Let's talk about the Electoral College.
One of the things you learn when you spend a lot of time studying the Electoral College is that very few people understand how it actually works. This holds for some of its strongest critics as well as for most of its tireless defenders. |
That lack of understanding is far too often replaced with misconceptions and myths, or what my colleague Jamelle Bouie calls “folk civics.” Some of these myths, like the idea that the College protects small states, are decades old, despite having been debunked again and again. The blind acceptance of myths like these poses the biggest obstacle to reforming the creaky, outdated and clearly inequitable system we use for picking the nation’s president. |
I’m Jesse Wegman, a member of the Times’s editorial board, and I break down a few of the most persistent myths in today’s video Op-Ed, produced by Tala Schlossberg and Andrew Blackwell. |
I started working on a book about the history and current functioning of the Electoral College in 2018, which now feels like a different century. I discovered pretty quickly that the arguments we are having now about presidential selection are not new, nor are they the product of liberals’ bitterness over their candidate repeatedly winning the votes of more Americans yet still losing the White House. |
There have been roughly 800 attempts in Congress to amend or abolish the Electoral College — more by far than for any other single provision of the Constitution. The first amendment was introduced in 1797, and the efforts have been rolling in at a steady clip ever since. They’ve come from the left and the right, from small states and large states … from anyone who has been cheated by the distortions in the system, or can see how they would be. |
 | | The New York Times |
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The framers themselves were among the first to be alarmed at how the system they devised at the Philadelphia convention was manipulated by the states. In particular, states moved to increase their political clout in the election by adopting “winner-take-all” laws, which give all of a state’s electors to the candidate who wins the most votes in that state, no matter the margin. |
James Madison, the father of the Constitution, saw how destructive these laws were to the functioning of a representative democracy. In 1823 he called for their abolishment through a constitutional amendment. It didn’t happen. |
Today, those winner-take-all laws still bedevil us, making presidents out of popular-vote losers and driving candidates to campaign almost exclusively in a small handful of “battleground states.” The effect of this, as I explain in the video, is that in “every election, 80 percent of American voters, roughly 100 million people, get ignored.” |
The good news is that winner-take-all laws appear nowhere in the Constitution. And that means that while we may not be able to abolish the Electoral College by amendment right now, we can use it as the means to achieve the real goal: a presidential election in which all Americans count equally, and the candidate who gets the most votes wins. |
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