doesn't make you President - shouldn't make you President.
We have an unpopular Repiblican President. If the Democratic party offers a centrist candidate, they will earn the vote of most Democrats and many Republicans. But if they propose a radical remake of American society - green new deal, healthcare for all, free college, huge redistributive income policies... such a radical agenda will turn off many voters, scare many voters.
There is not much the Donald Trump could do to make me want to vote for him. But there is quite a bit that the Democrats could do to make me vote for Trump.
3
@Joe W
A more accurate analogy would be the White Sox scoring 15 runs in the first inning, but the Yankees scoring 1 run in each of the next 8 innings. Do the Yankees win the game because they won more innings?
3
@Joe W So, healthcare for all is "radical?" You should know that we are the ONLY industrialized country NOT to offer universal health care for all citizens as a right. It looks as though we are the radicals in this instance.
3
The Electoral College is a powerful and power sustaining constitutional mechanism. It is not driven by slavery which is the trope trotted out to label it ‘racist’ and therefore DOA in a millennial debate. EC was formed when the USA and its Constitution were formed. The USA is NOT a democracy. It is not even purely a democratic Republic. It is a union of state. The states have popular elections of their congressman, senators and governors. But when the States elect a president, they do it as a state , not as a sum of the votes cast in the state mixed with other states.
4
So many interesting angles in this op-ed as well as good points in the comments.
At what point does it just become ridiculous to have a President that has lost by millions of votes....5 million, 10 million, 15 million? With Gore-Bush you could at least argue it was nearly a statistical tie, but when the difference is several million, the President does not represent the voters.
It would also help greatly if a popular vote losing President realizes more voters did not support him, and adjusts as appropriate. Governing from the middle to earn the trust of the other side rather than acting like you actually were the choice of the people would be wise, mature and in the interests of the nation.
3
exactly
Well, democracy is made of people, not land. Therefore, "one people, one vote" is more, not less, democracy.
6
The USA is not a democracy, Nor is Brasil a democracy.
I believe Clinton received more than 50% of the vote in 13 states. She was hardly the people’s choice- more like President of California
5
Clinton won California by something like $4.2 million votes in 2016. Her overall margin in the national popular vote was approximately $3.0 million. Trump therefore “won” 49 states by a more than $1.0 million margin. I for one am not inclined to have the future of this country determined by the state of California and I’m amazed at the foresight of the framers who understood the potential for the narrow interests of one state to overwhelm all of the others.
2
Yes, it is about Democrats always winning every national election, because of New York and California, and never having to abide a defiant Republican President who dares slow the Progressive agenda. Be honest.
6
@C
Fine. Here's honest and coming to you from New York.
It's not about abiding Democrats winning every election and New York and California " never having to abide a defiant Republican President who dares to slow the Progressive agenda."
It's about having a President who represents ALL the of the American PEOPLE, and not just a selected minority who criticize that most basic right granted to us by the U.S. Constitution -- which is namely, the right to dissent.
Those suggesting getting rid of the electoral college live in a fantasy alternative reality, it will never happen under the constitution. The college exists to prevent some states with large populations from controlling the presidency. They could control the house. If you don't like it please move to some other country.
5
The Electoral College is not the problem. The Constitution lets each state send electoral votes proportional to the number of representatives and senators (2) they have. This in my view is hard to argue with, because it supports states' rights.
The problem is that most of the states award the electoral college votes on a winner-take-all basis (Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions, allocating electoral votes on a congressional district basis, with the popular vote winner getting the two votes representing the senators).
I don't like that Trump won, but that's not about Trump in my view. The problem with the winner-take-all allocation is that a vote for an independent candidate is a vote for the opposition. If states allocated by popular vote, Johnson would have won 18 EVs, Stein 6, and Mcmullen 3. Sure, they wouldn't have won, but this is the only way to break the two party system, and if enough people really want the independent candidate, their vote won't be wasted.
Have you guessed why this is a non-starter, then? Because this breaks the two party system.
With the winner-take all allocation, we'll be stuck with marginal candidates who only got to the general election by being either left- or right-wing nutcase enough to get through the primary. Which means we can't get a moderate in the White House.
7
The Electoral College was an outgrowth of slavery. Slave states got credit for the number of slaves in the census for congressional apportionment - but slaves could not vote. In the census of 1790 Connecticut and South Carolina had almost identical populations and the same number of electoral votes. But Connecticut produced almost double the popular vote of South Carolina.
Since slaves could not vote, the electoral college gave power to slave states based on the census but not the number of votes. The 2 Senators was designed to make every state equal. But, the census recognition of slaves as 60% of whites, but they had no vote. Thus, the electoral college gave more power to slave states than the number of voters cast. Hence the fiction of the Electoral College.
7
@Fla Joe,
As Snopes points out, and any reasonable person would agree, slavery was one of many issues that the Founders considered in designing the election process for the President. And probably not the biggest, judging by Alexander Hamilton's well reasoned, forcefully argued support for the EC and the wide range of other concerns:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/11/11/the-electoral-college-and-the-popular-vote/
It is also well worth keeping in mind that the Founders, as they designed the EC, actually had no idea what the Presidency was to become. It was Washington, then Lincoln, then FDR who decided that.
3
"[The electoral college] is a plainly undemocratic institution." Yes, and that was intentional. The United States is not a direct democracy. We are a republic. The Founding Fathers, like the Greeks and Romans before them, saw the dangers of pure democracies - specifically majorities abusing minorities and allowing uninformed citizens to affect public policies. Pure democracy only works at the town level.
4
Even then, most towns have mayors whom they elect and entrust with authorities to govern, budget and select other public servants to official positions. So, even villages are rarely pure democracies. They are just more directly one person, one vote systems.
1
I would really, really like to see the Electoral College magically disappear.
But let us review the processes for amending the Constitution:
Step 1. Either agreed upon wording is adopted by affirmative vote of two-thirds(!) of each house of Congress OR, as has never happened, two-thirds of state legislatures pass resolutions calling on Congress to call a constitutional convention.
Step 2. The amendment as written is approved by three-forths (!) of the states either by state legislatures in each and every approving state or OR by ratifying conventions in each and every approving state. The latter has only happened for the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition.
Let's say that by some spectacular means two thirds of the Senate approves an amendment to change to nationwide popular vote the election of the POTUS and VPOTUS. Looking at a list of US states ranked by population and recognizing that 38 of the 50 are needed to ratify, it becomes clear that many of the smaller states are not those who are even remotely likely to vote to dilute their EC influence. You get to 13 nays pretty fast.
This is why there is a movement for states to pass legislation providing that their EC votes will all go to the winner nationally of the popular vote once the total of EC votes of states so chosing passes the total needed to win the election, or 270 votes. I some possible problems with this. The first that comes to mind is what if states back out and the total in the pact goes under 270.
1
@carol goldstein You should be aware that states could change this system independently. Any state legislature could decide to apportion electoral votes according to the popular vote of that state. Thus, you could have differing fractions. A close popular vote could yield a 50/50 split in electoral votes. A 65/35 split in popular vote would yield a similar split in electoral votes. States have full authority in how electoral votes are apportioned. Some states already apportion electoral votes in this manner.
2
Sorry, Mr. Bouie and Elizabeth Warren, if Hillary had carried PA and Florida you would not be making this argument. This albatross of an argument is due to a loss, not enlightenment about the importance of each vote.
The importance of individual states in a republic outweighs the merits of a straight democracy and popular vote.
8
In other words if you can’t win at the ballot box under the established rules just change the rules to suit your agenda. While we’re at it let’s import millions of new Democratic voters via illegal and legal immigration, let’s establish 2 New Democratic leaning states - PR and DC and then for good measure let’s go ahead and pack the Supreme Court.
The structural bias to rural states is in the Senate. Wyoming has 70 times the voting power of California. If anything, rural states are extremely over-represented in Washington. Since the President is the only elected official to represent all Americans, the one person, one vote rule is the only fair and judicious method of selection. Conservatives can seek comfort in the fact that the Senate (and by extension, the Supreme Court) will forever be far more conservative than the population as a whole.
12
what no one here has even mentioned is that the electoral college was designed so that when someone like trump, a charismatic despot wants to be president the electors were supposed to override the votes of the people and not vote him in as president. However many states passed laws that say the electors have to vote on the majority win in that state, tying the hands of the electors. If this hadn't been done, trump would not be president. Additionally this means that in every state, with a majority wins outcome, democrats don't count in TN and republicans don't count in NY. Thus denying people their vote. Additionally the people who believe that we would be ruled by the coasts are wrong, right now we are ruled by ohio, PA and florida, How is that fair for everyone. Republicans want the electoral college because in racist states they win the whole state, the majority of the country is democratic ruled by a minority party
7
It’s pretty hilarious that Trump’s opinion on the popular vote / electoral college has “all of a sudden” changed. He is so absurdly ridiculous.
