The 2016 presidential election was a double edged sword for the campaign to fix the Electoral College. On one hand, Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College despite losing to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes gave a much needed jolt to efforts supporting an election by popular vote. On the other hand, by making the Electoral College synonymous with Trump’s victory, the 2016 election has politicized the issue more than ever before. Republicans rushed to defend it while Democrats vehemently criticized it. That’s a shame because the primary reasons to fix the Electoral College have nothing to do with any specific election.
The Electoral College does not need to be replaced because it chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, though that is definitely not a strong point in its favor. The Electoral College needs to be replaced because it is undemocratic, outdated, and divisive. It does not serve our interests in a representative democracy. It does not even do the good things its supporters claim it does like protecting small states or ensuring that no states are ignored. The most viable plan to fix the Electoral College—the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)—is not a response to the 2016 election. It is a response to a flawed method of electing a President that has been problematic for decades.
The NPVIC is an agreement among states to cast their electoral votes for whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. Once states totaling a majority of electoral votes (currently 270) join the Compact, it will take effect and ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote always becomes President. The Compact is already more than halfway to success, with ten states plus the District of Columbia totaling 165 electoral votes signed on. But in order to get across the finish line the Compact will need the support of many, including state legislators, whose views are not overly influenced by last November’s result. Here are five reasons to fix the Electoral College that have nothing to do with the 2016 election.
Fixing The Electoral College Will Give Every Voter Equal Influence
The Electoral College currently gives voters in a few select swing states like Ohio and Florida a greater ability to influence the outcome of the presidential election than voters in safe states like Vermont or Texas. Presidential candidates spend the vast majority of their time campaigning in about a dozen swing states while ignoring the rest of the country. This may not violate the letter of the “one person, one vote” law, but it certainly violates the spirit of it.
To make matters worse, studies show that swing states are more likely than other states to receive presidential disaster declarations and the financial aid that accompanies them. Not only do voters in swing states have more influence over the presidential election, they get special perks from presidents as well.
Defenders of the Electoral College come up with many reasons why the Electoral College is wonderful while the popular vote would be a disaster (though they don’t seem to object that we choose our governors, senators, house representatives, mayors, state legislators, and nearly every other elected official via popular vote) but they can never offer a convincing explanation why a vote in North Carolina should be more valuable than a vote in New York. That’s because there isn’t one. Giving some voters more power than others in a national election is unfair and unequal. Electing our President by popular vote would ensure that every vote is worth the same no matter where it comes from.
Fixing The Electoral College Will Increase Voter Turnout
One of the consequences of the swing state/safe state phenomenon is decreasing voter turnout in most states. Evidence shows that voter turnout is higher in swing states and it is not difficult to understand why. Take California, for example.
Though California, like every state, offers a diverse mix of individuals with varying political views (Trump got more votes from California than from nine so called red states combined), as a whole California leans heavily to the left, giving both Republicans and Democrats less incentive to vote. For Republicans, voting in the presidential election seems futile. What is the point when your candidate is expected to lose by over 2 million votes? For Democrats, voting may seem unnecessary. Why bother to pad a preordained victory when you can go to the beach?
Depressing voter turnout and giving people who already have enough distractions even less reason to be politically active can lead to dire consequences in a representative democracy. Our elected officials are only going to represent our interests if we hold them accountable by staying informed, engaged, and by being willing to vote them out if they do not do their job to our satisfaction. By decreasing voter turnout, the Electoral College moves the needle in the wrong direction.
On the other hand, electing our President by popular vote would give voters more incentive to head to the polls and stay informed, not just about the presidential election, but about the other candidates and issues on the ballot as well. It would also give people more incentive to discuss the election with their friends or neighbors who disagree with them, the kind of discussion that is much needed in the era of the arguing with strangers over the internet. Low voter turnout is bad for democracy. Fixing the Electoral College will help cure what ails us.
Fixing The Electoral College Will Make Our Elections Safer
Studies of voter fraud in the United States have consistently shown that it is minimal or virtually nonexistent. But the threat of voter fraud or tampering with elections is very real, and as information about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election comes to light, we will find out just how real. So what does this have to do with the Electoral College? The Electoral College makes it easier to steal a presidential election.
If an enemy of the state or unscrupulous partisan had wanted to tip the balance of the 2000 election, it would have taken just 538 more votes in Florida for Al Gore to do it. In 2004, John Kerry would have been President with just 120,000 more votes in Ohio. The Electoral College makes it easier to change the outcome of a presidential election because it may only take a few thousand votes in the right state to do so, and leading up to the election we already know which states those are likely to be. Ironically, supporters of the Electoral College sometimes argue that it protects against voter fraud by confining fraud to swing states, but the opposite is actually true. The Electoral College makes it easy for the villains to know where to focus their attention.
Electing our President by popular vote would solve this problem. Though fraud and tampering would still be possible, nefarious efforts would have less chance of success because it might take millions of votes to tip the election rather than hundreds or thousands. The integrity of our elections is too important to leave in the hands of one or two states with limited resources. Fixing the Electoral College will help protect the electoral process.
Fixing The Electoral College Will Help Overlooked States
Supporters of the Electoral College love to say that it protects small states like Alaska or Wyoming and that if we elected our President by popular vote, those small states would be ignored. They also claim that the Electoral College forces candidates to focus on the entire country. Both claims are wrong.
Under the current system small states are already ignored and fixing the Electoral College would help states—small and big—that are currently overlooked. The Electoral College doesn’t reward small states; it rewards swing states. And since most small states happen to be safe states, presidential candidates spend the bulk of their time and money elsewhere. Of the fifteen smallest states in the country by population, only New Hampshire received significant attention from candidates during the 2016 campaign because it is both a swing state and the home of an important primary election. The other fourteen smallest states were effectively flyover country. The idea that the Electoral College protects small states in a meaningful way is a myth.
Electing our President by popular vote would give candidates more incentive to spend their time and money more equitably. It would certainly be a significant upgrade over the current system in which candidates focus nearly all of their attention on a handful of states east of the Mississippi River.
Fixing The Electoral College Will Make Our Country Less Divided
By artificially separating the country into red and blue states, the Electoral College creates the perception that Americans are more divided than we actually are and engenders troubling animosity. Some people from blue states look down on red state residents as uninformed bumpkins while some who live in red states view blue state citizens as hypersensitive, condescending elites who want to impose their views on everyone else. Looking at an electoral map, it is easy to see how those views gain traction.
States on an electoral map are all solidly just one color—red or blue. There are no shades of pink or purple or pockets of red within blue to reflect that even within individual states and communities, there is a unique mix of individuals with complicated views. That kind of artificial division is misleading, unnecessary, and seems to be increasingly reflected in the composition of Congress, a body that is noteworthy for its inability to get things done through compromise.
Electing our President by popular vote would diminish those artificial divisions. In elections in which the winner is decided by popular vote like a state governor’s race, there is no need to separate communities into colors. The candidate who receives the most votes wins. It is simple, straightforward, and much less divisive than the current system.
What If?
If John Kerry had gained 120,000 more votes in Ohio and won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote in 2004 on the heels of George W. Bush’s victory in 2000, I think we would have started electing our President by popular vote in 2008. But things played out differently and for now we must still contend with this relic that was created in an era when women could not vote and many Americans still owned slaves. Fixing the outdated Electoral College with the NPVIC is within our reach, but we cannot achieve that goal by using the 2016 election as our key piece of evidence, and we shouldn’t. The popular vote is a more equitable, safe, inclusive, and democratic way to choose our President. Those reasons alone are why it is time to fix the Electoral College once and for all.