The most popular alternative is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The places where there are more people become the top priority, especially if there is a chance to swing some votes. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, your vote probably doesnt count the way it should. Myth No. Do you agree? The winner-take-all method is nowhere in the Constitution. That means the major party that can maintain its base could win elections without a clear majority. We will focus on elections in the 20th and 21st centuries. It would stop the requirement to redistribute the electoral votes. Why did President Obama spend so much money bailing out the auto industry? ** Adjusted Maine to act as one state rather than separate EV districts. A plan to scrap the Electoral College via constitutional amendment would not pass in the current environment. Sometimes one party does better for a few election cycles. But heres the important part. They want the option to select a president based on who gets the most votes nationally. We survived. Its how we run every election in the country, except the most important one of all. That, critics say, means devaluing the votes of many non-white voters too. It no longer serves the intended job. 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. What do you think of Mr. Wegmans arguments? Support for direct popular election. Yet, ratification happens not by popular vote but by state legislature. Which states do matter? As a result, Republicans and Republican state governments are incentivized to maintain the current system. For instance, in 1900 New York was the biggest state in the union with 7,268,894 people and the state with the median population, Louisiana, had 1,381,625 people. Such an effort would likely receive little or no Republican support. But it's possible the candidate with the most votes from the public won't be the winner. Not one was a first-rank president, but their selection did not seriously injure the democratic character of our system. Five times in our history, presidential candidates who have won more votes than their opponent have still lost the election. I wrote a whole book on the subject. This is because the president is not . The winner of an election should be the person who gets the most votes. Only Rutherford Hayes, with a 3% difference, won the electoral college despite being in the minority. Click the links below for answers to these frequently asked questions. That is not to say the Electoral College is without its advantages. 61% of Americans Support Abolishing Electoral College by Megan Brenan Story Highlights 61% prefer amending Constitution to use popular vote to elect president 89% of Democrats, 23% of Republicans. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power - & we cant let that happen. Parties must obtain no less than 7% of votes - either on their own or in alliance with other parties - in order to enter . This action would allow the popular vote winner to take the White House. It took time for people to learn what was happening in the nations capital. Having the person who loses the popular vote win the presidency will seriously undermine the legitimacy of our elections. Thrown together at the last minute by the countrys founders, it almost immediately stopped functioning as they thought it would. He makes the case that both Republicans and Democrats should support a change. For example, in 1967, 58 percent favored its abolition, while in 1981, 75 percent of . However, a constitutional amendment is not the only means by which an alternative to the current Electoral College can be implemented. It also prevents candidates from going into states where the electorate typically votes for the other party. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America. [2] Both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature are currently controlled by Democrats; however, the 2020 elections shifted both chambers to Republican control. 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. 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. Throughout history there have been over 700 attempts to reform or abolish the Electoral College, according to the Congressional Research Service. Two hundred years after James Madisons letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. 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. It also stops the distribution process where California gets 55 votes, but a state like Delaware only gets 3. Back in 1787, when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were trying to figure out how the President should be chosen, some wanted the Congress to choose, and . Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. The Constitution originally stipulated that the top vote-getter chosen by these electors would become president and the individual with the second-most votes would be vice president. 2. Four of the electors came from the state of Washington. Why did they lose? The political game in the United States would change dramatically without the Electoral College present. 3) The Electoral . And the most recent major occasion took place in 1969, 1970, when there was a strong bipartisan effort to abolish the electoral college and have us utilize a national popular vote. If the U.S. were to abolish the electoral college, then the restrictions that territories experience against voting in this election would disappear. Over 2.8 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump, but it was Trump who won the White House because of the results of the electoral map. Map. Why? The presidential election in 2016 saw a modern-era record for faithless electors, but five of them came from the Clinton camp. In a polarized political environment, such an institutional structure remains entrenched. Gronke asks. Electors manage the needs of the state and community instead of following the will of the general public throughout the country. 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. However, in the five presidential elections of the 21st century, two ended up with the winner of the popular vote losing the Electoral College. Well, American democracy operates on a whole collection of cherished ideas and practices, but our system also includes some dusty old artifacts from its founding two centuries ago. Despite what you may have learned in school, it was not the product of careful design by brilliant men. Three happened in the 19th century; none in the 20th century and two in the 21st century. 