The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
My son currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He called me last week to wish me happy birthday and talk about the election. He said that Australians closely followed the election and that friends had kept asking him, “What is this Electoral College thing?” And then, after he’d given them an outline — “Why would you do it that way?”
It’s a really good question, and there’s no defensible answer.
There were, of course, historical reasons for the establishment of the Electoral College and there are political reasons for its persistence — the most obvious being that getting rid of it would require a Constitutional amendment, and so even though the thing creates havoc every four years, it seems too hard to kill. So we let it lie, until we’re coming up on another election, whereupon finding a better way suddenly seems both urgent and impossible. Then, once the election is past, and we have a new president who may or may not be the choice of a majority of Americans — thank you, Electoral College! — we more or less forget about it again. Until next time.
Remember the week of November 2, 2020? Want to live through that again?
This time, let’s not forget the trauma we just went through, holding our breaths for days on end as a nation of more than 330 million sweated out 4,000 votes in a county in Georgia and 3,000 in Philadelphia. Now is the time to fix it so that never ever again can a few hundred voters in Broward County, Florida (and an army of lawyers, and five Supreme Court justices) give us a president who clearly lost the popular vote.
The random nature of the thing cuts both ways, by the way. John Kerry, who lost the national popular vote, was short just 54,000 votes in Ohio of winning there and beating George Bush in the Electoral College in 2004.
The Electoral College is anti-democratic. It places an artificial, destructive and anachronistic mechanism between American voters and the effects of their vote in presidential elections — Republicans in California and New York are as effectively disenfranchised as Democrats in Kansas and Alabama. Further, it heavily distorts the shape of campaigning — candidates ignore safe states, because they can, and lavish attention on “battleground” states.
The distortion extends to very concrete matters of governance. According to a 2011 study by John Joseph Hudak, “The Politics of Federal Grants,” battleground states receive 7% more federal grants than “spectator” states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations and more Superfund enforcement exemptions. It simply is not fair. And it’s really dumb.
Constitutional amendments are arduous, and the will to get rid of the Electoral College tends to fade as the last election recedes in the rearview mirror. But there is an easier way to kill this procedural zombie — not by abolition but by legislation at the state level. The bipartisan National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a binding agreement among states to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national vote, once the compact reaches 270. It’s mostly there, and getting closer — Colorado joined last week, by popular referendum, adding its nine electoral votes for a total of 196.
The bill has also passed one legislative chamber in another nine states with a total of 88 electoral votes — it passed the Arizona House in 2016.
Please visit the National Popular Vote website for more information. And let your state reps know you’d like your vote not just to be counted, but to actually count.
