image from
Robert Reich on Facebook
Excerpt:
For the second time in five elections, the presidential candidate who won the most popular votes lost the election. And once again, presidential candidates competed in only a handful of swing states, effectively ignoring the rest of us.
We can change this bizarre system without a constitutional amendment if enough states require their electors to vote for the winner of the nationwide popular vote (instead of who won in that state).
We're closer than you might think to such a National Popular Vote compact. Already, 10 states and the District of Columbia have signed on, totaling 165 electoral votes of the needed 270. ...
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By JONATHAN MAHLER and STEVE EDER NOV. 10, 2016, New York Times
In November 2000, as the Florida recount gripped the nation, a newly elected
Democratic senator from New York took a break from an upstate victory tour to
address the possibility that Al Gore could wind up winning the popular vote but
losing the presidential election.
She was unequivocal. “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect
the will of the people,” Hillary Clinton said, “and to me that means it’s time to do
away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.”
Sixteen years later, the Electoral College is still standing, and Mrs. Clinton has
followed Mr. Gore as the second Democratic presidential candidate in modern
history to be defeated by a Republican who earned fewer votes, in his case George W.
Bush.
In her concession speech on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton did not mention the
popular vote, an omission that seemed to signal her desire to encourage a smooth
and civil transition of power after a divisive election. But her running mate, Senator
Tim Kaine of Virginia, highlighted her higher vote total than Donald J. Trump’s in
introducing her.
The disparity left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Democrats, whose party
won the country’s national popular vote for the third consecutive election but no
longer controls any branch of government.
“If we really subscribe to the notion that ‘majority rules,’ then why do we deny
the majority their chosen candidate?” asked Jennifer M. Granholm, a former
governor of Michigan.
Mr. Trump himself has been critical of the Electoral College in the past. On the
eve of the 2012 election, he called it “a disaster for a democracy” in a Twitter post.
Now, after months of railing against what he called a “rigged” election, he has
become the unlikely beneficiary of an electoral system that enables a candidate to
win the race without winning over the most voters.
None of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters have gone so far as to suggest that the
popular vote tally should delegitimize Mr. Trump’s victory, and the popular-vote
margin in Tuesday’s election was in fact narrower than the one that separated Mr.
Bush and Mr. Gore in 2000.
But the results are already renewing calls for electoral reform. “I personally
would like to see the Electoral College eliminated entirely,” said David Boies, the
lawyer who represented Mr. Gore in the Florida recount in 2000. “I think it’s a
historical anomaly.”
Defenders of the system argue that it reduces the chances of daunting
nationwide recounts in close races, a scenario that Gary L. Gregg II, an Electoral
College expert at the University of Louisville, said would be a “national nightmare.”
A variety of factors informed the creation of the Electoral College, which
apportions a fixed number of votes to each state based on the size of its
congressional delegation. The founding fathers sought to ensure that residents in
states with smaller populations were not ignored.
In an era that predated mass media and even political parties, the founders were
also concerned that average Americans would lack enough information about the
candidates to make intelligent choices. So informed “electors” would stand in for
them.
Above all, some historians point to the critical role that slavery played in the
formation of the system. Southern delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention,
most prominently James Madison of Virginia, were concerned that their
constituents would be outnumbered by Northerners. The Three-Fifths Compromise,
however, allowed states to count each slave as three-fifths of a person — enough, at
the time, to ensure a Southern majority in presidential races. [The population of
slaves would be counted as three-fifths in total when apportioning Representatives, as
well as Presidential electors and taxes. The Three-Fifths Compromise was proposed
by James Wilson and Roger Sherman, who were both delegates for the Constitutional
Convention of 1787.]
slaves would be counted as three-fifths in total when apportioning Representatives, as
well as Presidential electors and taxes. The Three-Fifths Compromise was proposed
by James Wilson and Roger Sherman, who were both delegates for the Constitutional
Convention of 1787.]
On social media Wednesday, some drew connections between that history and
what they perceived as an imbalance in the Electoral College that favors
Republicans.
“Electoral college will forever tip balance to rural/conservative/“white”/older
voters — a concession to slave-holders originally,” the author Joyce Carol Oates
wrote on Twitter.
To its critics, the Electoral College is a relic that violates the democratic
principle of one person, one vote, and distorts the presidential campaign by
encouraging candidates to campaign only in the relatively small number of contested
states.
“I think it is intolerable for democracy,” said George C. Edwards III, a political
science professor at Texas A&M University and the author of a book on the Electoral
College. “I can’t think of any justification for it, and any justification that is offered
doesn’t bear scrutiny.”
But calls to change the system, which would require a constitutional
amendment, are likely to fall on deaf ears with Republicans in control of both houses
of Congress.
And though there was some momentum for reform after Mr. Gore’s defeat, it
dissipated after Mr. Bush and Barack Obama won both the popular and electoral
votes in 2004, 2008 and 2012.
Some states have discussed a possibility that would not necessarily require
amending the Constitution: jettisoning the winner-take-all system, in which a single
candidate is awarded all of a state’s electoral votes — regardless of the popular vote
— and instead apportioning them to reflect the breakdown of each state’s popular
vote. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, already do this.
But even that approach could face challenges, said Laurence H. Tribe, a
professor at Harvard Law School.
For reformers, the best hope may lie in the so-called National Popular Vote
Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award all of their respective
electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in a given election.
So far, 10 states and the District of Columbia have joined the agreement. But it
will only go into effect when enough states have signed on to guarantee that the
winner of the popular vote would win an election.
For now, it seems, any change still remains a far-off notion.
“I am very mad at James Madison,” said former Representative Barney Frank, a
Massachusetts Democrat. “But I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it.”