3
The EC is working just fine. More elitist talk. You people on the two coasts are so much smarter than everyone else. Thank you for even acknowledging us little people. I don't know how we made it this far without your guidance.
Tell me doesn't the Democratic Party use super delegates to name their candidate? Why not just total the primary votes? Then the candidate with the most votes wins the nomination?
The DNC would really like that idea I bet. Now, what say you oh so much smarter than us....
3
@Haig Pointer
WAIT a minute. What do you mean by: "You people on the two coasts are so much smarter than everyone else. Thank you for even acknowledging us little people."
HAVE YOU LOOKED AT A MAP LATELY?...
New York is on one of those coasts.
@Haig Pointer
We don’t think you’re not smart, we think you’re wrong. !
Let the Dems win the Electoral Vote in 2020 and it will suddenly become a non-issue. Good Lord, three years of this weeping, wailing tantrum.
3
Wait a minute.
The USA us NOT a democracy !
The USA is a republic !
A democracy is 3 wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner, a Republic is a well armed lamb. We are a Republic.
3
"But does anyone really think popular vote losers make better presidents?"
---
That's a fallacious question. It's not about better, it's about righteous and fair.
3
Let's look at the Presidents who lost the popular vote:
1) John Quincy Adams. A short, miserable Presidency that lasted only one term.
2) Rutherford B. Hayes. He had to promise to fulfill the main intent of the actual winner, Samuel Tilden , to end Federal occupation of the South, and not to run for re-election.
3) Benjamin Harrison, grandson of W.H. Noted for being the guy between Grover Cleveland's 2 terms.
4) George W. Bush. Ignored every serious threat of terrorism, instituted a catastrophic tax cut that crashed the economy, started a couple of wars he couldn't finish, and left an annual deficit of $1.4 trillion dollars. Only popular vote loser to get re-elected...so far.
5) Trump. Almost certainly Worst.President.Ever. Hopefully he won't be re-elected.
Now look at who lost after winning the popular vote:
1) Andrew Jackson, Democrat
2) Samuel Tilden, Democrat
3) Grover Cleveland, Democrat
4) Albert Gore, Democrat
5) Hillary Clinton, Democrat.
Only Adams wasn't a Republican. (GOP didn't exist)
After 1988, 2004 was the only time the Republican candidate won the popular vote, losing it in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, and 2016.
Is it any wonder that Republicans are TERRIFIED of a real, fair election where every citizen's vote counts?
It means they LOSE 6 times out of 7!
16
@Dadof2,
Your analysis conveniently ignores that fact that the Democratic Party of Jackson, Tilden, and Cleveland was in fact the Republican Party of today. Quite amazing, since you allude to that party-reversal in explaining Hayes' EC victory.
3
"James Michener, an author ... in 1968, was even blunter. The Electoral College, he wrote, was a “time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation.”'
Look around us: The bomb has already gone off.
Nearly three million votes could not stop the Republicans from abusing the Electoral College to put an unfit candidate into the Oval Office. One of them now promises they’ll have “8 trillion bullets” to keep him in place.
6
Whatever. If liberals suggested this during the two term Obama presidency maybe they'd have a legit point. Now they're just coming off as poor losers.
Clinton lost the race in the Midwest, a region where key states have voted for Dem presidents 5x in a row. The conventional wisdom, including Clinton's campaign, thought she'd win a 6th time in a row. Thus she didn't campaign their vigorously and instead flirted with "expanding the map" to Utah and Texas.
ALl that being said, the Dems are in a decent place to take the WH back in '20. many would even say they're favored. We'll see but throwing out 200 years of precedent because one flawed candidate lost an election is not the way to go. Notice Obama hasn't complained about the electoral college.
1
@Ed
Why, oh why is the default response ALWAYS about Obama and Clinton (who actually won the popular vote by over 3 million in the 2016 election)??
"Conventional wisdom" would only go to show that this president only won by the Electoral College and a MINORITY of the American electorate.
By the way.
Obama didn't have to complain about the Electoral College -- because he won two terms hands down.
2
The contempt that the author and commenters here show for “the fly-over” states clearly demonstrate why the Founders correctly anticipated the need for the College. Simply put, no few states regardless of population should control the fate of our country.
4
@LTJ Thank you for making my point! Why indeed should the residents of but a small handful of states choose the president for the whole country? But that is precisely what the EC does: the 18 percent of voters who live in swing states have a say in presidential elections; the 82 percent that constitute of the rest of us do not.
And what is it with conservatives’ obsession about this term “fly-over” -- sneer quotes theirs? It is not a term that I or more liberal friends ever use, nor is it one I see used in posts by liberals. Why do conservatives keep quoting themselves?
2
Less populated states already have a permanent advantage in the Senate.
It's all about Republican hatred for democracy. Conservatives never wanted it, which was why we had to allow their slaves to count for voting purposes and had the stupidly undemocratic electoral college. Conservatives want to be ruled by aristocrats who inherit their wealth and position. Being born with something is always better than earning it to conservatives.
4
I assume that all these numbers are based on a 50% turn of eligible voters. What would happen if we had close to a 90% turnout. Elections on a Holiday or the weekend!!!
I grew up in Africa where in the 60's the chant was "one man one vote", It was based on our belief of what democracy stood for in the beacon of the free world the USA. It took me coming here and finding out it was a farce and it was an Electoral College that elected the president. Feels very much like the systems back home that gave power to the white minority. We need the people of the USA to elect the President, so then we don't get 30% of the country running the ship!
6
The electoral system worked admirably because it kept a corrupt machine politician like Hillary Clinton out of office. She was also unhealthy to boot. It never fails to astound me that liberals fail to recognize her corruption. They must really want to destroy this country.
3
Yes, please abolish the EC. While you're at it, Ranked Choice voting for all state wide and federal positions.
2
Fine with EC. Need to grant statehood to PR & DC. We could also have a minimum population threshold, and merge some less populous states.
1
What's really nuts is that the electoral college doesn't account for the fact that every state is actually purple. No matter what state you live in, the electoral college is either over-counting or under-counting your vote.
3
Popular vote loser make better President? Absolutely! Bush as compared to Gore - even Dems were thankful we didn’t have Gore to lead us through 9/11. Trump as compared to Clinton - no doubt about it.
1
@William,
I know of no Democrats who were glad Gore lost.
Please tell me who you think they were.
Indeed, the Electoral College is a nuisance that runs counter to democracy. Always has...and always will. Why should voters bother to vote when they know their passion and effort to contribute is for nigh? Make it simple, let the one who wins the popular vote win. It is high time to retire an anti-democratic residue of a 'white aristocracy' afraid to trust the people, always trying to keep the power to decide by themselves if the result is not to their liking. Can't we see this is a sick joke...at our expense? I can only imagine the bonanza of these United States, and the world, if rational Gore would have become president in 2000 (majority vote, mind you), avoiding the Bush-Cheney stupidity of invading Irak under false pretense, and also delaying sensible measures to give renewable energy sources a chance, and be well ahead in preventing the worst effects of climate warming already in our midst? Now, do we have the 'will' to change for the better?
7
the EC supposedly protects us from the tyranny of the majority. instead, we suffer the tyranny of the minority. in 250 or less, why is this better? no Bible quotes, please.
6
Texas: Help us get rid of the Electoral College!
All you have to do is vote blue in the next presidential election. If the Dems start every cycle with your votes in the bag, Republicans will demand democratic elections.
3
Hats off to the photographer who took the photo of the polling station. An amazingly evocative rural image.
1
PIpe dreaming by Dems who have no appreciation for the ingrained interests that will fight tooth and nail to preserve the EC. Nice topic for high school debate, but pigs will fly first.
2
We live in a federal republic.
3
@Dady
Correction. We live in a Feral Republic.
America - not a democracy. It's that simple. And really quite pathetic, in the truest meaning of that word.
1
Anything that gets rid of Republicans should be implemented. And, yes, we can probably say that Gore would have been better than Bush, and a potted plant would have been better than Trump.
5
Of course nyt misses the point.
The electoral college helps prevent radicals from getting elected by my making both parties appeal to as many states as possible. It’s that moderation, thru the electoral college, that is yet another genius element in the US Constitution
Democrats are so unhappy they are willing to destroy western civilization
4
I am utterly surprised that the readers of the NYT do not understand that we, and almost no Western country, are pure democratic countries but rather representative democracies.
