Time (Again) For the Electoral College to Go

The electoral college system is like the cicada: it crops up every four years to annoy voters with its power to override the popular vote in favor of arcane calculations that minimize the influence of states with larger populations. 2024 is no different.

The electoral college was created in 1787 as the founders tried to work out a system for electing a president. After 22 days of debate and 30 votes, the electoral college was agreed upon as a way to placate smaller (mostly slave holding) states with an equal share of voting influence. The result? Wyoming winds up having four times more influence on election results than does more densely populated California. In effect, the electoral college disenfranchises millions of voters. Candidates then hyper-focus only on “swing states,” overlooking the importance and value of all the rest.

The most recent example of how candidates calculate and play to the EC was in 2016, when Donald Trump squeaked out a presidency over the popular vote winner, Hillary Clinton. The whole process seems counterintuitive to our democracy; more than six out of ten Americans want a system where the candidate getting the most votes wins office. Through the EC, a candidate with only 23% of the popular vote could theoretically be declared the winner.

The EC creates too many opportunities for shenanigans, such as how and who picks the state’s “electors” with the power to grant their votes to the candidates (aka “winner take all”). In the 2020 election which Trump lost, there was a hard push on the GOP side to have slates of alternate (read: “fake”) electors submitted to Congress during the certification process on January 6, 2021 to bypass Joe Biden’s wins.

We saw how well that turned out.

The electoral college system is the basis of the 12^th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804. However, since then there have been over 700 proposals introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate it. It’s a heavy lift, one that would require another amendment. But having seen the sketchy ways in which state electors can be manipulated to deliver an unfair “win,” it’s worth keeping up the fight. This site provides some basic facts about the Electoral College system and allows you to join the push to get Congress to support a National Popular Vote.

Cindy Grogan is a writer, lover of history and "Star Trek" (TOS), and hardcore politics junkie. There was that one time she campaigned for Gerald Ford (yikes), but ever since, she's been devoted to Democratic and progressive policies.