And while Electoral College winning/popular vote losing presidents are formally and technically legitimate holders of the office, the perception that a broken system is anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian can have wide-reaching, penetrating, long-term consequences for the health of a democracy. But specifics vary. In the first instance, states could decide to award 2 Electoral College votes (EVs) to the winner of the national popular vote (NPV) and the remainder to the winner of the state. So far, 15 states plus the District of Columbia have joined in for a total of 196 electoral votes, just 74 more. The crisis of 1824 then, represented really the collapse of the old system, and an effort to re-institute it in other terms. And thats it. There are currently 538 electors up for grabs in an election, which means a majority of 270 is necessary to elect the President. 3Qs: Should the Electoral College be abolished? - News But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. Abolishing the Electoral College stops swing states from having sway in the election. The group of 16 (as of August 2019) currently control 196 electoral votes together. We need to think hard, and quickly, about how to reform three aspects of the presidential nomination process: the debates, the primary elections and the conventions. As we begin the third decade of the 21st century, change benefits the Democrats. Fully overhauling the way the president is selected would take a Constitutional amendment, which would require the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America. There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. Candidates focus on swing states because they actually have a chance of flipping them and winning a bucket of electoral votes. The electors can vote their conscience as well, refusing to follow what their state elections guide them to do. Mr. Wegman argues that reforming the Electoral College isnt a partisan issue its a fairness issue. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. But it's possible the candidate with the most votes from the public won't be the winner. This process means that each candidate must speak with the entire country instead of visiting the largest cities as a way to solicit for votes. This year is the poster child for the need for reform. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. Today the pact has the support of states and Washington D.C. that total 181 electoral votes, largely those that have gone for Democrats in recent years. The presidential election is held every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Using bots can streamline some law firm work, American Bar Association While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same. And even when that doesn't happen, Wegman sees another problem with the . A second variation would be to award two Electoral College votes from each state to the winner of the national popular vote and award the remaining electors to the winner of each congressional district (CD). But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. Opinion | Will the Economy Make or Break Biden in 2024? Polls conducted by Gallup over the past seven decades, with the most recent being from 2013, clearly show the American public's desire to get rid of the whole system. Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. "How would that work?" Generally, we count on the Republican and Democratic parties to nominate not the best people, but candidates who combine a degree of popular support with the experience and temperament to govern. Two hundred years after James Madisons letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. The interests of the minority would no longer receive protection. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays and appeals to narrow special interests. Nonetheless, it is likely the most viable alternative to the current Electoral College system. #Marianne2024 . In the interactive diagram The Battleground States Biden and Trump Need to Win 270, you are able to build your own coalition of states to see how either candidate, President Trump or former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., can win the election. That means more people can feel like their government accurately represents their needs. This means that every election, 80 percent of American voters, roughly 100 million people, get ignored. 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Plenty. List of the Pros of Abolishing the Electoral College 1. Alexander Hamilton was a significant supporter of the Electoral College. Most Americans, by a wide margin, believe the Electoral College should be abolished. Seventy percent of Americans between the ages of 18-29 said that the president should be chosen through a popular vote model, while just 56 percent of those over the age of 65 agreed. In the video above, we delve into the reasons people give for keeping the Electoral College and why theyre wrong. But get this, the way the Electoral College actually functions today isnt even enshrined in the Constitution. This Student Opinion prompt and a related Lesson of the Day will prepare students to participate in our live panel discussion about the Electoral College, on Oct. 22 at 1 p.m. Eastern. In August, a panel of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appealsruleddifferently in a case raising similar issues. When the Founding Fathers built the idea of the Electoral College into the structure of the American government, their idea of information management was very different than what we have today. It gives a slight edge to candidates with broad-based support in many states over those who rack up huge majorities in just a few large states. Christine Stenglein and Saku Gopinath provided research support for this post. 10. "And places where there are more people become more important when you're counting votes.". Including