3
@Dutch,
I'm surprised that you think people don't realize that.
Every democracy is representational. There are no direct democracies anywhere. Such a system would be unwieldy and unworkable.
But this discussion is not about running the country through legislation, but about electing its leaders. And in that regard, the EC of the US is uniquely undemocratic. Every other democracy allows direct election of its highest leaders.
Republicans, who are only interested in the craven accumulation of power, will oppose abolishing the Electoral College until they are forced to deal with the math of a blue Texas.
4
The Electoral College is nothing but vestige of slavery that allows the minority to lord over the majority and subvert democracy. Usually those nations fail.
2
One woman/man, one vote!
5
"But does anyone really think popular vote losers make better presidents?
I am thankful everyday that Hillary is not our President.
3
I for one am sick of senate policy being set by a few over represented people in sparsely populated states. If I recall correctly we are all Americans before we are citizens of a state. That you choose to live in a taker state is on you. You have decided to live in a place that cannot support itself. You may hate the “coastal elites” but you sure do love the money they provide, specially now with the natural disaster occurring in Nebraska. If you hate us so much refuse the FEMA money we provide.
7
When we Make the president a popular vote One,
we will then be susceptible to Great "Elected Talkers "
and will be electing Presidents to get FREE this & that.
Venezuela Did this, and you see the Result of FREE.
Electing a president other than through a one-person-one-vote process is one of our Constitution's greatest failures.
Yes, certainly, the Electoral College deserves to be tossed into the dumpster. But there is no point in wasting ink on throwing out the Electoral College, because it will never happen. Why? Because there will never be enough votes in Congress or in State legislatures to do it.
Look, we can't even pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Does anyone seriously think that low-population Red States would ever agree to give up the preposterous amount of leverage that the Electoral College gives them? So why isn't The New York Times devoting precious space, instead, to the existential threat to our country and our planet from climate change?
The Founding Fathers didn't think that one day, the Grifters Ol' Party would be able to dumb down public education enough to use the Electoral College to rule the USA by a Plutocracy, held up by overwhelming fake news and election lies.
3
Why can’t we talk about repealing the Reapportionment Act of 1929? It directly affects two branches and seems easier than a constitutional amendment.
1
A few of the Democratic hopefuls are already members of Congress. If they really believe that the Electoral College is so bad, why not introduce a bill to amend the constitution now, rather than promising to do it after the election?
3
Since the United States is not actually a democracy in any case (as this editorial points out, we're a republic), arguments that stand on "every vote must count" are logically far easier to dismiss than to support. The cold hard reality is that in an ocean of over a hundred million votes, nobody's vote counts. We all just want to feel that somebody is listening, and to be on the winning team.
Everybody involved in running a national campaign knows what the rules are and what needs to be done to win. Clinton's team did an unspeakably bad job of the fundamentals, not helped at all by the candidate's own words. Editorials like this, and candidates jumping on the "amend the Constitution" bandwagon, come across as a big pile of sour grapes.
The only pressing current issue I consider worthy of amending the Constitution over is to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. It is a travesty that so many column inches are being spent on cul-de-sac ideas while the ERA languishes.
Finally, the states matter and state governance matters. Good government is local government. The federal government should fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities, plus the things that states (under the guidance of the Federal judiciary) cannot handle for themselves. It's not a question of how much the Federal government can take on before it ceases to function effectively, but rather how much the states should be doing far more efficiently.
3
Charles,
If the states were left on their own to pursue "good governance," the country would still have slavery.
There is no principle that local is better than national. It depends on the issues.
1
Sorry, but there's nothing specific to the US or to present times, in the resurgence of the cities. Empires eventually become too large and unsustainable compared to their more nimble competitors, so they break up into City States and leave the rural areas behind, largely unpopulated and uncivilized.
3
You will never see the end of the electoral college until a Republican wins the popular vote but loses the election.
11
@Matt
At which point the Democrats will smile like Cheshire cats and abruptly change the subject. "Never mind!", they will say. "We had a lot of crazy ideas back in 2018, what with all those new Congresswomen, but we're over that now, thank God".
1
The Electoral College was devised as a means of gathering the preferences of all the states at the time the Constitution was written. Election information was sent by courier on horseback to a central location, Philadelphia or Washington, so that the people would know who was elected by each region, or state. There was, at the time, a reason that elections are held in early November, the Electoral College meets in mid-December, and the inauguration is held in late January: It ensured everyone was informed in a timely manner of the results and of the need to plan a move to the Capital for an inauguration ceremony.
The communications and transportation systems of the 19th Century greatly improved the wait time for election results: Telegraph, train, paved roads brought people in touch within hours or days, not weeks. But the Electoral College remained, so that, if a "snake" received the majority of popular votes, the final count could be adjusted by moral men--by "representatives," the Electoral College, who could override the peoples' choice. Moral men!
Why, in the 21st Century, are we still using a horse and courier approach to disseminating election results to Congress and to the people across 50 states and 7 territories? Isn't 5G fast enough for you? We know the people's choice---instantly!
4
@ultimateliberal,
At the onset of the EC, no candidate "won each state."
The electors were free to cast their vote for either candidiate.
1
Alexander Hamilton was one of the primary architects of the Electoral College and he admitted that he thought the election of a President was far too important to be left up to “the people”. Wasn’t that in the musical? I don’t know, I didn’t have an extra $800.00 to see the show myself.
5
@Cold Eyei,
Precisely! Alexander Hamilton was perhaps the foremost proponent and supporter of the Electoral College:
https://www.salon.com/2016/12/11/alexander-hamilton-explains-the-electoral-college-a-way-of-opposing-cabal-intrigue-and-corruption/
1
I believe we know this isn't going to happen, under any circumstances. Given all the other important issues facing us today, why are we spending time on a non-starter like this one?
1
It seems self-evident that a discrepancy between the popular and electoral vote generates persistent and serious strife in this country. Also, are governors, mayors, senators or representatives selected by an electoral college mechanism? No, because it's complex, divisive and idiotic.
7
this is so simple. Where else in the country are there elections that people win w/o getting the most votes. Keep up the good work Mr. Bouie!
4
Every tin pot dictatorship....
Republicans have stolen presidential elections in 2000 and 2016 by gaming the Electoral College so they will fight to keep it until Democrats return that favor and steal an election at which point the GOP will scream bloody murder. But either way the process for dumping the college is almost impossible so we're stuck with it at least thru the end of this century if not alot longer.
2
My vote here in Ct. counts for a big fat 0 using primaries and the electoral votes.
2
The Electoral College is the American equivalent of the powdered wigs British barristers and judges still wear, for no apparent reason other than that they're a quaint old tradition from the eighteenth century. They may be risible, but they're harmless.
The Electoral College is far from harmless. It's based on an eighteenth-century model of the United States, when people spent their entire lives in one state, and most Americans were farmers. As if there were no Conservatives in California, nor Liberals in Wyoming!
The Electoral College belongs in a museum, along with all the other artifacts of its time. It's as obsolete as flintlock muskets, as silly as powdered wigs, as dangerous as medical bloodletting, and as indefensible as slavery.
3
The Democrats loved the Electoral College until about 10:30 pm on November 8, 2016. That was when it began to become clear that Trump was going to win the election. Until that moment, the Democrats had embraced the Electoral College as a tool for winning Presidential elections. The "Blue Wall" of the Electoral College was seen as a way to blunt the presidential election power of the faster growing red states.
Now all of that thinking is suddenly moot to Democrats. But is it? The red states are still growing as people flee the aging industrial blue states. White Evangelicals in the South have huge families. If those folks start turning out in higher numbers, Democrats would be happy to have the Electoral College acting as a "Blue Wall" again.
4
@Brooklyn,
That makes no sense. How could the Democrats count on the EC to "blunt" the red states, when the EC so obviously favors the red?
Nor have Democrats ever "embraced" the EC. They tolerated it, just like everyone else.
I don't see a huge groundswell of Democrats advocating for its repeal, either. There are a few sane voices, that's all.
1
@Brooklyn Rube
Talk about alternate reality.
Democrats have no problem with the Electoral College until it's the ONLY parameter used to gauge the voice of all the American PEOPLE -- that includes being the country being subject to a one-party Republican control of all three branches of government; which by the way is the reason why Democrats are now back in control of the House.
The Founding Fathers were onto something with the U.S. Constitution and our 'checks and balances system'.....READ ABOUT IT.
