Opinion: The Electoral College Is A Perversity Of Democracy

Imagine an election night scenario in which a presidential candidate wins only 12 states but wins the election because those states delivered the requisite 270 Electoral College votes.

Just do the math:

1. California (54)
2. Texas (40)
3. Florida (30)
4. New York (28)
5. Pennsylvania (19)
6. Illinois (19)
7. Ohio (17)
8. Georgia (16)
9. Michigan (15)
10. North Carolina (16)
11. New Jersey (14)
12. Virginia (13)

That’s 281 electoral votes, enough to secure the presidency at the expense of the remaining 38 states. Worth noting: 38 is the minimum number of states required to ratify an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But you need only those 12 to win the presidency.

Unlikely? Of course. But someday? Why not?

The scenario underscores one criticism of the Electoral College: It allows candidates to focus on a few key states rather than campaigning across the entire country. We do that now. They’re called swing states.

Every focus on polls of the 2024 election emphasizes that only the so-called swing states matter. Media outlets gorged themselves on Kamala Harris’ choice for a running mate, and every expectation was that her vice presidential pick would be someone from a swing state. And it was, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The Electoral College causes such narrowcasting, and we should finally do away with it.

It won’t happen, of course. It might, had Republicans been winning the popular vote and losing the electoral one. But they’ve won the popular vote only once in the last six presidential contests — in 2004, probably because he was the incumbent. Yet they’ve won the election two other times courtesy of the electoral vote, profoundly changing the direction of the nation. I don’t particularly appreciate that two presidents in my lifetime, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, won without winning the popular vote, and both men proved terrible for the country. I wouldn’t like it if they’d been good for the country, either.

Consider: Despite Joe Biden’s margin of victory of 7 million votes in 2020, if 45,000 people in three battleground states had voted differently, Trump would have been reelected. Should 45,000 people hold sway over 7 million?

So, maybe we should think about the election process differently because what we have now doesn’t seem to be working in anyone’s favor.

Yes, we were taught in school that the Electoral College was created for every state to have a voice, ensuring all parts of the country are involved so that a big state like California or Texas alone doesn’t decide who gets elected. We are the United States of America, not the United States of California. But is the United States of Wisconsin or Georgia a better alternative?

California has a population of 39 million. With 54 electoral votes, that’s roughly one electoral vote per 722,000 people. Wyoming — the least populous state in the country — has one electoral vote per 195,000 people.

Twelve percent of Americans live in California, but its percentage of delegates is only 10%. That pattern repeats itself in nearly all the nation’s most populous states, starting with Texas, Florida and New York. The greater a state’s population, the greater the disparity in delegate representation and the more dramatically they are underrepresented. Conversely, each of the least populous states enjoys the opposite pattern: They have more delegates as a percentage of their populations and, thus, are overrepresented.

An analysis by The Washington Post found that “if every person in each state voted, a vote in Wyoming would still be worth almost four times as much as one in California.”

A common argument favoring the Electoral College is that it provides political stability — a cleaner, clearer and more decisive outcome, thus reducing the likelihood of a contested or inconclusive election. It’s also supposed to be a buffer against election fraud by decentralizing the vote-counting process across the states.

For Republicans who still insist the election was stolen, the unwillingness to get rid of the Electoral College seems a bit at cross-purposes with that conspiracy theory, no?

The Electoral College forces candidates to appeal to a wider range of voters across different states and regions, we’re told , potentially promoting more moderate and inclusive policies. Would you call campaigning in just seven swing states the best way to appeal to a wide range of voters? Are Trump’s policies moderate?

There is an even better reason to rid ourselves of the Electoral College. Voter apathy. More like resignation. How often have you heard, or even said yourself, “Why should I vote? My vote won’t matter anyway.”

It’s a common frustration for a conservative living in an overwhelmingly blue state, and vice versa. Historically, vast swaths of eligible voters don’t vote. How many felt their vote didn’t matter because it all came down to some state they don’t live in?

The 2020 election saw a huge turnout, you say? Explain how, out of 240 million eligible voters, 81 million of them did not cast a ballot. That’s how many people voted for Biden. I suspect 2024 will see a similar turnout. Extremism will do that, and nothing brings out voter extremism like Trump, regardless of party.

