The Bottom Line
The Electoral College needs to go. The process greatly distorts the will of the people, forces candidates to focus only on swing states, and discourages turnout in solidly red and blue states – ultimately disenfranchising tens of millions of voters.
A constitutional amendment is the cleanest way to abolish the Electoral College, but this is unlikely to happen anytime soon. So, we should jump to Plan B and replace statewide winner-take-all laws with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which would basically accomplish the same goal.
The Electoral College needs to go. In 2024, the president of the United States was essentially chosen by voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – meaning their votes mattered way more than the votes of everyone else in the country. That’s just not the American way. All votes should count equally. National Public Radio (NPR) puts it this way: A candidate can win the presidency if s/he wins only the 11 states with the most electoral votes. Seriously? There are 50 states! We haven’t done the math ourselves but, according to them, a person can mathematically win the presidency by winning as little as 23 percent of the popular vote – which is completely illogical.
There are people who say that the Electoral College shouldn’t be messed with because it was the fervent wish of the Founding Fathers. However, this is a mischaracterization of the Founder’s intent.
In truth, the Electoral College was born out of a compromise that James Madison struck in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, when one group wanted the U.S. Congress to elect the president and another group wanted to have direct elections. Many agreed that Congress electing the president would undermine checks and balances, but having direct elections would concentrate power in the heavily populated Northeast. No way said the less populated states! So, the Electoral College was born.
The Electoral College made sense then – after all, we wouldn’t have a country without compromise between these two competing interests – but it makes zero sense now. Since the Constitutional Convention, there have been five elections where the popular vote winner lost the presidency.
So, how can we get rid of this albatross? A constitutional amendment is the cleanest way to abolish the Electoral College but is by far the most difficult to achieve. Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, there are two ways to pass an amendment: 1) Receive two-thirds approval from both the House and Senate, plus ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures (which, currently, is 38 states), or 2) If two-thirds of the state legislatures call for a Constitutional Convention.
Because neither of these will likely happen anytime soon, we should jump to Plan B and replace statewide winner-take-all laws with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which would basically accomplish the same goal. States with winner-take-all laws – which is every state except Maine and Nebraska – require the state to cast its electoral votes for the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state. In the same way, the NPVIC is an agreement directly between the states that commits each state to cast its electoral votes for the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. As of the 2024 election, 17 states plus the District of Columbia had signed on to this pact, representing a total of 209 electoral votes (39 percent of the Electoral College).
A Very Important Point About January 6th!
The asinine things Donald Trump and certain members of the U.S. Congress were saying before and on January 6, 2021 – about Vice-President Mike Pence having the constitutional authority to disallow the results of the election by rejecting Electoral College votes or sending them back to the states – were embarrassing in their ignorance.
The United States Constitution is clear: States are the arbiters of their own elections for presidential electors. The U.S. Congress and/or the vice president of the United States have ZERO AUTHORITY to second-guess, change, or just decide not to count the slate of electors submitted to them by each state, or to hold up the electoral vote count to “investigate” alleged election fraud or election “irregularities.”
The only time Congress can object to Electoral College votes is if the appointment of the electors was not “lawfully certified,” or the votes were not “regularly given.” This is an extremely high – almost impossible to clear – bar because, in the end, majorities in both chambers must agree with the objection. As a result, objections to the electoral count vote are purely political – but as we now know, dangerous – theatre, like was the case on January 6, 2021.