The machinations of the Electoral College are an insult to the definition of democracy.
2
The average American does not understand how the electoral college works. When I learned about it in tenth grade at age 15, I knew it was wrong. It is pathetic that we still use it.
2
The utter ignorance of the constitutional structure of our republic is breath taking. This entire argument is either a smokescreen for those convinced they can't beat Trump or just filling airtime so as not to let the candidate's say something even stupider. talk about telling the big lie often enough.
3
Is this the new America? If you get beat, change the rules? What is next, a change to 2 senators per state? This is the UNITED states of American. If the small states are minimalized and have little or no say in the direction of the nation...why be united? Several designs in our system are there to keep the big dog from killing the little dog. I don't think our system is so bad that we need to reconfigure it every time someone has a new victory strategy . Some things can come back to bite you very quickly, like the 2013 Senate rule changes.
5
It is not going to happen so why keep beating this drum? The middle states are going to let their power go to the coastal states? You need a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. The same country that could not pass The Equal Rights Amendment where females in the majority of the population? Why not save the newsprint for when they make pigs fly?
If the electoral college was designed to prevent our having incompetent fools as president, how did it work with Bush and Trump? Not so well. There’s your evidence. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Americans love to do the same stupid things over and over again expecting different result. Idiotic.
3
@Woman of a Certain Age
It kept Hillary out of office, so we'll call it even.
3
Shutting down the Electoral College would take away the voice of over half of citizens. We would be ruled by the East and West coast rich people. They are ruling enough already.
1
@R. Kenny,
There is a serious flaw in your math.
Since fewer than 50% of the vote went to Trump, eliminating the EC would not take away the voice of "over half the citizens."
And, in fact, the EC victory for Trump took away the voice of 60% of the citizens.
Why doesn't that concern you?
Amending the Constitution has become almost impossible. There is a better way to bring democracy to American Presidential elections. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a campaign to get states to pass laws that would commit them to awarding their electoral votes to whomever wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of the results in the Electoral College. It would not go into effect until the electoral college votes of the states joining the compact total at least 270. This would insure the winner of the national popular vote would win in the electoral college.
So far 12 states with 181 electoral college votes have joined the compact. If your state is not one of them, write your state representatives urging them to pass the law to join the compact.
ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE!!!
4
You mean the National Conspiracy of Certain States to Collude in an Effort To Undermine The Function of the Electoral College during a National Election?
1
@Cold Eye,
Sorry, but you obviously don't understand the function the Electoral College, as it was originally intended.
The electors were supposed to be free to cast their votes for whomever they wished, not be tied to a winner-take-all system that gave them no discretion.
@Cold Eye - Read the Constitution. It gives each state the right to choose its electors any way it wishes. The Founders realized that conditions may change so they gave the states freedom to change the way the picked their electors.
Then why didn’t Dems propose it before? It will never get passed.
The Electoral College has put the pedal to the metal in establishing our nation's first dictator. A large, racist minority can now destroy civil rights and liberties for the rest of us so that they make keep their "dear leader" in power.
We have seen the damage Trump voters have done to our country, all entirely "legally" under our Constitution. First, this corrupt regime has stacked the Supreme Court with toadies. Then Trump makes hollow promises so that the Court grants him overly expansive powers, because surely Trump won't "abuse" them. We saw this in play when the Court upheld Trump's baseless Muslim ban. This opinion only emboldened him. He next ordered putting Hispanic children in cages.
Now let's apply this Court's submissive posture to the protection of American citizens who are ethnic or religious minorities. Justice Roberts struck down the heart of the Voting Rights act, on simply his naive view that Republicans wouldn't try to strip ethnic minorities of their voting rights. The results? Republicans had a field day in disenfranchising minority voters.
How about free speech? Trump has already proclaimed that the press is an enemy of the state, and that protesters should be stripped of their citizenship. And his adoring fans cheer him on.
The Electoral College needs to go. Trump voters will never change, and there is no reason why their votes should count more than ours. And if their power continues unchecked, this will not end well.
2
The Electoral College has put the pedal to the metal in establishing our nation's first dictator. A large, racist minority can now destroy civil rights and liberties for the rest of us so that they make keep their "dear leader" in power.
We have seen the damage Trump voters have done to our country, all entirely "legally" under our Constitution.
First, this corrupt regime has stacked the Supreme Court with toadies. Then Trump makes hollow promises so that the Court grants him overly expansive powers, because surely Trump won't "abuse" them. We saw this in play when the Court upheld Trump's baseless Muslim ban. This opinion only emboldened him. He next ordered putting Hispanic children in cages.
Now let's apply this Court's submissive posture to the protection of American citizens who are ethnic or religious minorities. Justice Roberts struck down the heart of the Voting Rights act, on simply his naive view that Republicans wouldn't try to strip ethnic minorities of their voting rights. The results? Republicans had a field day in disenfranchising minority voters.
How about free speech? Trump has already proclaimed that the press is an enemy of the state, and that protesters should be stripped of their citizenship. And his adoring fans cheer him on.
The Electoral College needs to go. Trump voters will never change, and there is no reason why their votes should count more than ours. And if their power continues unchecked, this will not end well.
1
If the EC is such a great idea, why do we elect statewide offices by popular vote? Aren’t rural voters “disenfranchised” by the populous cities? Doesn’t seem to be a problem in ALL fifty states, does it?
3
Yes, here in Illinois, we in rural areas say we are disadvantaged by Chicago. We would certainly enjoy a State Senate based on 1 Senator from each county!....County Sovereignty should be respected!!!!!
It's about the tyranny of where DNC Politburo does best--large population centers. Founders saw the future pretty clearly and didn't make it easy on those who wish to change it--why, it seems, the constitution is so despised by the left.
4
By continuing to advocate political positions and policy based on the frustration about the loss of the last presidential election, Democrats look like whiners...A constitutional amendment will not pass and most states will not give up their sovereign power to national interest. Those that do, may likely change their minds if the controlling party in that state determines the Compact doesn't suit their interests....Every Presidential election would have different rules for determing electors based on which party is in control of each state prior to each presidential election.....Very confusing to voters....Very backroom political...Very reactionary. And as Democrat policy, very insulting to voters in small states whose power you wish to dilute...Keep up this promotion and the Democrats will be run out of all of them...... When I see Bernie Sanders agree to reduce Vermont's Senate representation down to one, perhaps I'll believe this isn't all just foolish political whining!
2
Popular vote over Electoral College is really all about Clinton losing the election to Trump because she was obtuse to the working class voters in Industrial states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The last state she didn't even visit once after she won the nomination.
Clinton lost confidence among the working class when she gave 3 talks to Goldman, the icon of Wall Street and of the 2008 financial crisis for $675,000 in private without the media being invited to report. She also lost the vote when instead of empathizing with the harms caused by globalization to the working class in industrial states, she called them "deplorable" instead.
I prefer a system of voting, the Electoral College, where *if you choose to ignore the suffering of the working class in large industrial states you will lose the election.*
I'm sorry that Mr. Bouie and Democrats in general don't agree.
The Democrats have to (re)learn that the country is made up of people in the middle of the country and not just those on the coasts and of the working class and not just those with college degrees. The Electoral College makes anyone who wants to win an election not be able to ignore the suffering of those not living on the coasts.
Democrats: Win the Presidency by paying attention to the feelings of the working class in industrial states in the middle of the country.
Please tell me, what is wrong with that?
7
An unpopular leader is no leader at all. If you failed to win the majority of voters, what claim to legitimacy can you really hold over the hearts and minds of the people?
That’s clearly what we’re seeing with Trump. He didn’t earn it, so people don’t respect him. Bush too- the president who left office with such low approval ratings that he was booed off the White House lawn when Obama was sworn in. We see hashtag notmypresident. We have a large portion of the country who thinks Trump should be impeached (based on no evidence so far). There are states in open rebellion, challenging the Trump administration at every turn. Why? Because for the majority of voters, Trump should not be president. It’s like we have George III back on the throne all over again and no representation.
So whether you benefit from the electoral college or not shouldn’t be the question here. The real question is, how can we possibly still justify the electoral college when it is so demonstrably NOT good for the country?
1
A constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college would require 33 states to approve it. It would be asking a number of states to vote for less power for themselves. All Democrats realize that’s not going to happen. And the courts will block runarounds like state compacts
Requiring electors to vote proportionately might do some good
This is no more than pandering to the superficiality of the electorate.
Democrats would be better off changing their objectives to coincide with the majority of Americans and start nominating electable candidates, but that would be less likely to interest the more vocal and less thoughtful voters.