prescription drug benefits and all seniors at every income level. But they spend almost no time talking about issues that matter to millions of voters elsewhere, like public transportation in New York or climate change in California. But the Constitution and the courts have allowed the states some leeway to make changes to how their Electoral College representatives are chosen. [1] Only when they sign the certificate of ascertainment and the votes are tallied in the United States Congress is the presidential race officially over. The general threshold that an election result must reach to trigger an automatic recount is a difference of 0.5% of the vote or less. A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the senatorial bump giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. But swing states distort our national priorities, even when the president wins the popular vote. But the court has not tackled to what extent states can enforce such a pledge. And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. If such an amendment were to pass Congress, defeat in the states is likely. Thrown together at the last minute by the countrys founders, it almost immediately stopped functioning as they thought it would. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. 5. It's another way the system ensures it's perpetuity. However, a constitutional amendment is not the only means by which an alternative to the current Electoral College can be implemented. Those states do get a boost from their two Senate-based electoral votes, but that benefit pales in comparison to the real culprit: statewide winner-take-all laws. Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board and author of the book Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, explains: American democracy isnt just quirky its also unfair. The primary benefit of the electoral college is that it works to protect the best interests of the minority in every election. Some of the most important framers, including James Madison and James Wilson, wanted to write a direct popular vote into the Constitution. Kitty on Twitter: "RT @Valkary: THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE In part, that is because the Electoral College is constitutionally mandated, and abolishing it would require a constitutional amendment. This process stopped the process that was used in England to select a Prime Minister. 7. However, it is possible to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. Spend some time moving states into the Biden and Trump circles and make notes about what you notice and wonder. LIASSON: It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, so that's not going to happen. In the current Congress, this would require every Democratic House member to vote in favor of such an amendment and be joined by 59 Republicans and every Democratic Senator to be joined by 19 of their Republican colleagues. As the U.S. Government Archives likes to say, the Electoral College is a process, not a place. This structure was placed in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers of the United States as a compromise between having a vote in Congress to elect the President and the election of a candidate by qualified citizens. Polls from FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast have predicted Clinton receiving a majority popular vote of 49.7 percent, with Trump behind at 43.3 percent. Do they outweigh the arguments that Mr. Wegman presents? Five times in our history, presidential candidates who have won more votes than their opponent have still lost the election. Out of those visits, almost 70% of them happened in only four states: North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast have predicted. Because the Electoral College is based on the structure of state populations and representation in the House, some people have a vote that carries more weight per delegate than others. A plan to scrap the Electoral College via constitutional amendment would not pass in the current environment. But heres the important part. 3. Hamilton believed that it would prevent the Office of the President from falling into the lot of a person who was not endowed with the requisite qualifications to serve the American people. After reading the article and watching the video, what questions do you have for Mr. Wegman? Does It Need to Be Fixed? The Electoral College has been the subject of debate since it was first implemented centuries ago, but when George W. Bush won the presidential election in 2000 despite Al Gore winning the popular vote, controversy surrounding the institution rose to a much more intense degree. The political game in the United States would change dramatically without the Electoral College present. That means the major party that can maintain its base could win elections without a clear majority. It's time to abolish the Electoral College - Brookings Would the federal government get into the business of administering the elections, or leave that up to state and local officials, as it does today? Its primary function is to malapportion political power, and it does so indeed, has always done so with strikingly awful. Should we abolish the Electoral College? - Constitution Center Maine Department of Administrative and Financial Services, The Electoral College is a ticking time bomb, Its time to abolish the Electoral College, Two cheers for the Electoral College: Reasons not to abolish it, according to the Congressional Research Service, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/10/21/can-the-electoral-college-be-subverted-by-faithless-electors/, Policy lessonsand surprisesfrom the Reimagine Rural podcast, Justice Thomas, gift reporting rules, and what a Supreme Court code of conduct would and wouldnt accomplish, Why is federal spending so hard to cut? The politicians are tapping into what's become a popular position with many