But go back through the previous four-year cycles and a pattern emerges. In 2016, decidedly fewer people voted for Hillary Clinton (65.8 million) or Trump (62.3 million). More than 40% of eligible voters didn’t vote — 90 million people. In 2012, only 57% of eligible voters voted. And so on. Consistently, in each four-year cycle, 40% of the nation’s eligible voters do not vote.

How many more would have turned out to vote if they knew their vote counted? Or if it were easier to vote? Less than half of young voters vote, and we typically think that’s because of apathy and disengagement. Not exactly.

“Registering to vote and figuring out where and how to vote can look easy on paper,” explains Vox Media . “But for many young adults, getting clear instructions, along with all the variables that can change at the last minute, is more challenging than you might think.”

It points to another tradition that has outlived its usefulness: voting on Tuesdays. On Jan. 23, 1845, Congress voted to hold all national elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. (All political bribes would be accepted only on the third Wednesday after the second Friday of every other month.) It was done to accommodate a then-agrarian society. Think we could update to the 21st century?

How many more would turn out to vote if they could register easily, and vote conveniently, as well as knowing their vote mattered? What? Is moving Election Day to election weekend too hard? Or work toward a future of smart digital voting

Good luck getting any of this to happen. There have been over 700 attempts to reform or abolish the Electoral College. It means securing a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress followed by ratification in three-fourths of the states. Given recent election results, Republicans in Congress and Republican state governments are incentivized to keep what keeps them in power. They’ll scream something about voter fraud, always without evidence, but fearmongering always works for their base of voters.

Workaround efforts are in play. Among them is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact . Started in the mid-2000s, the compact is an agreement among states pledging to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote, effectively bypassing the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment. It takes effect only when states representing at least 270 electoral votes join the compact. As of April 2024, 17 states and the District of Columbia are on board, comprising 209 electoral votes.

Another idea: Proportional allocation. Rather than a winner-take-all approach, there would be two variations of allocation based on the popular vote within each state:

1. Award two Electoral College votes from each state to the winner of the national popular vote and the remainder to the winner of the state. That means that the national winner would automatically get 102 Electoral College votes. If you lost the popular vote but won a given state, you’d get the rest of that state’s electoral votes.
2. 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. Nebraska and Maine already do something along these lines.

None of these are perfect solutions, just like the Framers saw no perfect solutions in their day, but when a candidate receives an entire state’s electoral tally with just 51% of that state’s vote, it disregards the will of every other voter in that state. On a larger scale, the disproportionate focus on a handful of swing states undemocratically dismisses the will of voters in every other state.

Neither are shining examples of a representative democracy. Nor am I convinced that intermediaries (the electors themselves) should have greater credence than the will of the people. Citizens have voted. Do we really need electors to tell us what those votes are?

The Electoral College is a ticking time bomb, a perversion of democracy. Or would you prefer a repeat of the 2016 results?

Our electoral system is ridiculously convoluted and completely detached from the political landscape that the Framers of the Constitution intended. Instead, it should reflect certain core values.

• Every vote should have equal weight, regardless of location or identity.
• It should be consistent and not change from one election to the next.
• And transparent. Yes, a rarity in politics, but transparency is crucial. The principles on which our election process is based should be openly accessible to the public and widely considered fair by that public.

A national popular vote would best represent those core values. Every other First World democracy does it, and they do it pretty well. It’s how we run every other election in this country. You’re telling me the so-called leader of the free world can’t do it? Or doesn’t want to?

Seems to me it’s the latter. The sad reality is this: Regardless of how polarized we are as a nation, whether you live in California or Texas, Delaware or Wyoming, if your politics are in your state’s minority, your vote for president simply doesn’t matter. If you don’t live in a swing state, your vote doesn’t matter. Likewise, apathy among younger voters isn’t the problem. The apathy lies in the political unwillingness to make the voting process easier, not just for younger people, but for all U.S. citizens.

How can anyone say the right to vote is our most precious right in a country where so many feel as if their vote doesn’t matter, or where they have to go through a tortuous maze just to register, let alone actually vote?