WILL THE “ELECTORAL COLLEGE” EVENTUALLY BE REPLACED BY THE “POPULAR VOTE”?

…Alexander Hamilton was a believer in the Electoral College for preventing the election of a tyrannical American president.

Presidential elections will probably, eventually become Popular Vote elections.

It is important to understand why we have the Electoral College. 

It was created for two reasons. The first purpose was to create a buffer between the population and the selection of a President.  The second reason was as to structure of the government to give extra power to the smaller states.  At the time, the slave states were all the smaller states having the least population.  Their population was mostly more negro slaves than the slave owners, and slaves obviously could not vote.

The founders used that first reason to create the Electoral College, which is hard to understand in today’s America. The founding fathers were afraid of a direct vote election to the Presidency as they feared a tyrant could manipulate the press and the public opinion to come to power.  In other words, they were very concerned about having a president like President Trump without having an equally powerful Congress and a Judicial Branch as a check on the Executive Branch

The electoral college is part of compromises made at the Constitutional Convention to satisfy those small states.  Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representative in Congress, thus no state could have less than 3 electoral votes. The result of this system is that in this last election, the state of Wyoming cast about 210,000 total votes, and thus each of the 3 electors represented 70,000 votes.  Now, in California, approximately 9,700,000 votes were cast for their 54 electoral votes, thus each elector represents 179,000 votes for each elector vote. Obviously, this creates an unfair advantage to voters in the small states whose each electoral vote actually counts for more than for those people living in the medium and larger states.

Look at it this way, a single electoral vote for Wyoming represents 70,000 voters, while an electoral vote for California represents 179,000 voters.  But in the electoral election, the 1 Wyoming vote carries as much weight as one California electoral vote.  Instead of it being 70K votes versus 9.700K votes, it’s 3 versus 54 votes.

Unfortunately, for today, because our government is mainly run by two political parties, the current president’s party didn’t have the spine to do their job when they were running the House for doing a proper check and balance on the Executive Branch.

When Trump became the Republican nominee, he railed against the Electoral College. Trump himself used to seriously oppose the Electoral College, once calling it a "disaster for democracy."

But, as we have learned, Trump did not expect to beat Hillary in 2016, so of course, he was against the Electoral College because the smaller states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, had been expected to vote Democratic.  It was the voters in those states that wanted a change, and they decided to believe all the lies that Trump was spouting off at his high-profile campaign events.

So, since he did win the Electoral College, today Donald Trump thinks the Electoral College was a “genius idea from the Founding Fathers!”  "I used to like the idea of the Popular Vote," he tweeted, "but now I realize the Electoral College is far better for the U.S.A."

So, in his latest attack on the Democrats running against Trump in 2020, President Donald Trump is now defending the constitutional mechanism he once opposed.  The very thing that got him elected in the first place.

"The Democrats are getting very 'strange.'" Trump said during a late-night tweet storm. "They now want to change the voting age to 16, abolish the Electoral College, and Increase significantly the number of Supreme Court Justices.  Actually, you’ve got to win it at the [Electoral] Ballot Box!"

Trump zeroed in on the latest Democratic calls to eliminate the Electoral College, which was the key to his election, and he did lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than 3 million popular votes.  

By losing the popular vote to Hillary by more votes than any other former losing president, he of course just loves, the Electoral College.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, (D-MA), , who is seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, she has called for the end of the Electoral College in a Mississippi town hall event.

Senator Warren, whom Trump calls “Pocahontas”, had said: “My view is that every vote matters.  And the way we can make that happen is we can have national voting, and that means getting rid of the Electoral College."

"The brilliance of the Electoral College is that you must go to many States to win," Trump said during his series of tweets against the Popular Vote. "The Cities would end up running the Country.  Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power, and we can’t let that happen."

And there are a number of campaigners and US states that agree with Senator Warren.

Former US Rep. Beto O’Rouke, D-Tex., has also said that eliminating the Electoral College might be a good idea "because you had an election in 2016 where the loser got 3 million more votes than the victor."

And one must remember in two recent presidential elections, Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000, they both won the Electoral College, but both lost in the Popular Vote.

Many Democrats want to change the system, and they are correct when they say that the Electoral College forces all candidates to focus on a limited number of battleground states, while they  ignore those larger states with large populations.

On the other side, critics say that a Popular Vote election would further restrict campaigning, confining the candidates to campaign in the biggest states.

But at least a Popular Vote election would allow the winner to be the choice of all of the people, not just those selected, “Electoral States”.

But the idea of a change to a popular vote over the Electoral College is catching on across the country.

It would take a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College.  However, a group of states are looking at another way to make the college moot by agreeing to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is a current agreement among a group of US States and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall Popular Vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.  

This compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome.  As of March 2019, the compact has been adopted by twelve states and the District of Columbia. Together, they already have 181 electoral votes, which is 33.6% of the Electoral College and 67.0% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.  Colorado recently joined the Popular Vote compact.

It will take time, but it is headed in the right direction.

Copyright G.Ater  2019