what would happen if the electoral college was abolished

A presidential candidate who doesnt receive a majority of the votes can still win the Electoral College to get into the White House. Still, Levy said if he had to bet on whether the U.S. will still be using the Electoral College in 20 years he thinks it will. Whether youre Republican or Democrat, the Electoral College is unfair. Abolishing the Electoral College would get rid of this confusing process. According to Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper Number 68, the body was a compromise at the. The following table shows how this would have changed the outcome in two contested elections of the 21st century, and how a third would have remained the same. During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had 90% of their campaign stops in only 11 states. 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. Two hundred years after James Madisons letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. This shift would likely benefit that party for more than a generation. But there is something called the National Popular Vote Compact. The group of 16 (as of August 2019) currently control 196 electoral votes together. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. The great problems with our presidential selection system today stem from the haphazard way we choose the two major party presidential candidates. Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. 7. This agreement includes several states and DC, giving the electoral vote count assigned to them to the candidate who receives the most votes in the national election. The electors can vote their conscience as well, refusing to follow what their state elections guide them to do. .just the large States - the Cities would end up running the Country. The Electoral College consists of an elector selection, a group of people who will meet and vote for President and Vice President based on the results of their states election. Two closely watched cases arising from the 2016 electoral process, however, might provide the justices with an opportunity to do just that. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Our 230-year-old jerry-built system for picking the president, known as the Electoral College. Interestingly, the congressional caucus system is very close to the system the British used to replace Prime Minister David Cameron. Trump made a similar argument earlier this week, warning that "smaller states & then entire Midwest would end up losing all power.". 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. This issue exists in the Electoral College when the rural states face off with the urban ones. Britannicas ProCon.org lists three reasons: 1) The founding fathers thought the Electoral College was the best method for electing the president.2) The Electoral College ensures that different parts of the country, such as Iowa and Ohio, are involved in selecting the president, rather than just the most populated areas.3) The Electoral College guarantees certainty, whereas a popular vote system might lead to no candidate getting a majority. As Madison wrote in an 1823 letter, states using the winner-take-all rule are a string of beads and fail to reflect the true political diversity of their citizens. What are the positive arguments in favor of replacing the existing electoral system with a national popular vote? "The game will be: Be a liberal to the extent I can maximize votes in major urban centers.". 260, February 19, 2020, p. 9, https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/destroying-the-electoral-college-the-anti-federalist-national-popular-0. In the Electoral College, there are 51 voting jurisdiction (states) that includes D.C. Electoral college reform: What would happen if Congressional districts Even though some Americans dont like the gridlock that a two-party system creates, the electoral college keeps this design healthy with each 4-year cycle. But really, scholars say, consensus is constructed through thousands of small acts over generations. There can be distinctive advantages to one party in a decade where three election cycles are possible. It gives each state in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct electors equal to its representation in Congress. 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. Although he said that the system was far from perfect, it was at least excellent. Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. The electoral college ignores the will of the people. That position, shared by many Republicans, makes it highly unlikely that there would be sufficient support for changing the system. Instead of dealing with these complications, a simple majority vote would always speak of the will of the people. The Constitution originally stipulated that the top vote-getter chosen by these electors would become president and the individual with the second-most votes would be vice president. The distinction matters. Iowa farmers might lose out to California union workers since their population numbers are larger. Abolishing the Electoral College: Since the year 2000, there have been five presidential elections. The following table shows how this would have changed the outcome in the two contested elections of the 21st century and includes 2004 for comparison. Ive spent the past few years obsessively analyzing the Electoral College, trying to understand the concerns of the founding fathers, doing the math from different elections. In a truly national election, parties and candidates would have the incentive to turn out their votes wherever they were, fostering a deeper sense of engagement across the whole population. Think about it. Why, or why not? There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. Make sure to update your bookmarks! In late September, when the Republican nominee's numbers in the polls saw a significant rise and nearly eliminated Clinton's huge post-convention lead, forecasts still had her snatching the election with 17 more electoral votes than her opponent. 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. 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 party structureswhich, for all their faults, have a vested interest in candidates from the moderate middle who are able to work with Congress and other officials to governhave been sidelined. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. The first is easily dismissed. Blue states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the red states. "It really does over-represent some sparsely populated states, and it provides some skew and bias to our system that I just don't think is healthy anymore," said Paul Gronke, a political scientist at Reed College. Here are the yea and the nay. 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. 2) The Electoral College ensures that different parts of the country, such as Iowa and Ohio, are involved in selecting the president, rather than just the most populated areas. List of the Pros of Abolishing the Electoral College 1. hide caption. 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. In recent years, a new scheme has emerged that claims it can bypass the seemingly insurmountable impediment of a constitutional amendment process but have the same result of nullifying the Electoral College: The National Popular Vote Compact (NPV). Under this option, Florida would give 15 Electoral College votes to Clinton and 14 to Trump. The places where there are more people become the top priority, especially if there is a chance to swing some votes. Gronke asks. Or does the Electoral College work the way its supposed to, even if the candidate who wins the most votes loses? Do they outweigh the arguments that Mr. Wegman presents? [2] The compact would then be 43 Electoral College votes short of going into effect. Find all our Student Opinion questions in this column. Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? 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. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch. Your membership has expired - last chance for uninterrupted access to free CLE and other benefits. Editors Note: In 2016, we asked two professors to debate whether the Electoral College should cease to be the mechanism used for selecting the U.S. president. The system calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. To understand why, lets start from the point we make above: the Electoral College system currently benefits Republicans, as two Republican presidents in the last 20 years have been elected despite losing the popular vote and that nearly happened a third time this year. This cant go on. This is the result of an amazing technological revolution, but what does it have to do with the Electoral College? But its worth taking a closer look at arguments in favor of keeping the status quo. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. Were already letting women, former slaves, and 18-year-olds vote, changing the structure of the election since the countrys founding. 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. There were two additional votes for Sanders that were invalidated in Minnesota and one for Kasich in Colorado. As far as the 2016 election is concerned, Hillary Clinton would still be the likely winner if the Electoral College didn't exist. Social change can seem sudden, as if millions awoke one day to the same realization. The Electoral College Will Destroy America, The Battleground States Biden and Trump Need to Win 270, free daily writing prompts for remote learning. Voting By Mail Is On The Rise, But Could Alleged N.C. Election Fraud Change That? Now is the time for sober and spirited citizens from both parties to devise a new system for 2020. Switching to this standard system would not likely create an adverse result. These arent small states. Despite political challenges to reforming the manner in which the United States selects its president, there is danger in maintaining the status quo. 5. Not this year. Paul Krugman, my Opinion colleague, wrote Thursday that "the idea that the economy is going to pose a huge problem for Democrats next year isn't backed by the available data.".

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