The Electoral College Is An Endangered Species
There is a law working its way through state legislatures that might end the Electoral College once and for all.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – This week, I thought I’d report on some good news for a change. At least, it’ll be good news if you’re not a fan of the now-archaic electoral college.Â
We might actually be witnessing the final days of that old janky method of conducting national elections – and not a moment too soon.
I have to confess, in my misspent youth I was a relatively hardcore proponent of the institution. In my former estimation, the electoral college was useful for discouraging third party candidates, and by discouraging third party candidates, the two party system more effectively maintains continuity of government without wild swings in policy.Â
Additionally, if we ran our presidential elections based on a straight-up popular vote, I was concerned that we might elect chief executives who only receive a small plurality of support. Imagine the cranks and demagogues who could win with just, say, 20 percent of the vote. Plus, under our current system, candidates have to campaign in places like Iowa rather than focusing purely on the most populated areas.Â
In case you don’t know, the number of electoral votes in each state are based on the state’s total number of U.S. senators and congressional representatives. The electoral votes are allocated to the winner of the statewide popular vote. The national popular vote, so far, is irrelevant in electing the president.
After watching the twin disasters of 2000 and 2016 in which both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, as well as old-school electoral college disasters that elected John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison, I’m done with all that. Five times is more than enough. The electoral college is a failed institution.Â
But how do we kill it without going through the grueling and lengthy process of amending Article II, Section 1, Clauses 2 and 3 of the U.S. Constitution? And how many more Trumps and Bushes will get to the White House after losing the popular vote?
Now for the good news.
There’s a law working its way through state legislatures that’ll solve this problem. It’s called the National Popular Vote interstate compact. Each state that passes this law pledges to allocate its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than the statewide popular vote. The only catch is that the law will only go into effect once the total electoral votes of the National Popular Vote states reaches 270, the threshold for winning a presidential election.
You might be thinking: this all sounds great, Bob, but there’s no way we’ll get to 270. It’s too good to be true!
Not so fast.
As of this week, according to the National Popular Vote website, the law has been passed by enough states to reach 209 out of 270 electoral votes.
6 small jurisdictions (District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont)
9 medium-sized states (Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington)
3 big states (California, Illinois, New York).Â
One of the reasons I’m bringing this up today is because Maine just passed the compact this week. In recent years, Nevada passed the law through both chambers of its legislature while Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Arizona passed the law through one legislative chamber.
If Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada pass their laws, that’s it. The compact will go into effect and the electoral college will be neutered. It’ll still exist, of course, and winners of presidential elections will still be decided based on whichever candidate gets 270 electoral votes, but those votes will be allocated by the national popular vote.
A few caveats.Â
We still need to decide on a system that’ll maintain some semblance of policy continuity while preventing the aforementioned cranks from winning with 20 percent of the popular vote.Â
Additionally, once the compact gets down to the final state or two, you can expect the MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump, provided he’s even a factor any more, to go indiscriminately bananas and attempt to block passage of the compact, or to convince legislatures that have already passed it to make a u-turn and repeal it. There will also be legal challenges, of course, but these are problems we’ll cover once we get there. As of right now, it hasn’t been politicized, so maybe if we keep quiet about it, while electing more Democratic state legislatures and governors, it’ll happen without my prediction of last-minute chaos.
The time has come to leave the electoral college on the junk-heap of history, and the compact appears to be the wrecking ball. There’s nothing else on the table – no amendments, no other workarounds, nothing. This is it. But it’s tantalizingly close to passing so keep your fingers crossed. It won’t be this year, but there’s a decent likelihood it’ll be ready to roll out in 2028, and when it does, our democracy will become a lot more democratic.
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If there were no Electoral Collage, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would've been president, by the popular vote.
I was in high school in MD when MD became the first state to pass this. I respect Bob Cesca's opinion, since I very much used to hold it. Ironically enough, I think we've both made complimentary shifts on how we've seen this topic, albeit in opposite directions. And I agree with Cesca that the current Electoral College is a time bomb. But I think there's a better way to fix it:
The greatest benefit of the Electoral College (which Cesca mentions) is that is does semi-lock America into a two-party system. And a two-party system is the second best way to keep the Iron Law of Oligarchy in check. The NPVIC would potentially elect a president who has barely a slim plurality, at best. And sadly, multi-party presidential systems have a terrible record of failure. Case in point: See Latin America! Presidents get elected with only a plurality, never have a congressional majority, and almost immediately get their agenda blocked/impeached (presidential systems, after all, still keep checks & balances/separation of powers). Strongmen like Bolsonaro, Fujimori, or a military junta still exist, playing on people's frustrations with a dysfunctional government. And they still try to overturn checks and balances, and sometimes even succeed. Heck, this outcome could have even happened to us as early as 1800 if we hadn't adopted the electoral college and the two-party system it created.
