Electoral College

Con 1: The Electoral College gives too much power to swing states and allows the presidential election to be decided by a handful of states.

The two main political parties can count on winning the electoral votes in certain states, such as California for the Democratic Party and Indiana for the Republican Party, without worrying about the actual popular vote totals. Because of the Electoral College, presidential candidates need to pay attention only to a limited number of states that can swing one way or the other. [18]

A Nov. 6, 2016, episode of PBS NewsHour revealed that “Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have made more than 90% of their campaign stops in just 11 so-called battleground states. Of those visits, nearly two-thirds took place in the four battlegrounds with the most electoral votes—Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina.” [19]

Gautam Mukunda, a political scientist at Harvard University, explains that states are given electors on the basis of their representation in the U.S. House and Senate, so small states get extra votes. Mukunda states, “The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy.” [33]

Con 2: The Electoral College is rooted in slavery and racism.

The “minority” interests the Founding Fathers intended the Electoral College to protect were those of enslavers and states with legal slavery. James Madison stated, “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 the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.” [29]

“Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts,” explains Wilfred Codrington III, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president.…With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise [counting only three-fifths of the enslaved population instead of the population as a whole] as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.” [29]

The racism at the root of the Electoral College persists, suppressing the votes of people of color in favor of voters from largely homogeneously white states. [29][30]

Con 3: Democracy should function on the will of the people, allowing one vote per adult.

There are more than 337 million people in the United States. But just 538 people decide who will be president; that’s about 0.000156% of the population deciding the president. In 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than one million votes, and yet she still lost the election on the basis of electoral votes. [14][35][36][37]

“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?…You can’t let 538 people decide the fate of a country of 300 million people,” says Robert Nemanich, a math teacher and former elector from Colorado Springs, Colorado. [28]

Even Donald Trump, who benefited from the Electoral College system, stated after the 2016 presidential election that he believed presidents should be chosen by popular vote: “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.” Just as in 2000, when George W. Bush received fewer nationwide popular votes than Al Gore, Trump served as the president of the United States despite being supported by fewer Americans than his election opponent. [2][20]

“If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It’s about one person, one vote—everybody’s vote counting equally. You’re not going to convince a majority of Americans that that’s not how you should do it,” says Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President (2020). [33]

John Koza, the chairman of National Popular Vote, warns, “At this point I think changing the system to something better is going to determine whether there’s a dictator in this country.” [27]