what would happen if the electoral college was abolished

Despite California having millions of more people living in the state compared to Wyoming, the weight of a vote is 30% less. Every vote matters, commented Senator Elizabet Warren (D-Mass) in an early campaign stop in Mississippi in 2019, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.. If the remaining states with Democratic control of the legislature (Maine, Nevada, and Virginia) were to sign on, it would add an additional 23 Electoral College votes. There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. Today that system is threatened by a proposal called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or. Stanford, California 94305. For example, in 1967, 58 percent favored its abolition, while in 1981, 75 percent of . A split of electoral votes has occurred once in each of these states. There have been some unusual elections, such as the 1972 affair when Richard Nixon took 520 electoral votes to George McGoverns 16. The general threshold that an election result must reach to trigger an automatic recount is a difference of 0.5% of the vote or less. Recurring debt ceiling fights will only be solved by budget reform, Amend the Constitution so the candidate who receives the most votes wins. Most people in America want the Electoral College gone, and they want to select a president based on who gets the most votes nationally, polls say. Would the federal government get into the business of administering the elections, or leave that up to state and local officials, as it does today? There are millions of Republicans in deep-blue states, like Massachusetts and California. Or is it working the way it is supposed to? 1, that Democrats will win a popular vote every time. As Americans look at their election processes, a complete review of the pros and cons of abolishing the Electoral College is useful when taking this unique structure into account. They disagreed so strongly that the final system wasnt adopted until the last minute, thrown together by a few delegates in a side room. Most Americans would breathe a sigh of relief, I believe, if we had a system capable of choosing the U.S. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Does this interactive influence how you feel about the Electoral College? In the first instance, states could decide to award 2 Electoral College votes (EVs) to the winner of the national popular vote (NPV) and the remainder to the winner of the state. Only two Republicans voted for someone other than Trump and Pence. It would only come into effect when it could guarantee that outcome. It also stops the distribution process where California gets 55 votes, but a state like Delaware only gets 3. In the video above, we delve into the reasons people give for keeping the Electoral College and why theyre wrong. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/learning/is-the-electoral-college-a-problem-does-it-need-to-be-fixed.html. While people were moving to the coasts, especially California, the Electoral College stayed the same. Its how we run every election in the country, except the most important one of all. The Electoral College is outlined in Article II, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution. Given that a change would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures, it is not going to happen. Does It Need to Be Fixed? Here are the yea and the nay. 4. The current structure limits Americans from pushing in this direction even though candidates tend to visit swing states more often. And, as our colleague Bill Galston has written, the Electoral College continues to be a ticking time bomb. In the 2020 presidential election a shift of just 45,000 votes in three states, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona could have shattered Americans belief in the legitimacy of their political system by creating a tie in the Electoral College and sending the election to the House of Representatives. That means that the national winner would start out with 102 Electoral College votes. This means that every election, 80 percent of American voters, roughly 100 million people, get ignored. This process stopped the process that was used in England to select a Prime Minister. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. {{currentYear}} American Bar Association, all rights reserved. Save Our States, The Status of National Popular Vote, https://saveourstates.com/threats/the-status-of-npv (accessed April 17, 2020). Yet, ratification happens not by popular vote but by state legislature. During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had 90% of their campaign stops in only 11 states. First, there's the Constitutional problem. A party system was instituted really to fulfill that old function of the Electoral College's, which is to narrow people down and get responsible people to be candidates for the presidency. And the reasons people think we need to keep the Electoral College the way it is, theyre all wrong. Debate renewed in 2016 after theelectionof the fifth U.S. president who won the presidency despite losing the popular vote. In 2000 Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote against Governor George W. Bush by 543,895. Thrown together at the last minute by the countrys founders, it almost immediately stopped functioning as they thought it would. In the interactive diagram The Battleground States Biden and Trump Need to Win 270, you are able to build your own coalition of states to see how either candidate, President Trump or former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., can win the election. Not this year. Thats almost 1.5 billion votes. Gronke notes, however, that there would be major administrative challenges if the U.S. ever got to the point of switching to a national popular vote. Out of those visits, almost 70% of them happened in only four states: North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Seventy percent of Americans between the ages of 18-29 said that the president should be chosen through a popular vote model, while just 56 percent of those over the age of 65 agreed. A presidential candidate who doesnt receive a majority of the votes can still win the Electoral College to get into the White House. Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. 2? Despite what you may have learned in school, it was not the product of careful design by brilliant men. Second, a national popular vote would eliminate the battleground state phenomenon that has now become the key feature of post-convention campaigning, leaving most Americans alienated from the decisive phase of presidential elections. What Is the Electoral College? Democratic presidential candidates are weighing in too. There have been a total of five candidates who have won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, with the most recent cases occurring in the 2016 and 2000 . To this day, people are still arguing that Al Gore was the real winner and debating whether the recount in Florida was accurate the state whose electors propelled Bush to the top. Hans von Spakovsky, Destroying the Electoral College: The Anti-Federalist National Popular Vote Scheme, Heritage Legal Memorandum No. 61% of Americans Support Abolishing Electoral College by Megan Brenan Story Highlights 61% prefer amending Constitution to use popular vote to elect president 89% of Democrats, 23% of Republicans. Abolishing the Electoral College stops swing states from having sway in the election. Of the 700 attempts to fix or abolish the electoral college, this one nearly succeeded In 1969, Congress almost approved a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college,. Tell us about it. Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning. The two-party system solves the fractured vote problem more effectively than the Electoral College ever did, and the electors never exercised genuine independence. Now, Trump feels the Electoral College is "far better for the U.S.A." as he wrote Tuesday on Twitter. Polls conducted by Gallup over the past seven decades, with the most recent being from 2013, clearly show the American public's desire to get rid of the whole system. Remember what we said back in Myth No. They simply happen to be states that become competitive because of their demography, and which are readily identifiable as such because of the increasing sophistication of political polling. Anyone can read what you share. Candidates focus on swing states because they actually have a chance of flipping them and winning a bucket of electoral votes. Source: Daily Kos Elections. If a candidate wins the popular vote in a state, even by a single vote, they get all of that states electoral votes. The founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects. He disliked the practice so much he called for a constitutional amendment barring it. But really, scholars say, consensus is constructed through thousands of small acts over generations. It is extremely difficult to amend the Constitution. The voices of small states, like Rhode Island and Wyoming, would be drowned out. This action would allow the popular vote winner to take the White House. Well, American democracy operates on a whole collection of cherished ideas and practices, but our system also includes some dusty old artifacts from its founding two centuries ago. This is just one way the legacy of slavery still taints our politics today. If the Electoral College system begins to prevent, on a regular basis, the popular vote winner from becoming president, it will create systemic challenges. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, your vote probably doesnt count the way it should. The small towns in the United States, along with all of the rural areas, would become marginalized if this system were to be entirely abolished. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. In his recent Op-Ed The Electoral College Will Destroy America, Mr. Wegman provides further evidence to support his claim that the Electoral College is unfair: The Electoral College as it functions today is the most glaring reminder of many that our democracy is not fair, not equal and not representative. LIASSON: It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, so that's not going to happen. Under the current system, voters in each state cast their ballots for electors, of which 270 are necessary to win. So overall, while the Electoral College may not make much of a difference to the results of our modern elections, it forces our politicians to have a larger scope of the issues facing this country, rather than just focusing on the concerns people in areas with large populations care about. Abolishing the Electoral College seems to be the next logical step in that process. In May, the Washington State Supreme Courtuphelda state election law that said an elector who did not vote for the candidate he pledged to support could be fined up to $1,000 in civil penalties. And even when that doesn't happen, Wegman sees another problem with the . The Electoral College has given one candidate a majority win in this political structure since 1992, but there have been four times when the winner of the election didnt receive a clear majority of the votes across the entire country. FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast have predicted. Redirecting to https://m.startribune.com/one-clear-result-of-the-2020-election-at-last-let-s-abolish-the-electoral-college/. Changing or eliminating the Electoral College can be accomplished only by an amendment to the Constitution, which requires the. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,686 and yet lost the Electoral College vote: 304 for Trump and 227 for Clinton. The cost of conducting a nationwide recount could be hundreds of millions of dollars, which is money that may not always be in the budget. The interests of the minority would no longer receive protection. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. While there are two different means to amend the founding document, this country has always used the same route: a 2/3rds vote in both houses of Congress, followed by the ratification of 3/4ths of the states. And so each Electoral College vote in a small state like Delaware or Wyoming is worth more than an Electoral College vote in a big state like California. Warren says she wants to get rid of the Electoral College, and vote for president using a national popular vote. Each of those states has Democratic control of the state legislature. "The game will not be any longer to be a [politician who is] liberal but be able to appeal to a rural Ohioan," he said. Technically, it is . Sometimes one party does better for a few election cycles. 5. "Every vote matters," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in Mississippi on Monday. But the Electoral College is worse than merely useless. In 2016, the results were even more dramatic. However, it is possible to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. Electoral vote totals will equal 538. In the history of the United States, there have been five elections where the eventual winner didnt receive a clear majority of the vote. Throughout our nations history there have been many unwise attempts to abolish the Electoral College, but these proposed constitutional amendments saw little success and unsurprisingly failed to gain traction. Under the current structure of the United States, there are 50 unique presidential contests instead of one nationwide affair to elect a President. That, critics say, means devaluing the votes of many non-white voters too. It wasnt the first time a president won by losing or the second or even the fourth. Some laws simply state that electors must vote for the candidate of the party they represent; others require electors to sign an oath or a pledge. But if youre a voter in the United States, theres a really good chance your vote doesnt count the way you think it does. Without the Electoral College, big states like California and New York would dominate elections. The way it gets implemented is the result of dozens of state laws, which evolved over time as the country settled into a two-party system. Having a state-based system for electing both houses of Congress should be adequate to that task. And yet we have generally accepted it for centuries on the assumption it serves an important purpose. Myth No. In the history of the United States, there have been six presidential elections that would have qualified for this issue and three of them have occurred since 1968. Electoral vote totals will equal 538. There are also circumstances where a majority of electors might not be available, which would throw the results of the election into the House of Representatives. This scenario is very different from what happened in 2000 when Gore and Bush were separated by less than 1 percent of the popular vote.
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