## For the purposes here, all electoral votes in a given state were awarded to the proper winner, thus attributing faithless electors to the proper candidate. According to Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper Number 68, the body was a compromise at the. Why? But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. It causes some votes to have greater weight than others. It also prevents candidates from going into states where the electorate typically votes for the other party. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, your vote probably doesnt count the way it should. Students, watch the video and read Mr. Wegmans Op-Ed, and then tell us: What does democracy mean to you? And sure, the last two times the Electoral College has awarded the White House to the popular-vote loser, its been to the Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000. The electors can vote their conscience as well, refusing to follow what their state elections guide them to do. In each state, electors meet after the presidential election on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December and cast their votes for president and vice president in separate ballots. In most cases this should prevent the popular vote loser from becoming president. 2016 is on track to be the fifth election in U.S. political history in which the candidate who wins the most votes is not the one elected president -- giving rise to another round of calls to. 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. Americas auto industry auto industry auto industry At least in part because its located mostly in swing states, like Michigan and Ohio, states whose electoral votes he needed to win. The voices of small states, like Rhode Island and Wyoming, would be drowned out. This isnt a partisan issue its a fairness issue. **Here, we treat the District of Columbia as a single congressional district (as the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution does for the purposes of the Electoral College). The primary benefit of the electoral college is that it works to protect the best interests of the minority in every election. Only Rutherford Hayes, with a 3% difference, won the electoral college despite being in the minority. 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/learning/is-the-electoral-college-a-problem-does-it-need-to-be-fixed.html. The only difference is that in this unique structure, the voice of the minority can actually shout down the desires of the majority. This polling reflects why a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College will not pass the U.S. Congress any time soon, nor would it have anywhere near the necessary support in state legislatures. In his recent Op-Ed The Electoral College Will Destroy America, Mr. Wegman provides further evidence to support his claim that the Electoral College is unfair: The Electoral College as it functions today is the most glaring reminder of many that our democracy is not fair, not equal and not representative. 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. When you know that one state will vote the same way in every election, there is no need to visit that place. Is the Electoral College a Problem? It's time to renew your membership and keep access to free CLE, valuable publications and more. 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. Abolishing the Electoral College: Since the year 2000, there have been five presidential elections. For years, a majority of Americans have opposed the Electoral College. Did you know that when Americans vote in the 2020 presidential election, theyre not actually voting for the next president? 3) The Electoral . This shift would likely benefit that party for more than a generation. A lot of people dont even want to talk about changing the Electoral College because of this idea. There are currently 538 electors up for grabs in an election, which means a majority of 270 is necessary to elect the President. Mr. Wegman argues that reforming the Electoral College isnt a partisan issue its a fairness issue. These arent small states. It is the formal body that elects the President and Vice President of the United States. Erdogan's 'polar opposite' wants to replace him as president of Turkey. 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. Its just basic fairness. Still, there would be some major changes to our elections if we abolished the Electoral College. In the ensuing 215 years, the Electoral College system itself has changed little, although the popular vote has been rightfully guaranteed to millions more previously denied on the basis of race, gender and age. Out of those visits, almost 70% of them happened in only four states: North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Two hundred years after James Madisons letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. That probably promotes a more national and less regional vision. The compact requires states to pass laws that would award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally. This is clear in polling on the topic. Redirecting to https://m.startribune.com/one-clear-result-of-the-2020-election-at-last-let-s-abolish-the-electoral-college/. While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. They disagreed so strongly that the final system wasnt adopted until the last minute, thrown together by a few delegates in a side room. But swing states distort our national priorities, even when the president wins the popular vote. 4. TheNational Archives reportsthat over the past 200 years more than 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College without any becoming law. Abolishing the Electoral College seems to be the next logical step in that process. But it's possible the candidate with the most votes from the public won't be the winner. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. If such an amendment were to pass Congress, defeat in the states is likely. The supporters of the NPV are not hiding their goal: They are trying to circumvent the AK constitutional amendment process and manipulate the Electoral College out of existence.11. In each case, the number of faithless electors who exercised that behavior would not have had a meaningful impact on the outcome. # Because the District of Columbia is awarded Electoral College votes under the 23rd Amendment, we include its votes here as if it were a state. As Americans look at their election processes, a complete review of the pros and cons of abolishing the Electoral College is useful when taking this unique structure into account. Every vote would count equally instead. What Is the Electoral College? Not one was a first-rank president, but their selection did not seriously injure the democratic character of our system. Blue states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the red states. It no longer serves the intended job. So overall, while the Electoral College may not make much of a difference to the results of our modern elections, it forces our politicians to have a larger scope of the issues facing this country, rather than just focusing on the concerns people in areas with large populations care about. Despite what you may have learned in school, it was not the product of careful design by brilliant men. When Americans are polled about the Electoral College, most of them say that they want it to disappear. In the 20th century there were 25 presidential elections and none of them resulted in an Electoral College winner who lost the popular vote. 