Thrown together at the last minute by the countrys founders, it almost immediately stopped functioning as they thought it would. In each case, the number of faithless electors who exercised that behavior would not have had a meaningful impact on the outcome. As the U.S. Government Archives likes to say, the Electoral College is a process, not a place. This structure was placed in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers of the United States as a compromise between having a vote in Congress to elect the President and the election of a candidate by qualified citizens. That meant more power for those states under an Electoral College system, and slave states didnt want to give up that power. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/learning/is-the-electoral-college-a-problem-does-it-need-to-be-fixed.html. It creates 50 individual contests. If you submit a question as a comment on this article, we might use it during the live event. Or is it working the way it is supposed to? Our 230-year-old jerry-built system for picking the president, known as the Electoral College. And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. In each case, the number of faithless electors who exercised that behavior would not have had a meaningful impact on the outcome. If the U.S. were to abolish the electoral college, then the restrictions that territories experience against voting in this election would disappear. "And places where there are more people become more important when you're counting votes.". 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. Did you know that when Americans vote in the 2020 presidential election, theyre not actually voting for the next president? Because the Electoral College is based on the structure of state populations and representation in the House, some people have a vote that carries more weight per delegate than others. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. Under the current system, voters in each state cast their ballots for electors, of which 270 are necessary to win. Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, Ron Paul, and Faith Spotted Eagle received one each. It doesnt. As a result, Republicans and Republican state governments are incentivized to maintain the current system. Given that a change would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures, it is not going to happen. This Student Opinion prompt and a related Lesson of the Day will prepare students to participate in our live panel discussion about the Electoral College, on Oct. 22 at 1 p.m. Eastern. In winner-take-all states, all electoral votes cast for the state are assigned to the candidate who gets the most electoral votes. As American leadership falters, scholars say, autocrats are on the rise. When the Founding Fathers built the idea of the Electoral College into the structure of the American government, their idea of information management was very different than what we have today. One of the ways that states are considering a way to go around the Electoral College is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Why, or why not? Your membership has expired - last chance for uninterrupted access to free CLE and other benefits. "The game will not be any longer to be a [politician who is] liberal but be able to appeal to a rural Ohioan," he said. Four of the electors came from the state of Washington. It took time for people to learn what was happening in the nations capital. This is the heart of the problem with the Electoral College. 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. Because the Electoral College is based on the structure of state populations and representation in the House, some people have a vote that carries more weight per delegate than others. The effort in Congress to overhaul America's election system followed the contentious 1968 presidential contest. The outcome has prompted some to question whether the Electoral College the body of officials that formally elects the nation's president every four yearsis good for democracy, and even compelled outgoing California Sen. Barbara Boxer to file legislation to abolish the 229-year-old system. Under the current structure of the United States, there are 50 unique presidential contests instead of one nationwide affair to elect a President. See: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/10/21/can-the-electoral-college-be-subverted-by-faithless-electors/. In fact, lets tally up all the votes cast for president between 1932 and 2008. It said that the Colorado secretary of state erred in removing an elector who cast his vote for then-Ohio Gov. 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. https://saveourstates.com/threats/the-status-of-npv, https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/destroying-the-electoral-college-the-anti-federalist-national-popular-0. 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. 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. The elected officials of both parties have incentives to choose candidates with an eye toward popular electability and governing skill. 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. Warren says she wants to get rid of the Electoral College, and vote for president using a national popular vote. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public. Support for direct popular election. By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. Still, there would be some major changes to our elections if we abolished the Electoral College. The Electoral College Will Destroy America, The Battleground States Biden and Trump Need to Win 270, free daily writing prompts for remote learning. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, your vote probably doesnt count the way it should. The amendments Fully overhauling the way the president is selected would take a Constitutional amendment, which would require the votes of two-thirds of. "And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.". 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. We survived. While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same. Is the way Americans choose the president undemocratic and unfair? And even though it is widely acknowledged that the Electoral College is a ticking time bomb that could seriously erode American democracy, none of these attempts has been successful. Polls conducted by Gallup over the past seven decades, with the most recent being from 2013, clearly show the American public's desire to get rid of the whole system. The Electoral College has elected a president who did not win the popular vote twice in the past 20 years, in 2000 and 2016. 2: The founders wanted it this way. Is the Electoral College a Problem? But swing states distort our national priorities, even when the president wins the popular vote. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, the Electoral College is unfair. 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. Instead, theyre voting for their states representatives in the Electoral College, who will then vote for the president. That could have happened even though Biden won the popular vote by 7,060,087 (and counting)a margin even larger than the margins won by George W Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012. 3. 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. ## For the purposes here, all electoral votes in a given state were awarded to the proper winner, thus attributing faithless electors to the proper candidate. An amendment hasn't been adopted since the 27th, in 1992, and one hasn't been adopted relatively quickly since the 26th, which took 100 days from proposal to adoption in 1971. If such an amendment were to pass Congress, defeat in the states is likely. 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 thats it. When you know that one state will vote the same way in every election, there is no need to visit that place. In part, that is because theElectoral Collegeis constitutionally mandated, and abolishing it would require a constitutional amendment. 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. It should be noted, there is debate about the permissibility of such a proposal and its going into effect would likely face a flurry of lawsuits. But under this system, those Republican votes might as well not exist. A presidential candidate who doesnt receive a majority of the votes can still win the Electoral College to get into the White House. Currently, 15 states and DC have approved the NPVIC. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. Map. Every four years, tens of millions of Americans votes magically disappear before the real election for president happens about six weeks after Election Day, when 538 electors convene in state capitals across the country to cast their votes for president. This is the result of an amazing technological revolution, but what does it have to do with the Electoral College? Only one election was so close that it had to go to the House of Representatives, which is how John Quincy Adams won over Andrew Jackson. Here, again, there are three main points to make. Think about it. By Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science. This is because the president is not . Sixty years later inRay v. Blair, the court ruled the Constitution, including the 12th Amendment, does not bar a political party from requiring electors to sign a pledge to support the nominees of the national convention. That position, shared by many Republicans, makes it highly unlikely that there would be sufficient support for changing the system. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. Using bots can streamline some law firm work, American Bar Association First, there's the Constitutional problem. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch. The effect is to erase all the voters in that state who didnt vote for the top candidate. The compact requires states to pass laws that would award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally. It channels presidential politics into a two-party system, which is superior to multiparty systems where fringe factions can exercise too much leverage. In the video above, we delve into the reasons people give for keeping the Electoral College and why theyre wrong. After reading the article and watching the video, what questions do you have for Mr. Wegman? I think it would make more sense to split the electoral votes based on the state-wide vote so if a state has 10 electoral votes and the election goes 60% to 40%, the candidates gets 6 votes and 4 votes respectively.

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