Short of abolition, could the electoral college be modified to make it more representative? Perhaps, and it may be worth noting here that the Constitution was amended once before to fix flaws in the electoral college. Granted, that last happened in , through the 12th Amendment , but there is precedent! Since the Electoral College gives each state the number of electors equal to their number of senators plus representatives, one fix is to let the number of representatives increase with the population of the states.
Since the number of House seats was last fixed at in , the country has grown disproportionately, with some states growing much faster than others. Under a proposal sometimes called the Wyoming Rule , the House could be expanded so the maximum size of every House district would be equal to the size of the smallest district—currently the entire state of Wyoming and its , residents, according to the census. Seats would be added until every state had proportionate representation.
Under this system, the House would grow to Representatives , with California gaining 13 new seats and New York gaining seven.
Texas, for example, would also grow by nine seats. But the weight of each state in the electoral college would be more closely aligned with its population. There would no longer be red and blue states since each state would have value for both candidates, and states like California and Mississippi would again be in play in presidential elections.
While our current system counts a close victory the same as a blow out, proportionate allocation would mean even votes in losing efforts have value. Because it works with the existing make up of the House and Senate, small states are still over weighted, and so the winner of the popular election could still lose. In his Crosstab blog, journalist G. Elliott Morris used this system to re-run every election since And while Hillary Clinton would have won with this method in , Al Gore would still have lost in Russell Wheeler Wednesday, October 21, While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same.
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. These imbalances effectively ensure that some votes in presidential elections are worth more than others, and as that imbalance scales up across the entire Electoral College, it can under the right circumstances provide the recipes for popular vote winners losing the Electoral College. Right now, those circumstances tend to benefit Republicans in the Electoral College, while disadvantaging Democrats who have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections.
This imbalance is primarily a 21 st century phenomenon and it could, of course, change in the years to come as some states grow and other states shrink in population. But the fact is that we are now one country, whereas in we were 13 colonies desperately trying to hold onto some semblance of their independence—hence a political deal was struck that now threatens the very democracy for which they were trying to create a lasting framework.
It is extremely difficult to amend the Constitution. Article V sets up the manner by which an amendment is passed. A plan to scrap the Electoral College via constitutional amendment would not pass in the current environment. As a result, Republicans and Republican state governments are incentivized to maintain the current system. In the current Congress, this would require every Democratic House member to vote in favor of such an amendment and be joined by 59 Republicans and every Democratic Senator to be joined by 19 of their Republican colleagues.
Such an effort would likely receive little or no Republican support. If such an amendment were to pass Congress, defeat in the states is likely. Even if all 25 of the states that Mr.
Biden won in were to ratify such an amendment, nine additional states that President Trump won would need to ratify it as well. Yet, ratification happens not by popular vote but by state legislature. In this case, 19 state legislatures are currently controlled solely by Democrats. Another 15 legislatures with varying degrees of Republican control would also need to ratify such an amendment for the Electoral College to be removed.
However, a constitutional amendment is not the only means by which an alternative to the current Electoral College can be implemented. Started in the mids, the NPVIC is a fairly straightforward system that capitalizes on the constitutional guarantee that states are free to determine the manner in which they award their electoral votes.
The compact requires states to pass laws that would award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally. Under the current plan, states that join will not activate the compact until enough states have joined to total electoral votes.
That is, the compact does not go into effect until there is a critical mass of states for it to be effective. These states currently total electoral votes, although after the census is completed, projections suggest a net loss of two seats, lowering that number to Each of those states has Democratic control of the state legislature.
If the remaining states with Democratic control of the legislature Maine, Nevada, and Virginia were to sign on, it would add an additional 23 Electoral College votes. 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. Nonetheless, it is likely the most viable alternative to the current Electoral College system.
As discussed above, the only practical way of ending the Electoral College is by changing the ways in which states use the popular vote to award electors to the presidential candidates. To fully explain how difficult the Electoral College is to dislodge, Keyssar chronicles more than two centuries of near-constant disputation and battle. On four occasions one chamber of Congress approved a constitutional amendment, only to see it fall short in the other.
All of these came during times in which parties were ideologically confused and politics was uncertain enough to make even short-term advantages unclear— opportune times for constitutional change. For the compact to take effect, states would have to collectively represent at least Electoral College votes, the bare minimum necessary to win. As of this writing, 16 states, representing electoral votes, have signed on.
But the Electoral College is a slippery target. In most political constituencies, opposition to the institution is fluid; with every elimination effort, the battle lines change.
In each fight, critics of the institution earnestly call out its arbitrary distortions, and trumpet broad democratic norms of fairness and equality. Opponents always find some plausible principle—the value of federalism, a vague warning about some unintended consequence—on which to hang a defense.
The Road Runner always gets away, despite Wile E. K eyssar begins in the summer of , as the Framers were struggling mightily over how to elect a president.
Some plans had the legislature picking the president, for a single term. Others favored a direct election, eager to see a more independent executive with closer ties to the people.
The system was fraught from the beginning. Motivated by the prize of executive power, partisan state governments continually changed the rules for distributing Electoral College votes to advantage their own party. Sometimes, they distributed electors by congressional district. At other times, they gave them all to the statewide popular vote winner.
Occasionally, the legislature just decided whom to appoint. District elections were widely considered fairer than winner-take-all elections, since they were more proportional. By nationalizing the rules, district elections would keep states from capriciously refashioning their processes to suit changing partisan whims.
The Democratic-Republicans also felt disadvantaged by winner-take-all elections, compared to the then-ascendant Federalists. Jefferson might have had a chance to change the system when his party won a supermajority of House seats in the midterms. But after their monumental victory, the Democratic-Republicans felt more confident in their ability to win outright majorities and backed off their earlier support for mandatory district elections, which they now thought would help Federalists.
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