Consider history: Following the election of 1968, there was a serious push for a constitutional amendment to move to a system of popular elections, though there had not been a constitutional amendment to change the electoral vote since 1804. “Every American should be guaranteed that their vote counts”, Boxer wrote.
Advertisement
In fact, once you dump the Electoral College, why stop there? They’re not ready. If they were, the Electoral College would’ve been abolished.
For example, Texas’ 38 electoral votes go to the state’s winning candidate whether the vote is one to zero, 10 million to zero, 50 to 49, or 4.68 million to 3.87 million (like it was this year.) Trump won Texas by only 9.1 percent, compared to Romney’s 15.8 percent victory in 2012. Instead, they vote for a slate of electors from each party who then gather in December to select the next president. So, for all practical purposes, what happens is we elect the president of the battleground states of America versus the president of the United States of America…
Since the election of Trump, calls to end the Electoral College have been on display in everything from opinion pieces, online petitions to protests in the streets.
So for your education, and to make sure that you do not look like an idiot in conversation, please see a list of the presidents who lost the popular vote but still won the presidency.
Nearly half of Russians polled in a survey have said that if they’d had the chance to vote in the recent U.S. presidential election, they would have backed the Republican candidate and eventual victor, Donald Trump.
Now, some activists in Arizona are making a last ditch effort to invalidate Trump’s win by harassing the state’s presidential electors to ignore voters and choose Clinton. Candidate Trump, for instance, would have spent a lot more time in the numerous conservative districts in upstate NY and northern and western California if all that mattered was the national popular vote tally. Had John Kerry convinced 59,301 George W. Bush voters in OH to support him instead, he would have taken the presidency in 2004 despite losing the popular vote by 3 million.
Democrats have used Clinton’s lead in the popular vote to downplay any mandate Trump might claim.
Overall, Donald Trump got more votes than Hillary Clinton in suburban and rural areas, while Clinton got more votes in the larger cities. A direct national election would mean focusing on blue-state Republicans and red-state liberals. Though, despite other potentially stronger reasons for its initial existence, the Electoral College was still partially designed with federalism in mind, as the number of electoral votes per state is slightly unweighted with the determination being based in part on the number of Senators as well as the number of representatives. Whether he, or Hillary Clinton, could have racked up more votes (and whether more people would have been motivated to turn out for their candidate) in an alternative system is another question entirely. The same thing happened in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost to George W. Bush thanks to the antiquated Electoral College. When he said “the system is rigged” we laughed. Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans would need to win over another 12 state delegations. However, if all states do not adopt this method a party in a state that still has the winner-take-all electoral vote system may gain an unfair advantage.
“Donald Trump is nobody’s fool – he is a smart guy”, Mr. Sanders said.
Advertisement
Georgia introduced a county unit system in 1917, presumably based on the Electoral College.
