what would happen if the electoral college was abolished what would happen if the electoral college was abolished

), and the big state-small state divide no longer animates our politics, if it ever did. As far as the 2016 election is concerned, Hillary Clinton would still be the likely winner if the Electoral College didn't exist. Gronke asks. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It is no secret that the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suffered, from the outset, from efforts to imply that there was something improper and unworthy or even suspicious in their elections. In 1892, the court upheld inMcPherson v. Blackerthat Congress can set the date nationally for the Electoral College to meet, but it also said that the states could determine how electors were apportioned and chosen. We already see gridlock and partisanship in Congress that limits the opportunities for collaboration. So far, 15 states plus the District of Columbia have joined in for a total of 196 electoral votes, just 74 more. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does. It provides for separate votes for president and vice president and specified that those individuals must be from different states. 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). Changing or eliminating the Electoral College can be accomplished only by an amendment to the Constitution, which requires the. 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. Its how we run every election in the country, except the most important one of all. We should be talking about other things. Nonetheless, it is likely the most viable alternative to the current Electoral College system. If this system were to be abolished, then every vote counted would have the exact same weight in the final tally. Its no wonder the candidates fixate on issues that matter to specific groups of voters in swing states, like fracking in Pennsylvania This is my 13th visit. or prescription drug benefits in Florida. Many of them were unhappy with the results. Sticking to the electoral college format allows us to use electors as intended instead of relying on all of the votes counting. If the Electoral College system begins to prevent, on a regular basis, the popular vote winner from becoming president, it will create systemic challenges. Is the Electoral College a Problem? Stanford University. The founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects. RT @Valkary: THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SHOULD BE ABSOLVED AND ABOLISHED. Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. The system calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Article II, section 1 of the Constitution establishes the Electoral College. In this video excerpt from our Oct. 22 panel, Mr. Wegman argues that states should join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a plan to guarantee that the candidate who receives the most popular votes across all 50 states and the District of Columbia wins the presidency. Colin Powell was the primary beneficiary, receiving three votes. The only point in this election where the possibility of either of the candidates losing the popular vote but still claiming an electoral victory was on July 30, when a FiveThirtyEight model showed Clinton clinching the popular vote by less than 1 percent, but still losing to Trump by two electoral votes. Our 230-year-old jerry-built system for picking the president, known as the Electoral College. A plan to scrap the Electoral College via constitutional amendment would not pass in the current environment. This reflects how uncommon it is to reach the Oval Office without winning the popular vote; it has only happened four times in United States history. It creates 50 individual contests. It's another way the system ensures it's perpetuity. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it. So, let me make the case for its abolition and its replacement by a simple national popular vote, to be held in an entity we will call (what the heck) the United States of America. The voices of small states, like Rhode Island and Wyoming, would be drowned out. 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. John Locher/AP While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same. 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. Around six-in-ten U.S. adults (63%) say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency, while 35% favor keeping the current Electoral College system, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. The NPV would effectively abolish the Electoral College and co-opt even those states who did not join the compact into accepting an electoral regime they never agreed to or approved. In fact, there is already a movement brewing among states to agree to award their electors to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. Do you support this movement? 3. Each of those states has Democratic control of the state legislature. Do you think this means the system is broken? Under the current system, voters in each state cast their ballots for electors, of which 270 are necessary to win. The places where there are more people become the top priority, especially if there is a chance to swing some votes. Tell us about it. Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning. The Electoral College website now has an easy-to-remember address. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. The interests of the minority would no longer receive protection. See: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/10/21/can-the-electoral-college-be-subverted-by-faithless-electors/. Throughout our nations history there have been many unwise attempts to abolish the Electoral College, but these proposed constitutional amendments saw little success and unsurprisingly failed to gain traction. In most cases this should prevent the popular vote loser from becoming president. As a result, most are considered safe, that is, comfortably in hand for one party or the other. Who verifies if a candidate is qualified to run for President? Were already letting women, former slaves, and 18-year-olds vote, changing the structure of the election since the countrys founding. A lot of people dont even want to talk about changing the Electoral College because of this idea. 7. Why? Now, Trump feels the Electoral College is "far better for the U.S.A." as he wrote Tuesday on Twitter. Take the Electoral College, Americas system for picking the president. Having the person who loses the popular vote win the presidency will seriously undermine the legitimacy of our elections. 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. In the U.S., 65 percent of adults think whoever wins the popular vote should hold the nation's highest office, according to an Atlantic/PRRI poll last year. LIASSON: It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, so that's not going to happen. It would stop the requirement to redistribute the electoral votes. Then in 2016, Donald Trump won the Electoral College despite receiving 2.1% less of the popular vote. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power - & we cant let that happen. Article V sets up the manner by which an amendment is passed. 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. Paul Krugman, my Opinion colleague, wrote Thursday that "the idea that the economy is going to pose a huge problem for Democrats next year isn't backed by the available data.". Switching to this standard system would not likely create an adverse result. That means more people can feel like their government accurately represents their needs. The reasons for the Electoral College may not be relevant any more. 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. Warren Focuses On Policy, Which Looks Like A Tough Sell With Voters, Which Democrats Are Running In 2020 And Which Still Might. Source: Daily Kos Elections. Note: A previous version of this post stated that awarding 2 electoral votes per state (plus D.C.) to the national popular vote winner would form a baseline of 138 votes. Still, there would be some major changes to our elections if we abolished the Electoral College. The Electoral College thus presents democratic risks without serving any of its original purposes. 