@Cold Eyei 38 states. It requires 3/4 of the states to ratify a constitutional amendment. But your point stands.
I stand corrected. It’s 2/3 of the Senate I was thinking of
In 1787 our framers created the first representative democracy. It wasn't perfect--it was marked by compromise over a variety of issues, the most potent being slavery. It was flawed by an 18th century frame of reference, which couldn't imagine air travel or large cities, much less television and the Internet. The framers believed the majority of the D.C. population would be their fellow representatives, so they gave D.C. no representation.
For the past 250 years we've been gradually moving toward a more perfect democracy. We enacted direct popular election of senators, then electors, both of which used to be chosen by state legislatures. We allowed all white men to vote, regardless of whether they had property. We passed the 14th Amendment granting former slaves the right to vote. Then we gave women the vote.
The Electoral College is a vestige of an 18th century slave-holding society. We need to continue our progress toward a more democratic union by enacting a popular vote.
3
There are a variety of ways to protect the interests of rural voters in presidential elections, some of them at least, without perpetuating a system of government that effectively disenfranchises huge numbers of voters in predominantly urban states. We could, for example, insist that, in order to win eelection, a presidential candidate must win a plurality of all votes and the majority of votes in, say, at least one-third of the states. Reforming the Senate will be a more difficult matter without disbanding it and replacing it with a more generally democratic institution but there are models around the world which might, at least in part, be emulated. For the time being, even as the GOP recedes to become a fringe party in the rural and remote parts of the country, no progress will be made because the very system which cries out for reform is tyhe one which allows Republicans to throttle any effort to change things for the better. Lindsay Graham and Marco Rubio's touching devotion to the current electoral system is akin to the GOP's devotion to balanced budgets, small government and federalism: something to be gleefully cast to the wind when no longer politically expedient.
1
The popular vote totals in the past don't include votes that aren't counted because they don't have an impact on the local or state elections. Many absentee and military ballots are not counted in some places, since they don't change the local result. That and the ability to hide errors or make 'adjustments' in the numbers in lots of out-of-the-way places that can add up to changing the result of a close national election. Until we do a better job of securing the totals from fraud and transcription errors and making sure we count all the ballots, it's not a good idea to go to a national popular vote method of electing a president.
It’s called a general election, not a by state election.
2
Two points about the electoral college. First, the founding fathers felt that unqualified/unethical candidates and tyrants would manipulate the citizenry and win the presidential election. To put it bluntly, they felt that citizens were too gullible to directly select the president. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 68, said;
"A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations."
(I doubt Donald Trump knows this, but the electoral college was intended to keep someone like him from becoming president.)
Second, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the popular vote winner in each state would win ALL the electors of that state. But with the exception of Maine and Nebraska (and then only one elector each), a candidate who gets the most votes in a state, even if by 1 vote, gets all the electors of that state. If electors were proportioned to the vote in each state, the call to abolish the electoral college would be greatly reduced.
6
This will mean no need so much for party delegates. Let’s see how well that goes over.
1
Small states already have wildly disproportionate representation in the Senate. For example, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and the Dakotas have a lower combined population than California but six times as many Senators. Time to get rid of the Electoral College. The will of the people should matter more than the will of States when it comes to the Presidency.
4
@Rich Casagrande
Interesting that you don't mention Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, Rhode Island, or Hawaii-small states that lean Democratic.
It makes one believe that the issue is not so so much small states as states that lean Republican.
3
Ever since living as an exchange student in the US in 1989 I have failed to understand why there isn‘t much more of an uproar against this utterly unjust and undemocratic system of the Electoral College by the citizens of the United States themselves.
Not only do they suffer from having a plainly undemocratically elected president but the rest of the world is made to suffer for it, too.
9
i never understood what the electoral college system was .until the Gore /Bush debacle. now i see that a vote in south Dakota is equal to 30 votes in California. that's not democracy
5
The truth is, that the electoral college is totally outdated in this country with 330 million people. We do have the other problem, in that we don't necessarily get really good candidates for office, in my opinion, regardless of whether the popular vote, or the electoral college, elects our President. Since 2000, there has been more death, in the millions, more refugees, in the millions, most of whom were left on the doorsteps of western Europe, and trillions spent, with nothing to show for it in policy for those in the middle east. Voting for any of those who have held the job since 2000, including Bush, Obama, and Trump, has been disastrous for the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, etc. We haven't even talked about our debt of $22 trillion, and the over $1 trillion that will be spent this year, more than the revenue our government will collect this year. It won't be talked about by either DT, this President, or any of those who have already announced they are potential candidates to run on the Democratic ticket. A good future for this country, think again?!
1
This is called the United States for a reason. States are actual things, you know. Without the electoral college there would never have been a union. The popular vote is an interesting metric to observe, but to try to use it to claim who "should" have won is ridiculous. That is changing the rules of the game after its been played. Without the Electoral College the candidates likely would have run different campaigns. In fact, without the EC we might have had different candidates.
1
It's pretty clear that current Republicans will never go for this, as they are the ones winning the White House with a minority of voters. Although you make a great case, no amount of reason will change minds. It's all a big them-or-us power grab now, but maybe in another hundred years...
3
How is it fair that some states have one elector for every 143,000 people and others have one for every 500,000 people? If the Electoral College was abolished, then all votes would count equally, and voting would increase everywhere. There would be no safe states, and politicians would be forced to go anywhere they could find votes. However, the Electoral College will never be abolished because less-populated states will never give up their unfair advantages.
2
The genius of our system of government lies not with the electoral college, but with our checks and balances among elected officials. Those who say that the rights of low population states need to be protected by the electoral college are forgetting that those states are granted equal weight already in the Senate - Wyoming and California both get two Senators. No one state has an advantage. As an aside it makes absolutely no sense that in this day in age the Senate and House races are determined by popular vote, but presidential races use the electoral college. The electoral college, combined with the Senate, actually lets low-population states double-dip in terms of influence in our Federal government.
2
I am for the Electoral College. This is despite 2 elections in the last few years that have been unsatisfactory.
I do not wish someone popular only to get elected.
I believe there are more Democratic voters than Republicans.
Just sheer numbers should not be the basis of Presidential elections. This is the equivalent of Gerrymandering.
I am a lifelong D. I want the Republicans to put forth good candidates so there is a choice.
1
The whole premise of an election is that the candidate with the most support should win. When a candidate with less total votes can be named the "winner" because of a fluke in the way those votes are distributed, something is fundamentally wrong. Defenders of the Electoral College express the fear that eliminating it would cause less populous, rural states to be ignored and lose their influence. But WITH the Electoral College those small, rural states actually wield TOO MUCH influence, with every vote from those states carrying much more weight than a vote from one of the most populous states. And with modern communications and television coverage, no area of the country should really fear being ignored.
Election by national popular vote is the way to ensure that each voter's choice has equal impact.
3
It’s not a fluke. It’s in the constitution
1
@Cold Eyei
It causes fluke results! Twice in our last presidential elections.
@Debra Petersen
Obviously I meant to say twice in our last FIVE presidential elections. Just typed too fast.
The writer talks about instances where the popular vote loser won the Presidency, and why that is a problem. The flaw is that we don't know in any of our past elections who would have won the popular vote if that had actually been the pre-determined measure of victory. Perhaps, if the popular vote had been the determinant of victory in the last election, Trump would have campaigned e.g. in California and done much better there (or Republicans in California would have bothered to show up at the polls in greater numbers). The writer's lament is like complaining that the team that gained the most yards in the football game did not win. But perhaps if "winning" had been defined before the game as gaining the most yards, the teams would have put their energy into that, rather than scoring the most points, and the yards gained by each team would have been completely different from what actually happened.
4
A strictly popular vote would probably elect Kim Kardashian. She’s not that far away from Trump anyway
Let’s open this Pandora’s box and take it to the next level. Why continue to have the sovereign states? Why not do away with state governments and just have one national government with no state laws, only National laws? California and New York would have the same laws as Texas, Wyoming and South Carolina. Sorry! It wouldn’t work today or in the 232 years since the Constitution was ratified.
The genius of the founding fathers, including the aforementioned James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, is that they realized this was and would continue to be a nation of many diverse points of view wherein compromise would be required if there were to be one United States. And the system of government they founded has stood the test of time and will continue to do so. The Electoral College, which is designed to elect the only two people elected nationally by the people, ensures that all regional concerns are taken into account during Presidential campaigns and not just those of the coasts.
7
Rural states with under one million people, have two Senators, to really over represent their state, compared to say California, with close to 40 million people, and still only has two Senators. Smaller states are over franchised in the Senate, yet there are few voices trying to change Senate representation.
