The Electoral College: A Thorny Issue in American Presidential Elections

The Electoral College has been a constant source of controversy since its creation by the Founding Fathers. Is it a fair way of electing the president of the United States, or should it be scrapped? The debate over its continued use resurfaced during the 2016 presidential election when Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than 2.8 million votes but won 30 states and the Electoral College and therefore the presidency.

Historical Origins and Evolution

The Electoral College was established by the Founding Fathers and has undergone revisions through the Twelfth Amendment (ratified June 15, 1804), the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 1868), and the Twenty-third Amendment (ratified March 29, 1961). Historians have suggested a variety of reasons for the adoption of the Electoral College, including concerns about the separation of powers and the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, the balance between small and large states, slavery, and the perceived dangers of direct [popular vote] democracy.

How the Electoral College Works

On election day, voters choosing a presidential candidate are actually casting a vote for an elector. Most states use the “winner-take-all” method, in which all electoral votes are awarded to the winner of the popular vote in that state. In Nebraska and Maine, the candidate who wins the state’s overall popular vote receives two electors, and one elector from each congressional district is apportioned to the popular vote winner in that district. In each state, a group of electors is chosen by each political party. The electors meet on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December after the presidential election. The electors gather in their respective states and cast their votes for president and vice president on separate ballots.

The Core Debate: Popular Vote vs. Electoral College

The United States is the only democratic country in the world in which a presidential candidate can win the most popular votes and lose the election. This has happened four other times in American history: in 1824 (John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden), 1888 (Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland), and 2000 (George W. Bush over Al Gore). In the 21st century, this has happened twice, including in 2016.

Arguments in Favor of the Electoral College

Protecting Minority Voices

The Electoral College was created to protect the voices of the minority from being overwhelmed by the will of the majority. The Electoral College was also intended to prevent states with larger populations from having undue influence and to compromise between electing the president by popular vote and letting Congress choose the president. Democratic Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak vetoed a measure in 2019 that would have added the state to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would have obligated the state’s electors to vote for the popular vote winner. “The Framers’ fears of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ is still very relevant today.

Read also: Abolishing the Electoral College

Ensuring National Focus

If the election depended solely on the popular vote, then presidential candidates could limit campaigning to heavily populated areas or specific regions. Currently, to win the election, candidates need electoral votes from multiple regions and, therefore, they build campaign platforms with a national focus, meaning that the winner will actually be expected to serve the needs of the entire country. Without the Electoral College, groups such as Iowa farmers and Ohio factory workers would be ignored in favor of pandering to metropolitan areas with higher population densities, leaving rural areas and small towns marginalized. “The current Electoral College system creates a needed balance between rural and urban interests and ensures that the winning candidate has support from multiple regions of the country,” according to Tina Mulally, a South Dakota state representative.

Providing Certainty in Elections

The Electoral College can preclude calls for recounts or demands for runoff elections, giving certainty to presidential elections. This happened with Richard Nixon in 1968 and Bill Clinton in 1992, when both men won the most electoral votes while receiving just 43 percent of the popular vote. The existence of the Electoral College precluded calls for recounts or demands for runoff elections. “There is pressure for runoff elections when no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast; that pressure, which would greatly complicate the presidential election process, is reduced by the Electoral College, which invariably produces a clear winner,” explains Richard A. Posner, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. The electoral process can also create a larger mandate to increase the president’s credibility.

Arguments Against the Electoral College

Disproportionate Power to Swing States

The Electoral College gives too much power to swing states and allows presidential elections to be decided by a handful of states. The two main political parties can count on winning the electoral votes in certain states, such as California for the Democratic Party and Indiana for the Republican Party, without worrying about the actual popular vote totals. A November 6, 2016, episode of PBS NewsHour revealed that “Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have made more than 90 percent of their campaign stops in just 11 so-called battleground states. House and Senate, so small states get extra votes.

Rooted in Slavery and Racism

The “minority” interests the Founding Fathers intended the Electoral College to protect were those of enslavers and states with legal slavery. James Madison stated, “There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. “Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts,” explains Wilfred Codrington III, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president.…With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise [counting only three-fifths of the enslaved population instead of the population as a whole] as the foundation. The racism at the root of the Electoral College persists, suppressing the votes of people of color in favor of voters from largely homogeneously white states.

Undermining Representative Democracy

The Electoral College undermines representative democracy and the notion of one person, one vote. There are some 335 million people in the United States. But just 538 people decide who will be president. In 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than one million votes, and yet she still lost the election on the basis of electoral votes. “Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?…You can’t let 538 people decide the fate of a country of 300 million people,” says Robert Nemanich, a math teacher and former elector from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Even Donald Trump, who benefited from the Electoral College system, stated after the 2016 presidential election that he believed presidents should be chosen by popular vote: “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.” Just as in 2000, when George W. Bush became president after receiving fewer Electoral College votes than their opponents. “If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It’s about one person, one vote-everybody’s vote counting equally. You’re not going to convince a majority of Americans that that’s not how you should do it,” says Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President (2020).

Public Opinion

More than six-in-ten Americans (63%) would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally. Roughly a third (35%) favor retaining the Electoral College system, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 9,720 adults conducted Aug. 26-Sept. Republicans were less supportive of this change following Trump’s 2016 win. Majorities across all age groups support changing the system. However, adults younger than 50 are somewhat more supportive of this than those ages 50 and older (66% vs. 60%).

Potential Reforms and Alternatives

National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

A proposal calling for a national popular vote interstate compact could change the process without abolishing the Electoral College. Under this agreement, states will pledge their electors to the candidate who gets the most votes across the country, Kowal said. “It wouldn't get rid of the Electoral College, but it would make the Electoral College dependent on the national popular vote, rather than the vote of individual states,” Kowal said. Scherb said the compact could come into effect in the next four to six years. “I think a neat feature of the national popular vote interstate compact is that it does not take a constitutional amendment,” Scherb said. “You can do it state by state.” Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have agreed to this compact and together they have 209 electoral votes, Kowal said. This compact would not go into effect until there are 270 electoral votes pledged, Fortier added. Massachusetts adopted the compact in August 2010.

Constitutional Amendment

It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, something requiring two-thirds votes in the House and Senate and ratification by three-quarters of the states. That has only been done 27 times in the nation’s history. It could also be changed through a Constitutional Convention called for by two-thirds of the states - something that has never happened.

Proportional Representation

Another possible solution would include proportional representation. Under the current winner-takes-all system a candidate gets all the electoral votes if they get 50.1% of the vote.

Campaign Strategy Implications

Replacing the Electoral College would change campaign strategy as candidates would need to visit the entire country. Swing states currently receive the majority of the advertising and this new compact would require outreach across the country, Scherb said. “I think it would be a much more equal distribution of not only campaign visits, but also campaign spending across the board,” Scherb said.

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