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 the video above, we delve into the reasons people give for keeping the Electoral College and why theyre wrong. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. The Electoral College is not going to be changed, and there are far more urgent and promising topics for reform of our presidential selection system. 2) The Electoral College ensures that different parts of the country, such as Iowa and Ohio, are involved in selecting the president, rather than just the most populated areas. This action would allow the popular vote winner to take the White House. In this case, 19 state legislatures are currently controlled solely by Democrats. Do you agree with him that the winner-take-all system that most states use for the Electoral College is undemocratic and unfair? 7. If the Electoral College was eliminated, the power to elect the President would rest solely in the hands of a few of our largest states and cities, greatly diminishing the voice of smaller populated states. As far as the 2016 election is concerned, Hillary Clinton would still be the likely winner if the Electoral College didn't exist. The issue that could make Joe Biden unelectable is not in his control and is a far greater threat to his re-election than any single policy question. If, say, environmental sustainability or abortion or the Second Amendment is your dominant concern, it does not matter whether you live in Wyoming or California, Pennsylvania or Delaware. It channels presidential politics into a two-party system, which is superior to multiparty systems where fringe factions can exercise too much leverage. Another 15 legislatures with varying degrees of Republican control would also need to ratify such an amendment for the Electoral College to be removed. Here are the yea and the nay. Three happened in the 19th century; none in the 20th century and two in the 21st century. That, critics say, means devaluing the votes of many non-white voters too. James Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, was very disturbed by the state winner-take-all rule, which he considered one of the central flaws of the Electoral College as it took shape in the early 19th century. If this system were to be abolished, then every vote counted would have the exact same weight in the final tally. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. The founders fought like cats and dogs over how the president should be chosen. Do you agree with Mr. Wegman that we should change how the Electoral College works to ensure that the popular vote chooses the president? Still, Levy said if he had to bet on whether the U.S. will still be using the Electoral College in 20 years he thinks it will. If the U.S. were to abolish the electoral college, then the restrictions that territories experience against voting in this election would disappear. A split of electoral votes has occurred once in each of these states. There were two additional votes for Sanders that were invalidated in Minnesota and one for Kasich in Colorado. Without the Electoral College in place, presidential candidates would build platforms that would speak to their base. That line garnered one of her largest roars of applause for the evening. An example of a state closely split by congressional district is Florida in 2016, where Trump won in 14 of them and Clinton won in 13. Who verifies if a candidate is qualified to run for President? 3. And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. Getting rid of the Electoral College would radicalize politics. 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. However, a constitutional amendment is not the only means by which an alternative to the current Electoral College can be implemented. 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. Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992 with only 43% of the vote, and then in 1996 with 49.2%. Instead of a politician trying to appeal to someone with specific needs, the adoption of a general platform that maximizes votes in urban centers would become the emphasis of each party. It would stop the requirement to redistribute the electoral votes. Even when it is against the law for these folks to vote for someone other than what the electoral results in their state indicate, there is always an option to become a faithless elector under the American structure. It doesnt have to be this way. 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. In May, the Washington State Supreme Courtuphelda state election law that said an elector who did not vote for the candidate he pledged to support could be fined up to $1,000 in civil penalties. Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. I wrote a whole book on the subject. Beto O'Rourke Announces His Run For President In 2020, Moderate Democrats Under Pressure As Party's Left Grabs Attention. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does. Take the Electoral College, Americas system for picking the president. [2] The compact would then be 43 Electoral College votes short of going into effect. Why? Does this interactive influence how you feel about the Electoral College? But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states. Think about it. We already see gridlock and partisanship in Congress that limits the opportunities for collaboration. The corrosiveness of this system isnt only a modern concern. Electors manage the needs of the state and community instead of following the will of the general public throughout the country. The threat is the effort to create a so-called . But specifics vary. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. It can be fixed. And the reasons people think we need to keep the Electoral College the way it is, theyre all wrong. Thats when the Founding Fathers crafted a compromise between those who argued for the election of the president by a vote of Congress and the election of the president by a popular vote of qualified citizens. Your membership has expired - last chance for uninterrupted access to free CLE and other benefits. Could Washington administer a national recount in the event of a close result? It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. The framers of the Constitution set up the Electoral College for a number of different reasons. What would happen if the Electoral College was abolished? 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,. This agreement includes several states and DC, giving the electoral vote count assigned to them to the candidate who receives the most votes in the national election. A New Mexico doctor describes the pain and horror of caring for COVID-19 patients. As a result, most are considered safe, that is, comfortably in hand for one party or the other. For example, in 1967, 58 percent favored its abolition, while in 1981, 75 percent of . Despite California having millions of more people living in the state compared to Wyoming, the weight of a vote is 30% less. Why, or why not? Not this year. 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