The Electoral College is a gerrymandering of the Presidential election, where votes in small rural states, are given a much higher weighting than just one person, one vote.
If the Electoral College was biased towards Democrats, there would be so much noise and complaints from Republicans about how it was undemocratic. Republicans have only won the popular vote for President once since 1988, in 2004. No wonder they want to continue this anachronistic relic from the past, that gives them a head start before a vote is cast for President.
16
I absolutely do not want to eliminate the Electoral College. I also believe that if the Democrats had the advantage in the Electoral College, a column like this would never see the light of day in the NY Times (I'm a long-time subscriber by the way).
Having said that, this is the second of Mr. Bouie's columns on the subject that I have read. Both times, I began reading with the assumption that I could not be persuaded, that I knew what Mr. Bouie would tell me even without reading the column. Both times, I was wrong. He hasn't changed my mind, but both columns were very persuasive and made me think.
I will say this, though. Trump won by playing the game that was there - the Electoral College. He played it better than Hillary. If the game were different, with different rules, he would have played the game differently. The Dems need to know that if a popular vote was instituted, and the Republicans played by those new rules, the Dems might not necessarily come out on top. If you accept Mr. Bouie's arguments, you can't deny that potential outcome.
8
The problem with the Electoral College isn't the College itself. It's the fact that 48 states have a winner-take-all allocation of electoral college votes. The state's winner gets them all, whether (s)he won by 0.1% or 50%.
Maine and Nebraska have a better system. Each Congressional district gets their own Electoral College vote and two are awarded to the statewide winner.
The Maine/Nebraska system is closer to the popular vote, but rewards Gerrymandering. Apportioning all of the Electors based on the statewide vote would be better.
And none of this requires amending the US Constitution.
8
Marco Rubio says that the Electoral College "makes sure interests of less populated areas aren’t ignored at the expense of densely populated areas.”
Translation: The Electoral College makes sure the will of the few can outweigh the will of the many.
That's NOT democracy, Mr. Rubio.
13
The value of the EC should be evaluated by its results in achieving the desired outcome. Most agree that the EC in its present form is not truly representative since it allows a minority to elect POTUS, a tyranny by the minority.
The EC is the total of a state’s Senators & Representatives (limited at 435 by Congress in 1929) & each state determines how its Electors will be assigned (most use “winner takes all”. A Constitutional amendment to abolish/change the EC has little chance of success, & legislation on the Rep limit (is a Rep really able to effectively represent nearly 700k citizens?) & state allocation of electors a slightly higher chance. All depend on winning elections; 2018 was a beginning, 2020 is even more important.
If the planet survives, we will still probably be talking about this issue many years in the future. Educating red state voters is a generational undertaking to overcome the cultural myopia of voting against themselves. Younger red voters may be more open to change especially if facilitated by economic crisis. However, IMHO, change will most likely be effected as blue voters migrate to red states to escape urban congestion & high costs, and return to the land to start new businesses & eventually industries, and vote blue. If only the corporations & the rich do not buy up all of the land & resources in the meantime.
The electoral college was designed by the Founding Fathers to favor the elite over the mob with a 3-level system—electors chosen by state legislatures, chosen by white male property owners. The U.S. is a Constitutional republic not a democracy, and rural states can block any amendment on the electoral college—waste of time. If the Democratic Party proposes investing in green infrastructure in rural areas providing jobs with good wages, reviving schools and hospitals, curbing big pharma to end the opioid epidemic, while fighting for urban minority and women’s rights, they can peel off enough rural voters to form an FDR-like urban-rural progressive alliance that can win in spite of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the electoral college.
1
I am the oft-cited heartland voter from flyover country who is supposedly at risk of disenfranchisement from so-called coastal elites.
The reality? My vote for president hasn’t counted since I moved to Missouri. And I’m far from alone. Just as there are plenty of Republican voters in California, there are plenty of progressives in the Midwest.
It’s time to stop the rhetoric and let every vote have equal weight. We have geographically based representation in Congress. The President is supposed to represent us all, not as residents of specific states or acres, but as equal members of one country.
4
Wyoming has four times the voting power of California, despite California being the world's fifth largest economy by GDP. Why should a state with more cattle than people be afforded more representation than the economic engine of the country? This is fundamentally undemocratic.
20
@MK
So if you have more wealth as a state you should have more power? Does that work at a personal level as well ? Should Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates have their votes count more then my friends are teachers and policemen ?
Stay with the EC. There was no need to dismantle it when Obama won.
4
@Norville T. Johnson, I am currently residing in Michigan. I have lived in 4 other states in my life. I'm still the same person. Why should my voting power change when I move from one state to another? No one is "forcing me" to live anywhere. Let's get rid of the EC and have a national election without state borders. We are, after all, the "united" States, right?
12
@Norville T. Johnson I think you have fundamentally misunderstood my point. I am not advocating that the wealthiest be given an outsize participation in our democracy. However, if a State is providing most of the tax dollars, most of the jobs and more people than any other state, it should not have less voting power than a state with less than 600,000 residents. That is the point - it is tyranny of the minority as it stands.
3
California could just split into a bunch of states along lines that give each one a liberal majority. How is this any different than separating the Dakotas and Carolinas in order to have more votes in the Senate and the Electoral College? There's an infinite amount of ways to game this type of electoral system. The popular vote is the only one that represents a true democracy and the will of the people.
9
@Fish
So you want mob rules voting system Tyranny of the majority ?
Will you be okay with that if the GOP wins the popular vote after you put this system in place?
Some how I don’t think you do.
1
The Electoral College can not be overturned without a constitutional amendment. But the way electors are chosen can be changed. A winner-take-all system increases the likelihood of an unbalanced result that does not coincide with the popular vote. Could we not assign electors by their congressional districts? This would allow the urban areas of rural states to more heavily weight the results. The Electoral process could then proceed with, for instance, Red Texas including blue Dallas, Austen, etc. (with more congressional districts).
With gerrymandering as it exist right now, that system could be problematic. Still, a Democratic controlled House would probably equal a more balanced EC.
You have an apartment building. There's a vote affecting each apartment. So with a popular vote, a family with three children and in-laws from one apartment will decide what their neighbors must do - even if every apartment is somebody's else life?
6
That’s not how it works in a condo or co-op.
Terrible illustration.
1
The adults in each apartment will vote, not children. Yet Sidney people have as much say so over building policy that effects them as do couples and roommates. Even then the analogy fails. Living spaces do not correlate in any way states. No state is homogenous with a unanimously shared interest. Just another reason why the EC needs to go.
@Topher S,
Homogeneous or not it's THEIR state. As long it's the United STATES of America - it's not for people of California to decide what other people, even with different interests, want for THEIR OWN state. You're right: people in less populated states must have as much say over the country policy that affects them as do people of bigger states.
Our nation's founding fathers never ever considered the EC would result in the election of a man of Trump's poor character as they had more faith in the inherent goodness and thoughtful consideration of the voters.
Boy did they get that wrong in 21st century America.
1
@GTM
Actually, the Founding Fathers had very limited faith in the voters. That is Senators were not directly elected and sat for 6 years whereas Reps, who were directly elected sat for 2.
That is also why they established the Electoral College.
11
They were right not to trust the will of the people in elections. Most people, in those days were illiterate farmers, with a few aristocrats mixed in here and there. They didn’t have the resources to communicate the issues to people. people wouldn’t know what they were voting for, and they would often vote against their own interest.
Now, we have the same problems but for the opposite reason. We have way too much information to process. 50% of the Republican Party thought Obama was a Muslim. That’s roughly a quarter of the voting public. McDonalds is America’s most popular restaurant, the internet is like a bathroom wall. The media covers the horse race but avoids more than passing reference to issues. People don’t take individual responsibility to stay informed.
The two parties are the entertainment divisions of corporations. Trump the clown keeps us entertained while regulations on corporate responsibility are stripped. Hillary was a political hack and unelectable and the owner of the DNC that corrupted the primaries.
Maybe a race/cultural neutral literacy requirement for all would be a good idea. As it is,we don’t elect presidents, we elect slogans.
An easier fix would be that the electoral college vote had to reflect the popular vote for each state. So if a candidate won 70% of the popular vote he/she would get 70% of the e.c. vote. This way all votes would count without requiring a constitutional amendment which most of us writing responses to this column know that we'll all be dead before this amendment would ever pass.