voters, especially Democrats. Based on your understanding, do you believe the Electoral College is democratic? Do you think any of these arguments, or others, are convincing reasons for preserving the Electoral College as it stands now? That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. Support of that magnitude has become rare for anything in a sharply divided United States. First, there's the Constitutional problem. Did you know that when Americans vote in the 2020 presidential election, theyre not actually voting for the next president? "Precisely what it does is proportionately advantages where the people are," Levy said. Some laws simply state that electors must vote for the candidate of the party they represent; others require electors to sign an oath or a pledge. That fall, former Vice President Richard M. Nixon defeated . Social change can seem sudden, as if millions awoke one day to the same realization. Why, or why not? Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representationthe three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromiseand guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. Your membership has expired - last chance for uninterrupted access to free CLE and other benefits. As discussed above, the only practical way of ending the Electoral College is by changing the ways in which states use the popular vote to award electors to the presidential candidates. "There's no realistic chance of a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College," said Jacob Levy, a professor of political theory at McGill University. We will focus on elections in the 20th and 21st centuries. "And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.". It provides for separate votes for president and vice president and specified that those individuals must be from different states. Most people in America want the Electoral College gone, and they want to select a president based on who gets the most votes nationally, polls say. 4. No more Electoral College? Here's how campaigning might change But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. Maintaining the Electoral College may seem like the most politically expedient position for the Republican Party in the short term, but it may cause significant damage in the long term. States have the power to award their electors however they like. Changing or eliminating the Electoral College can be accomplished only by an amendment to the Constitution, which requires the. They do not matter because they have any special civic characteristics. It also stops the distribution process where California gets 55 votes, but a state like Delaware only gets 3. Under the current structure of the United States, there are 50 unique presidential contests instead of one nationwide affair to elect a President. And yet we have generally accepted it for centuries on the assumption it serves an important purpose. The threat is the effort to create a so-called . But as people moved and the economy changed so did that ratio. Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at an organizing event in February. Gronke notes, however, that there would be major administrative challenges if the U.S. ever got to the point of switching to a national popular vote. As the graph below illustrates, over the course of the 20th century the distance between the biggest state by population and the median state increased. Here are the yea and the nay. 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren calls for abolishing the Electoral College and moving to a national popular vote: Every vote matters #WarrenTownHall https://t.co/pPFMVywETf pic.twitter.com/yy0J0HgAjc. Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at an organizing event in February. [1] Over the years some of them, so-called faithless electors, have deviated from this norm but in 29 states and the District of Colombia state laws exist which bind the electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote. What does arthur schlesinger, jr. say would happen if the electoral Of the 700 attempts to fix or abolish the electoral college, this one nearly succeeded In 1969, Congress almost approved a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college,. That means centrist ideas tend to be the ones that receive the most traction instead of the individual priorities of platforms on the extreme left or right. As Madison wrote in an 1823 letter, states using the winner-take-all rule are a string of beads and fail to reflect the true political diversity of their citizens. There are over 300 million people currently residing in the United States, but only 538 people actually get to choose who gets to be the president. Save Our States, The Status of National Popular Vote, https://saveourstates.com/threats/the-status-of-npv (accessed April 17, 2020). Democratic presidential candidates are weighing in too. Then the 2020 census will be valid for the 2024 and 2028 elections. Supporters of a national popular vote argue something must be done; the Electoral College disproportionately inflates the influence of rural areas while undervaluing the votes of cities. The reason we even have swing states is because almost all states award their electoral votes using a winner-take-all system. Abolishing the Electoral College would get rid of this confusing process. But in the end, Republicans and Democrats are virtually tied. In fact, there is already a movement brewing among states to agree to award their electors to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. It's time to renew your membership and keep access to free CLE, valuable publications and more. Thats almost 1.5 billion votes. Remember what we said back in Myth No. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be running against Washington.. It wasnt the first time a president won by losing or the second or even the fourth. In winner-take-all states, all electoral votes cast for the state are assigned to the candidate who gets the most electoral votes. Should We Abolish the Electoral College? | STANFORD magazine This ensures that smaller rural and industrial communities will have their issues addressed by those seeking office. Residents of places like Puerto Rico and Guam would have their votes be counted in the final total, and these locations consistently vote for one party. Electoral college reform: What would happen if Congressional districts Democracy is, at its core, about fair, equal representation one person, one vote. Thanks to the Internet, telephones, email, social media, and every other form of communication that we have today, people can choose for themselves whether a new story has an underlying sinister bias. What happens if a candidate with electoral votes dies or becomes Support for direct popular election. That means there must be a majority of states that agree with a specific candidate instead of allowing the people to decide who they want to have as president. There are also circumstances where a majority of electors might not be available, which would throw the results of the election into the House of Representatives. Most Americans would breathe a sigh of relief, I believe, if we had a system capable of choosing the U.S. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, theyre voting for their states representatives in the Electoral College, who will then vote for the president. Next week five hundred and thirty-eight American citizens will travel to their state capitals and elect the president of the United States. To this day, people are still arguing that Al Gore was the real winner and debating whether the recount in Florida was accurate the state whose electors propelled Bush to the top. There will always be a concern about the tyranny of the majority in the United States. That line garnered one of her largest roars of applause for the evening. However, in the five presidential elections of the 21st century, two ended up with the winner of the popular vote losing the Electoral College. Many of them were unhappy with the results. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. One of the ways that states are considering a way to go around the Electoral College is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. For years, a majority of Americans have opposed the Electoral College. Third, a national election might provide a cure for the delegitimation of presidential authority that has afflicted the last three presidencies. That, critics say, means devaluing the votes of many non-white voters too. RT @Valkary: THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SHOULD BE ABSOLVED AND ABOLISHED. In addition to the NPVIC discussed above, there are two variations on this theme that could reduce the odds that someone could win the presidency without winning the national popular vote. In a polarized political environment, such an institutional structure remains entrenched. The founders fought like cats and dogs over how the president should be chosen. Its how we run every election in the country, except the most important one of all. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., if the Electoral College of the United States was abolished, the collapse of the already weakened two-party political system would be fast tracked; resulting in multiplication of splinter parties. In late September, when the Republican nominee's numbers in the polls saw a significant rise and nearly eliminated Clinton's huge post-convention lead, forecasts still had her snatching the election with 17 more electoral votes than her opponent. How the Electoral College helps preserve our constitutional system. It's just not clear how you could do that.". Majority supports changing Electoral College system for U.S It can be fixed. Is the Electoral College a Problem? Turkey general election 2023 guide: what you need to know | CNN Erdogan's 'polar opposite' wants to replace him as president of Turkey. 3. If you submit a question as a comment on this article, we might use it during the live event. 2. On this date, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College and provide for the direct election of the President using the results of the national popular vote. Its just basic fairness. Think about it. It took time for people to learn what was happening in the nations capital. No amount of campaigning will change that. And the most recent major occasion took place in 1969, 1970, when there was a strong bipartisan effort to abolish the electoral college and have us utilize a national popular vote. Back in 1787, when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were trying to figure out how the President should be chosen, some wanted the Congress to choose, and . Blue states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the red states. These states currently total 196 electoral votes, although after the 2020 census is completed, projections suggest a net loss of two seats, lowering that number to 194. The winner-take-all method is nowhere in the Constitution. Trump made a similar argument earlier this week, warning that "smaller states & then entire Midwest would end up losing all power.". Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But really, scholars say, consensus is constructed through thousands of small acts over generations. Hillary Clinton won. Make sure to update your bookmarks! Under these laws, which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nations early years, even though it was never raised by the framers states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state. /content/aba-cms-dotorg/en/news/abanews/publications/youraba/2019/october-2019/q--the-electoral-college--is-it-open-for-interpretation-by-the-c, Trade, Sports & Professional Associations, Affordable Housing & Community Development Law. Why We Should Abolish the Electoral College - New York Times