Multi-party proportional representation parliamentary systems meanwhile have the opposite problem: So many political parties balkanize the electorate, that governments are unstable, until along comes a Berlusconi or a Netanyahu who promises to cut the clamor and "get things done." People like them don't survive because they're good at winning elections; they survive because they're good at negotiating parliamentary majorities, and playing off popular discontent about governmental instability. (Netanyahu is literally using this "argument for stability" right now.)
Westminster style systems - parliaments without proportional representation - have their own sets of problems. The % of the vote and the % of the parliamentary seats you win can differ greatly, especially if there are more than two parties. The lack of a checks and balances means that whoever gets elected has borderline unlimited power. And unless your country/province has VERY strong two-party competition, you might end up with awful people (like Modi, the Alberta Socreds, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the last 5 UK Conservative PM's) getting elected and staying in power for decades. Worse, this exact same problem can happen on a national level, which is how Orban created his dictatorship: He rewrote the electoral rules to make the seat-vote disparity even larger, (reducing proportional representation), and thus in a multi-party Westminster system he could thus get supermajorities so long as his opposition stayed divided.
Regardless of the flaws of our system, if nothing else at least it's minimized the chances of an Orban through strong two-party competition that the electoral college creates. The flipside though is this: While American presidential elections tend to be very predictable most of the time (president does a good job, their party wins reelection, and vice versa), it does have one obvious issue: During Ambivalent Elections - which is an incumbent party screwing up as much as possible without crossing the threshold into an outright loss - the incumbent party still wins the popular vote, but the electoral college goes to the better campaigner. This didn't used to be an issue, since Ambivalent elections used to be really rare (there were only three between 1848 and 1988). But for reasons I can go into in another post, Ambivalent Elections have become worryingly common: Three of the eight presidential elections since/including 1992 have been ambivalent. And another four presidential elections would have been, had it not been for a black-swan event.
Again, there are larger reasons why this shift has happened. But given everything I've written so far, here's the design challenge I put to everyone: Can you create a way of electing a president that:
a. Keeps the Iron-Law-Fighting benefits of the current Electoral College and two-party system?
b. Leads to both parties paying attention to every state, and not just swing states?
c. Prevents the tendency in our current system for national two-party competition to degenerate into one-party sectionalism?
d. Prevents the loser of the popular vote from winning the Electoral College?
e. Makes it easier for 3rd parties to replace an incompetent first or second party?
f. Gets rid of 12 Amendment contingency elections (hasn't happened in a while, but would still be a problem)
There actually is. In fact there are at least two: One I call PRATT (Proportional Representation Amongst Top Two), the other PRATT-RV (Proportional Representation Amongst Top Two with Range Vote):
PRATT would divvy up a state's electoral college votes proportionally by the statewide vote total amongst the top two winners. If we divved up EC votes to the nearest whole number, the number of swing states would go from 5-10 up to 40. And if we divvied each state's EC votes to the nearest quarter of an electoral college vote (i.e., you'd need 269.25 electoral college votes to win, rather than 270), literally every state would become a swing state. Even Democrats would win a quarter of an EC vote in Wyoming, and even the GOP would win a quarter of an EC vote in DC.
The Top-Two aspect keeps the Iron-Law in check. The requirement that both Dems and Reps actually compete in literally every single state minimizes the degeneration of two-party competition into one-party sectionalism. And the PR aspect means the electoral college tracks the popular vote. (Even loosing Florida, Gore under PRATT would still have been elected with 269.5 electoral college votes). And in the highly unlikely even of a contingency election, individual states could just re-assign their electoral college votes based on the first and second place winners nationally rather than statewide.
Now PRATT would work by itself. But it becomes even better if you throw in Range Voting. Range Voting is something we actually have all seen before, but might not have known the name of. When you rank an amazon purchase from 0 to 5 stars, that's Range Voting. And fun fact: Humans are not only species who practice it. Bee dancing, when a honeybee swarm is decide where to set up their new nest is actually Range Voting (the "direction" the bee dances is a candidate for a new nest; the intensity/number of times they keep repeating the dance is the equivalent of giving a candidate a certain number of stars).
So with Range Voting, every voter would be able to give every candidate a rating of between zero and five stars. If you want to give both candidates 5 stars, give both zero stars, of give one candidate zero stars and another a single star (because they both suck but one is just slightly less terrible) - you can do that! And at the end of the election, all the stars are counted and then the state's EC votes divvied up proportionally amongst the top two.
Under the current system, third parties have to win or they are essentially useless. Under PRATT-RV, third parties coming in second, or even demonstrating widespread popularity just underneath the threshold, would have an effect. We'd still have all the benefits of two-party competition preventing a dictatorship, but the two main parties would have to be more on their toes, as it would be easier to replace one them. The PR aspect still ensures that the electoral college tracks the popular vote. And I think most voters would appreciate the flexibility Range Voting creates.