Another option is to abolish the Reapportionment Act and make the House of representatives more fairly reflect the population of each state. I've read that even though New York's population is still steadily growing they will be losing two Congressmen because another state's population has grown by a larger margin. I find it hard to believe that this is what our founding fathers intended when setting up our style of governing.
4
Actually, elimination of the electoral college would not eliminate the disproportionate power of the less populated states. Each State gets two senators generating disproportionate power to the citizens of the least populated States. The notion that rural America should wield disproportionate power to pick a President is just another Republican power grab.
3
I think it predates the Republican Party.
@John P
No- the Founders feared "...the Tyranny of the Majority..." as much as they feared '...the Tyranny of The man On The White Horse...". Every state got 2 senators so that the big states- then Pennsylvania and Virginia, could not act together to overpower the small states.
I am a Democrat, but I learned this in 5th Grade American History. And in 8th grade and in 11th grade.
What are the public schools teaching these days?
1
Thank you 10,000 times for keeping up the anti electoral college drumbeat. Because of it we've had George Bush and Trump, arguably - maybe not - the two worst presidents in the nation's history. And Trump still has two years to go to do even more damage. I'm sure his strategists are figuring out he can pull off an EC repeat in 2020. Could happen.
3
Any discussion of this issue must, in my opinion, include the words "assuming a 50 percent threshold." that the author states in passing. The electoral college+House of Representatives is a much better system than any system that doesn't require that threshold; do we really want a system where someone with 35% of the vote (and with a proportional system there will be many more candidates!) can be President?
2
@Brian Grady
; do we really want a system where someone with 35% of the vote (and with a proportional system there will be many more candidates!) can be President?
_____
A perfect description of Bill Clinton in 92.
1
@Brian Grady
"do we really want a system where someone with 35% of the vote (and with a proportional system there will be many more candidates!) can be President?"
Ranked choice voting.
It seems clear enough--and it is a system used by most countries around the world: one PERSON, one vote. It wouldn't matter if said PERSON lived in a rural area or a metropolitan area. ONE PERSON ONE VOTE is the only fair and democratic way to elect leaders. And it would probably save millions in campaign donations to be used to better purpose.
7
My Dear Mr Bouie,
I agree with your excellent and thoughtful essay. The problem is that the GOP and its voters are people who are fighting as dirty as they can to protect the irrational gift they were given by the founding fathers. It is called the Electoral College. If it wasn't for that piece of junk, we would be in a much higher level of civilization as a nation. With all the natural resource advantages we had added to the exploitation of slave labor which reduced our national cost of capital for a century we became the richest empire ever.
The Electoral College is there to make sure the distribution of this amazing wealth remains as close to an L-shaped graphic as possible. So far so good! The paymasters called Koch Brothers or Mercer Pere et Fille are rubbing their greedy and sweaty hands with delight.
People like the late Birch Bayh and Elizabeth Warren are brilliant patriots with a strong sense of ethics. They understood and understand the need to eliminate the albatross that weighs on all of us except a few: get rid of the Electoral College, amend the ancient constitution.
But reaction is reaction and reactionaries are reactionaries. James Michener said it well. I appreciate the quote. It is so valid. It will remain so until progressives manage to get the White House and have an absolute majority in both Houses of Congress. It is a slow train, but it is coming.
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@Blunt
They had all the control when Obama was first elected. Why didn’t they address the horrible EC then ? Seems like they only want to change it after the lost.
Can’t win, blame the rules.
1
Both parties ignore the many people in our heartland that may never have rewarding jobs or enough money to weather a personal crisis like hospitalization. Without the electoral college they will not even be a blip on the political radar.
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@Gary: They are ignored NOW. Compare the number of times each candidate in 2016 went to Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania compared to the number of times they went to North Dakota or Wyoming or Hawaii.
The Electoral College forces the candidates to devote most of their attention to the larger states, especially the swing states.
@Gary...with regards to weathering a personal crisis like a hospitalization - which political party has as its goal - alleviating/mitigating this cloud of doom hovering over these heartland voters?
Via the Electoral College they have voting "power" and are not a blip.
To our country's demise, they seemingly remain committed to voting against our collective best interests in choosing the Republican route - which is paved with the stepping stones of dismantling Social Security and Medicare - and oh! no umbrella for that impending hospitalization storm.
But none of that matters, because most likely, their voting bottom line is and will remain -
abortion, guns and immigration.
@Gary
But it’s totally okay to ignore the needs of those who are down and out in urban areas?
Or are they all “Welfare Queens” as Reagan incorrectly named them?
What’s the difference?
Since the popular vote for president is a straw vote that doesn’t count, we should take presidential candidates off the ballot. This would prevent the popularity of presidential candidates from affecting the votes that do count—the vote for congressional, state, county and municipal offices.
This would permit presidents to limit their campaign to appearances before state legislatures.—the bodies that determine who becomes president by instructor electors how to cast their ballots. Instead of spending billions on mass market advertising, a candidate could address every American whose opinions count in 50 stops.
And there would be only 533 presidential ballots to count. There would be no hanging chad nonsense.
4
For the millionth time, we don’t need to abolish the Electoral College. We simply need to pass a law to increase the size of the House of Representatives so that it once again proportionally represents the larger states. That in turn will award more EC electors to the larger states (which are currently under-represented in the EC) and fix the entire problem. All this takes is an act of Congress and a Presidential signature. It could be achieved literally the day that Dems regain Congress and the White House. The House of Representatives has been increased in size more than 20 times in our history. Why are Democrats ignoring this obvious and easy solution?
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@Jim
We don't need a larger House of Representatives and that would not resolve the issue since it is primarily the electoral delegates reflecting the Senate that creates the political imbalance.
However much of the imbalance could be eliminated simply by basing the count on the number of representatives and excluding Senators from the count.
However the small states are unlikely to approve such a move. Further, the large v. small state issue is precisely why we have the compromise of a House based on population and a Senate with equal representation for each state.
4
@Jim, sounds like eliminating the Electoral College would be a much simpler fix.
I believe that presidential elections should be decided on the basis of the popular vote. I would not have a problem if the 10-15 most populous states were given one additional senator. It is absurd that Wyoming and California have an equal number of senators. I also understand the concern that rural voters will be marginalized if the EC was abolished in its entirety.
2
@Jefflike swallowing
Ah, but Jefferson, Madison, Mason, Adams, Washington and a rather large number of other smart folks didn't think it 'absurd' that all states have two senators regardless of population.
So it is hardly 'absurd', whether or not one 'agrees' with it.
1
What stake does a disregarded majority have in a system in which its preferences are overridden by an hostile and antagonistic minority?
The U.S. may be able to coast on inertia and patriotic sentimentality for a little longer, but eventually the disempowered majority is going to reject the whole system if it finds itself permanently locked out of translating popular will into government action. At that point, no reference to the genius of the founding fathers or constitutional order will hold any sway.
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@JSD: "What stake does a disregarded majority have in a system in which its preferences are overridden by an hostile and antagonistic minority?"
Have you asked Senator Schumer if he wants to get rid of the filibuster rule?
3
@JSD
And then the 72% Majority White Voter ruled America with benevolence and generosity.
- The End -
And they lived happily ever after...
1
@JSD
Maybe that's why we'd better hang onto all of those guns.
1
One solution to the problem would be simply to require each state to award its electoral college votes in the same proportion as the actual votes cast, thereby eliminating the current winner-take-all feature that virtually all states use. While this would not be one person one vote, it would be less likely to produce a president who had less votes than his/her opponent. It make campaigning in every state relevant, while at the same time, preserving the slightly greater power given to smaller states. In fact, given that states like California and New York would then split their votes, it would increase the influence of smaller states. It would also mean that Republicans in New York and California and Democrats in Texas and Alabama would no longer be irrelevant. Finally, it would decrease the chance that an election could be swung one way or another by a shift of a small group of voters in a single state.
4
@Paul H. Aloe
I don't know about that. Until the last midterms Republicans have dominated the government of NYS, so I am inclined to think they were hardly irrelevant. If anything, the opposite has been true.
For the first time in years, NY finally has a Democratic state government.
@cl
Yes we do. Now watch the exodus start. First Detroit then eventually NY.
1
The major reason for keeping the electoral college is the possibility for close elections with real or apparent irregularities and vote challenges.
Recall the situation in 2000 Florida elections with "hanging chad" and other issues. The nation was focused on the Florida election returns, a dispute that eventually went to the Supreme Court while America waited and watch.
The electoral system isolated that issue to one state - the winners were clear and uncontested in other states. If a national election were close and had irregularities in any state, it could bring election issues in every state into play. Every challenge across the whole country could become a national issue if the election were in play.
