Voting & Democracy

Replace or Modify the Electoral College

Map of the United States with a diagonal line going from the bottom left corner to the top right corner. The left portion is blue and the right, red. In front of the map, in large white, capital letters over a blue banner, it says 'Electoral' and underneath in red letters it says 'College'

About This Principle of Democracy

To win the Presidency, a candidate must win a majority of the 538 electoral votes designated to the states and the District of Columbia by the Electoral College. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has members of Congress. Equal to the number of its House seats plus two for its Senate seats. In addition, Washington, D.C. gets three electors.

After the results are certified, the state’s electoral votes go to the candidate with the most votes. It is done winner take all—except in Maine and Nebraska, where one electoral vote goes to the winner of each congressional district and their remaining two electoral votes to the statewide winner.

As impossible as it seems today, initiatives like the National Popular Vote Compact—discussed below—are inching us closer to a solution that counts everyone’s vote equally and does not require amending the Constitution.

painting depicting the signing of the Constitution - a large group of white-haired, white men in a room with a desk

History

From the beginning, the Electoral College was a constitutional compromise, never meant to last. As George Edwards II, emeritus scholar of presidential studies, said, “It wasn’t like the Founders said, ‘Hey, what a great idea! This is the preferred way to select the chief executive, period.’ The (convention delegates) were tired, impatient, and frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else.” The key votes came from slaveholder states that refused to sign the Constitution without this provision in it.

The South, fearful of calls from the more populous north to end slavery, demanded a process like the Electoral College that would overrepresent their smaller number of eligible voters. Their strategy also included a demand for the “three-fifths rule” that counted non-voting slaves as three-fifths of a person in the census.

The result of this scheme can be seen in the 1800 census, when the state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, yet ended up with 20% fewer electoral votes. With both the Electoral College and the three-fifths rule, Virginia came up the big winner. A slave-holding Virginian won the presidency in the first eight of nine presidential elections.

There are many myths that perpetuate the Electoral College. One of the most persistent mythsis that it was meant to help small states. This was never the case. James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution, made it clear that states were divided then into different interests not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances — “principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.”

In reality, campaigns spend all their time and money in the large states like Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in pursuit of their large cache of electoral votes. The dozen small states are mostly ignored because they’re not worth fighting over. States like Wyoming, North Dakota, Delaware, or Hawaii are predictably red or blue; even New Hampshire is trending Democrat for presidential elections.

Problems

The Electoral College has always been problematic and an outlier. All 50 states elect their governor by the popular vote as does every other advanced democracy that directly elects its chief executive. So why does our presidential election continue to be conducted in a way that can lead to minority rule?

The riskiest outcome of this process is allowing the winner of the popular vote to lose the election. This has happened five times already, including in 2016. In 2020, but for a few thousand votes in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin, we came within an historical “hair” of doing the same. With extremists on the rise in the United States, an election decided in a few sharply contested battleground states presents a growing danger to the country.

There are other effects built into its design that undercut democracy’s most basic principles of one person one vote and representation for all. Effects no modern democracy can or should have to sustain.

  1. It leaves more than half the nation on the sidelines. Having a national election decided by a small number of states divides states and voters into two tiers: deciders and spectators. Candidates fight over voters in a few swing states, while the rest of the country is taken for granted. In 2020, 60% of eligible voters lived outside the 13 battleground states. The same was true in 2016 and most all previous contests. This can leave voters in many states feeling that their votes don’t matter.
  2. All the money and attention go to the battleground states. Campaigns target their money and attention toward a handful of battleground states. Consider the 2020 election. The presidential campaigns and allied groups spent almost all of the more than $1 billion in political advertising in just 13 states. Of the 212 public campaign events by major parties, 204 took place in 12 states. Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin alone accounted for 84% of campaign ad spending and 71% of candidate appearances.

image still shot of reporter standing in front of screen that says '270 Trump vs Biden' with a map of the US and various states colored red or blue - the man has his left hand face up and his right hand looks like it's counting the fingers on the leftA Nation Divided into Red and Blue

The Electoral College map fuels our division into red and blue camps, a polarizing framework which results in citizens forming opinions about others based on where they live without considering the diversity of views and political identities that reside in every county and every state.

American Linguist Geoff Nunberg said in the lead-up to the 2016 election that the blue and red colors have become “a proxy for all the differences in values and lifestyle that seem to be cleaving the country into warring tribes.” Creating a winner-take-all battle among states obscures any nuanced understanding of the political geography of the United States.

Policy Solution

The most popular solution has always been the simplest: Replace the Electoral College with the national popular vote. It’s a state-based solution that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment.

This is the plan of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact where states would sign a binding compact to award electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote. The Compact would take effect when enough states have signed on to represent the 270 electors needed to win.

So far, 15 states and the District of Columbia have voted to join. Their combined 165 electoral votes now represents 71% of what’s needed to reach the goal of 270. If passed, will it legally stand? Proponents make a strong case that it could. Whatever challenge it will face, it builds momentum and does the most to replace the divisive and deeply consequential political compromise of 250 years—and at last come together as a nation to allow the election for our highest office to take place equally in all 50 states.

Another solution often proposed is to change the method by which states distribute their electoral votes, by moving from winner-take-all allocation to a proportional allocation reflecting the percentage of the population that voted for each candidate. It’s a promising strategy, but not easy to implement.

Benefits of the National Popular Vote

  • Candidates would have to prioritize representation and accountability to all Americans—both during the campaign and also once elected—rather than disproportionately weighted to voters in battleground states.
  • It would help strengthen voter mobilization and outreach in all states, which would also bring more attention to statewide and local races.
  • All votes and all voters would be valued the same, no matter where they live. One person, one vote, as in all other elections.
  • It removes a troubled compromise that relegates most voters and states to a secondary role in electing a president.

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