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. 2? Why, or why not? 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 this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. By 2019, the median state was Kentucky with 4,467,673 which made it 11% of the population of California, the biggest state in the union with 39,512,223 people. And the reasons people think we need to keep the Electoral College the way it is, theyre all wrong. 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. The political game in the United States would change dramatically without the Electoral College present. 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. That means that the national winner would start out with 102 Electoral College votes. By Michael W. McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, director of the Constitutional Law Center and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The Electoral College has given one candidate a majority win in this political structure since 1992, but there have been four times when the winner of the election didnt receive a clear majority of the votes across the entire country. This toolkit provides guidance and resources to those associated with community colleges who are interested in either creating a pathway program to law school or enhancing an existing program. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. But swing states distort our national priorities, even when the president wins the popular vote. Editors Note: In 2016, we asked two professors to debate whether the Electoral College should cease to be the mechanism used for selecting the U.S. president. It's called the national popular vote movement, and it's already been passed into law in many states, totaling 196 electoral votesthe states include big ones like California and New York and small ones like Vermont and Hawaii. Candidates focus on swing states because they actually have a chance of flipping them and winning a bucket of electoral votes. 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. 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. It channels presidential politics into a two-party system, which is superior to multiparty systems where fringe factions can exercise too much leverage. The effort in Congress to overhaul America's election system followed the contentious 1968 presidential contest. 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. Without the Electoral College in place, presidential candidates would build platforms that would speak to their base. There is a trigger for NPV to go into effect, and we are creeping ever closer toward it.10 When enough states have entered the compact to reach a majority of the electoral votes270 out of 538the compact will then kick in. Although there are some advantages to this system, the disadvantages have been highlighted in recent elections. Continually updated tools and resources to help move your practice and the legal profession forward during COVID-19 and beyond. Even if all 25 of the states that Mr. Biden won in 2020 were to ratify such an amendment, nine additional states that President Trump won would need to ratify it as well. And so each Electoral College vote in a small state like Delaware or Wyoming is worth more than an Electoral College vote in a big state like California. The Electoral College consists of an elector selection, a group of people who will meet and vote for President and Vice President based on the results of their states election. The way the Electoral College actually functions today isnt even enshrined in the Constitution. States have the power to award their electors however they like. Candidates had to go to each state to talk about what they wanted to do for the country because there was no other way to let people know what was happening. But experts say reforming this practice isn't likely anytime soon for a number of reasons. 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. Democratic presidential candidates are weighing in too. [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. This isnt rocket science. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America. Why? The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully! 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. While politicians continue to put major focus on highly-populated urban cities of many states, such as Cleveland, Ohio, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Electoral College pushes candidates to address issues in states as a whole and not just in metropolitan regions. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. The distinction matters. 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. Donald Trump was open about ignoring the pleas of the safe blue states like New York when they were suffering the most from the coronavirus pandemic. 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. hide caption. Why did they lose? It also stops the distribution process where California gets 55 votes, but a state like Delaware only gets 3. And this year, who knows? The party structureswhich, for all their faults, have a vested interest in candidates from the moderate middle who are able to work with Congress and other officials to governhave been sidelined. John Kasich, a Republican, even though Colorado law required electors to cast their votes for state-winner Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. 4. Myth No. 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. So what would happen if we got rid of the Electoral College? 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. The first is easily dismissed. Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. For instance, if a hotly contested state like Wisconsin broke for the candidate who lost the popular vote, eight of its ten electoral votes would be added to their tally. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. We survived. But the court has not tackled to what extent states can enforce such a pledge. Enslaved people couldnt vote, but they were still counted toward the slave states representation in Congress. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be running against Washington.. On September 18, 1969, the U.S. House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming 338 to 70 to send a constitutional amendment to the Senate that would have dismantled the Electoral College,. Make sure to update your bookmarks! If a candidate wins the popular vote in a state, even by a single vote, they get all of that states electoral votes. The current structure limits Americans from pushing in this direction even though candidates tend to visit swing states more often. That position, shared by many Republicans, makes it highly unlikely that there would be sufficient support for changing the system. Five times in our history, presidential candidates who have won more votes than their opponent have still lost the election. This cant go on. 260, February 19, 2020, p. 9, https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/destroying-the-electoral-college-the-anti-federalist-national-popular-0. As we begin the third decade of the 21st century, change benefits the Democrats. 1. Do you agree? No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. Electors manage the needs of the state and community instead of following the will of the general public throughout the country. 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 two of these elections, a. 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. 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. 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. As a result, Republicans and Republican state governments are incentivized to maintain the current system. The following table shows how this would have changed the outcome in the two contested elections of the 21st century and includes 2004 for comparison.