4
@Rocky, electing our president by popular vote would make it less likely that the final result could be manipulated, either by foreign actors or partisan hacks. In 2016 the Kremlin knew that they could concentrate their social media attacks in a handful of swing states. Likewise, those who wish to rig voting software or manipulate registration rolls would only have to target a small number of states.
Contrary to your point, I think if we had a popular vote system in 2000 we would never have gone through the hanging chad scenario in Florida. Gore won by a wide enough margin nationally that a recount wouldn't have been necessary. Only in the rare instances that the popular vote is very close would you have to do recounts in certain districts, and you would probably do that district by district instead of the entire state, with only closely contested districts recounted.
I think a popular vote would have the added advantage of protecting our elections from foreign interference and lessening the chances of statewide recounts. With the Electoral College, we're sitting ducks.
9
@Rocky yes because convenience is more important than democracy. We managed to put a man on the moon but coordinating a nationwide recount is beyond our capability.
1
There is only one good reason for keeping the electoral college, and that is a president could be elected by a plurality of votes rather than a majority. A majority would require that one candidate got more votes than all others combined. This is not likely considering the number of candidates that already crowd the ballot.
The other possibility is electing the president by a plurality, in which the candidate who got the most votes of all those running would win, regardless of the number of votes he or she got. This could mean that a president could be chosen by receiving one more vote than the second-place candidate. This would no doubt lead to endless squabbling and recounts.
Eliminating the electoral college will not squeeze smaller or rural states out of the picture. Presidential campaigns are no longer a matter of a candidate giving a speech from a train stopped in a small town. Television, newspapers and (unfortunately) social media are the methods of getting the message out. Personal rallies are kissy-fests - besides, they are always filmed and put on Youtube.
Where does that leave us? It would help if we stopped the current trend of electing a king rather than the head of the executive branch. But that's even less likely than eliminating the electoral college.
@Michael Walker, we would continue to elect the president by a plurality of votes, as we do now, but it would be nationwide as opposed to statewide. For example, Bill Clinton won both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 1992, but he didn't win a majority of votes.
1
@SandraH.
I fail to see how electing a president by a plurality of votes is superior to the present system. Depending on the number of third party candidates, the ultimate winner could be a decidedly minority candidate.
1
Looking at the map on election night one sees a very large blot of red and scattered blue areas. That gives the impression of right wing dominance of American politics. However, real estate doesn't vote, people vote.
Representing the great plains naturally means representing fewer people. If you, right wing, want more influence in rural areas, why do you promote economic and tax incentives to destroy its family farms and communities ? The great outmigration from the plains is down to your policies. You are using the Electoral College as a crutch, and an anachronistic crutch at that. Then there's...
"His main reservation was slavery and how it made “the right of suffrage” more “diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States.” (Diffusive meaning more widely exercised.)
Interesting how that effect has carried through to this day, only for more of the country.
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@Stevenz
The Electoral College isn't being 'used as a crutch'. It's in place; it always has been, therefore it has always been used.
The Electoral College was put there for a reason. To prevent a handful, geographically speaking, of very large population centers from controlling the entire country. Specifically to the disadvantage of those other areas. History has show over and over again an electorate votes on self-interest, perceived and/or real. And much of that is based upon promises that the elected can't largely guarantee the results. In fact the elected are actually legally protected from these failures.
If anything the States need to get rid of the winner takes all system.
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@Mark, the scenario you describe is what we're taught in high school. It isn't true. When the framers met in Philadelphia to write the Constitution, there was one big question: Would the slave states sign on. Some of those slave states were large and populous, like Virginia. The framers seriously considered--and argued for--a popular vote for president. Ultimately Madison--although he liked the idea--nixed it because he knew that slave states wouldn't ratify the Constitution if a popular vote were included.
The men who wrote the Constitution couldn't even imagine cities large enough to overwhelm the rural vote. America was entirely rural in 1787. Philadelphia had a population of 30,000 and New York City, a population of 25,000. Nobody was afraid of these metropolises.
The concern in the eighteenth century was slave states vs. free states, not city vs. rural areas.
4
@SandraH.
Uhmmm..... The concept of Electoral Colleges were around long before our country was even founded.
@Mark - Actually that’s not fully correct. The Electoral College was put in place as a way to overrule the general population’s choice of President in the event that he is a populist lunatic. And clearly it has shown that it cannot even serve that one basic function.
1
We are a divided country right now. A pact of a simple majority of states would create a lot of animosity in an already divided country. IMO, a constitutional amendment is needed.
A question for Mr. Bouie: Under what terms would a recount be performed? Within 1% of the vote? In all 50 states? Talk about potential chaos. It's resolvable but important.
@David, you're right that it's resolvable. It would be less likely in a national popular vote that a candidate would win with that kind of narrow margin, but we could determine what the margin is. We could also determine orderly rules for a recount, no more chaotic than we have now in individual states.
1
I wonder if the Electoral College opponents have thought through the practical implications. In France, a popular vote system has led to a more-or-less overtly racist party making it into the "finals” two separate times. If not for a runoff requirement, they might have won, altogether. I'm afraid people are so blinded by dislike of Trump that they are not thinking on a practical level.
1
@Mike Livingston
"If not for a runoff requirement, they [France's racists and neofascists] might have won..." Flabbergasting statement:
there IS a runoff built into the French system! And the popular vote buried both LePens (2002 and 2017), didn't it? And in the USA the Electoral College system enabled a Mussolinian to win the Presidency by winning states that have more electoral votes relative to their population than the largest states in the union. This seems to be an unavoidable conclusion for anyone thinking on a practical level
1
@Mike Livingston, do you think our system prevents an overtly racist candidate from winning? I think it makes it more likely.
1
@Mike Livingston
Nah! I just don't like being underrepresented.
A good and thoughtful analysis.
Thanks.
3
The Electoral College IS IN THE CONSTITUTION.
It cannot be "...gotten rid of..." other than by a Constitutional Amendment or a Constitutional Convention.
There will never ever be a succesful Constitutional Amendment to do away with the Electoral College because it could never be ratified by by the necessary number of states. The small population states would lose all their political power without the EC. They will never agree.
A Constitutional Convention, frankly, would be a dangerous thing./ In my view it would more likely lead to the break-up of the country than to reworked Constitution that could be ratified by a significant number of States both Red and Blue.
Opinion pieces like this are a watse of time. Even worse, all they do is rile up the Red-state-istanis. Like we need to rile them more than they already are!
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@Lefthalfbach - I think it's very clear in the article that it would require a constitutional amendment, and the commenters seem to understand that very well.
11
@Lefthalfbach Yes, eliminating the EC would require a constitutional amendment, obviously.
It is true that it is unlikely that the requisite number smaller states would ever agree. When it does come to pass it will likely be through the Interstate National Popular Vote Compact, where the states simply agree to give their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. It would only require states totalling a simple majority of the electoral votes for this to take effect. At that point, once it becomes clear that the EC has become meaningless, an amemdment abolishing it would probably follow after several years.
4
@Lefthalfbach, the constitution can be overridden at the state level. Already many states have passed legislation that basically state that the state's electoral college will automatically deliver all of their votes to the winner of the NATIONAL popular vote in presidential contests. However, in order for this to become law, more states need to adopt similar laws until the total EC vote tally from these states reaches 270. The EC won't be abolished but it will certainly cease to be relevant in future elections should this pass.
4
Considering that the Electoral College was specifically designed to accomodate the slave-holding states, it makes no sense to keep it. Additionally, the Senate is already grossly biased in favor of low populaiton, right wing states, so eliminating the EC will in no way affect the influence of the low-population states. Indeed, ridding ourselves of the antiquated and useless EC will give an extra check on power between the branches. As it is, if an ultra right winger like Trump gains the Presidencey due to the bias of the EC and the Senate also is biased towards the same low-population states, that makes it possible, as currently, for a small minority of ultra right wingers to dominate the political sphere. And we are seeing the danger in that as the right wingers run rough-shod over all the human rights, environmental protections, corporate regulations that we have built up over the last several decades, not to mention the stacking of the Supreme court with ultra right wing religious fanatics via obviously corrupt means.
Dumping the EC is the most obvious and easiest to do, but will not be easy by any means to beat the corrupt repubs at this.
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@Joe Rockbottom
And it will be a lot harder to convince any but the largest states to agree to abandon it. And it takes 3/4 of the states....
Whoever is in the White House....
@Joe Rockbottom
The EC was created in order to convince smaller states to ratify the constitution. Virginia was a slave state and the most populated and powerful. We would still have the EC even if we never had slavery.
1