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. But the Constitution and the courts have allowed the states some leeway to make changes to how their Electoral College representatives are chosen. List of the Pros of Abolishing the Electoral College 1. Sticking to the electoral college format allows us to use electors as intended instead of relying on all of the votes counting. Every vote matters, commented Senator Elizabet Warren (D-Mass) in an early campaign stop in Mississippi in 2019, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.. While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same. What happens if the President-elect fails to qualify before inauguration? 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. And yet we have generally accepted it for centuries on the assumption it serves an important purpose. Why? In part, that is because the Electoral College is constitutionally mandated, and abolishing it would require a constitutional amendment. 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. 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. 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. 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. Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at an organizing event in February. How the Electoral College helps preserve our constitutional system. It's another way the system ensures it's perpetuity. Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at an organizing event in February. The general threshold that an election result must reach to trigger an automatic recount is a difference of 0.5% of the vote or less. Do you think this means the system is broken? 2? Eliminating this barrier could mean that some parts of the country never become part of the overall campaign. 6. To this day, people are still arguing that Al Gore was the real winner and debating whether the recount in Florida was accurate the state whose electors propelled Bush to the top. Candidates focus on swing states because they actually have a chance of flipping them and winning a bucket of electoral votes. The election, as Mr. Trump would say though not for the right reasons is rigged. 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. As Madison wrote in an 1823 letter, states using the winner-take-all rule are a string of beads and fail to reflect the true political diversity of their citizens. This system allows minorities to have a bigger microphone for their concerns as well. There have also been five elections where the eventual president didnt win a majority of the vote, including Trump in 2016. The great problems with our presidential selection system today stem from the haphazard way we choose the two major party presidential candidates. Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representationthe three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromiseand guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. 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. In most cases this should prevent the popular vote loser from becoming president. Lauren Wesley Wilson Is Making WHCD Weekend More Inclusive, Dylan Mulvaney Wanted To Be An Actor, Not An Activist, Olivia Munn & John Mulaney's Meet Cute 8 Years Ago At A Wedding Is Relatable, 10 Times Tom From 'Succession' Was Actually Mr. Darcy, Get Even More From Bustle Sign Up For The Newsletter. If this system were to be abolished, then every vote counted would have the exact same weight in the final tally. In a truly national election, parties and candidates would have the incentive to turn out their votes wherever they were, fostering a deeper sense of engagement across the whole population. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. In the video above, Mr. Wegman argues that the Electoral College is undemocratic. 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. This spring, numerous candidates for president expressed support for either abolishing or changing the Electoral College, which ultimately picks the U.S. president. But there is something called the National Popular Vote Compact. 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. 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. Then in 2016, Donald Trump won the Electoral College despite receiving 2.1% less of the popular vote. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. This has happened five times in American history. FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast have predicted. If the Electoral College system begins to prevent, on a regular basis, the popular vote winner from becoming president, it will create systemic challenges. Yes. But in the end, Republicans and Democrats are virtually tied. Warren says she wants to get rid of the Electoral College, and vote for president using a national popular vote. Abolishing the Electoral College would get rid of this confusing process. And thats it. Most Americans would breathe a sigh of relief, I believe, if we had a system capable of choosing the U.S. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. The pact raises questions of its own for democracy: It creates a situation in which voters in, for example, Colorado, may cast most of their votes for the Democrat in a presidential race but the state might wind up giving its electors to the Republican depending on the national outcome. 5. Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992 with only 43% of the vote, and then in 1996 with 49.2%. And even when that doesn't happen, Wegman sees another problem with the . 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. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. But really, scholars say, consensus is constructed through thousands of small acts over generations. Electoral vote totals will equal 538. The way the Electoral College actually functions today isnt even enshrined in the Constitution. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. 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. When you know that one state will vote the same way in every election, there is no need to visit that place. They simply happen to be states that become competitive because of their demography, and which are readily identifiable as such because of the increasing sophistication of political polling. 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. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, the Electoral College is unfair. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. 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. And this was an effort that was supported by the AFL-CIO, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association, and progressive and liberal groups outside. But get this, the way the Electoral College actually functions today isnt even enshrined in the Constitution. 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. This isnt a partisan issue its a fairness issue. Article V sets up the manner by which an amendment is passed. Think about it. It causes some votes to have greater weight than others.
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