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transcript

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is "The Daily."

In two of the past five presidential elections, the Electoral College has awarded the White House to the loser of the popular vote, raising questions about the legitimacy of how America picks its leader. Editorial board member, Jesse Wegman, on the origins of that system and just how close America came to dismantling it.

It's Thursday, October 22.

Jesse, I think by now everyone understands that President Trump won the White House four years ago by losing the popular vote and winning the Electoral College vote, but can you remind us of the specific math involved in that split.

jesse wegman

Sure. I mean, what's amazing about it is he didn't just lose the popular vote, he lost it by a huge number. Nearly 3 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump in 2016. And yet, because of 77,000 votes in just three states in the upper Midwest - Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin - Donald Trump wins the entire presidency.

michael barbaro

The math there is very hard to wrap your head around. 77,000 somehow outweighing 3 million.

jesse wegman

It's smaller than the size of a college football stadium. And it decided the election for the entire country.

michael barbaro

Which is a legitimately strange way to conduct a nationwide presidential election. And I think the question everyone has and what we want to talk to you about is how we developed such a peculiar system in the United States for picking a president. One that allows for the popular vote, the majority's will, to be ignored or outvoted by a minority of voters. And it turns out you are an expert in this area, pretty much the expert in this area. So tell us that story.

jesse wegman

All right so in 1787, the framers who come to Philadelphia to design our new Constitution had no idea how to pick the leader of a self-governing republic. No one had done it before, certainly not on this scale. And they argued about it almost from the first day to the last day of the constitutional convention, four months over the summer of 1787. Their concern was that most people wouldn't know national political candidates. They knew the people in their local communities because that's where they lived, that's where they spent all their time. They didn't travel. They didn't have national media. So they wouldn't know political candidates on the national level. So that leads to this intermediary body of what they called electors.

michael barbaro

Jesse, who are these electors? And what is their precise role in picking the president?

jesse wegman

Well, the idea that the framers had was that they would be this body of elite well-educated men, people who had been mayors or judges or war generals. And that they would come together, and they would deliberate and decide for themselves who was the fittest person to be the president of the United States.

michael barbaro

And so to some degree, it might just be based on their preferences.

jesse wegman

Right. Well, it's interesting the Constitution is actually silent on this matter. What the Constitution does provide for his how many electors each state gets. And it's a simple mathematical calculus. A state gets the number of electors as it has members of Congress and its two senators. So you just add those two numbers together, and that's the number of state gets. Beyond that, the Constitution left everything up to the states. The state legislatures could decide for themselves how to choose these electors, how to award them to the candidates. It was all up to them. They didn't have to give the voters of their state any say at all in choosing the president. So in the end, voters themselves have no constitutional right to play any role at all in the selection of the president.

michael barbaro

Right. So from the start this is envisioned as a pretty elite and removed group of people, who have been entrusted by the framers to make this decision on behalf of voters, who are basically cut out of this process. That's the Electoral College at its birth.

jesse wegman

Exactly. The founders themselves were elite white men. And so it was natural for them to think that they were the best to decide. Many of them were slave holders. And I think that reminds us of one of the most egregious examples of how the Electoral College was not representative of the people. Remember, one of the key compromises that the Constitution was the 3/5 clause. And that was the clause that allowed the slave-holding states to count their slaves as 3/5 of a white person for the purposes of representation in Congress. That transfers over into the Electoral College. And that extra power is hugely important. It gives the slave-holding states an extra 12 or more electors in the Electoral College.

michael barbaro

And again, seems to highlight, just how disconnected the Electoral College is from any modern understanding of democracy and letting the people pick the president.

jesse wegman

Exactly.

michael barbaro

So Jesse, how do we get from this version of the Electoral College - so divorced from voters - to something closer to what we have today, in which voters do play a meaningful role in how the Electoral College works?

jesse wegman

Well, in the early years, states were experimenting with all sorts of different methods of using the Electoral College. But within a few decades, they had very quickly shifted to letting the people of their state, the eligible voters anyway, vote for the electors and then awarding those electors in a manner called winner-take-all. And it was in placed largely by the early 1820s.

michael barbaro

So explain winner-take-all as a concept.

jesse wegman

Sure. I mean, it means exactly what it sounds like, which is that a state gives all of its electors, 100 percent of them, to whichever candidate gets the most votes in that state. And what that means is every voter in that state who voted for somebody other than that candidate is essentially erased when the electors cast their ballots.

michael barbaro

So this is more or less the system we still have to this day?

jesse wegman

Yes, that's right.

michael barbaro

So this winner-take-all system, this is not something envisioned by the framers. It seems like it kind of came to us in a pretty haphazard way.

jesse wegman

Right. People like to imagine that the system that we used today was handed down to us from the framers. And in fact, the framers didn't talk at all about the winner-take-all rule. It didn't come up at the convention. And when they saw it start to be adopted in the states in the early 1800s, they were horrified. James Madison, the man we think of as the father of the Constitution, tried to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of winner-take-all rule because he saw how corrosive it was to erase up to half of voters in the state.

michael barbaro

It sounds like he didn't succeed.

jesse wegman

He didn't.

michael barbaro

So Americans more or less make peace with this winner-take-all system even though it is routinely discounting tons of votes for the losing presidential candidate.

jesse wegman

That's right. And what's also happening in the same time is that an American democracy that in the earliest years only represented a tiny percentage of people, is expanding consistently. So even as you have that Electoral College with the winner-take-all rule, you are also expanding American democracy at the same time. You have a Civil War to end slavery and to make citizens and voters of Black Americans. You have the women's suffrage movement, which results in giving the vote to half of the adult population who didn't have it before. All of these things are making American democracy a truer and fuller expression of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. And meanwhile, in the background, you have this Electoral College system with the winner-take-all rule that is consistently eliminating millions of Americans votes.

michael barbaro

Right. But it sounds like that inconsistency is not so present in the civic discourse.

jesse wegman

That's right. Nobody really talks about it or even understands it until the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement burst into full bloom. And suddenly, Americans are thinking about their democracy in an entirely new way.

jesse wegman

And then into the middle of all of this upheaval -

jesse wegman

Comes a first-term senator from Indiana named Birch Bayh.

jesse wegman

Starting in 1966, Senator Bayh begins an effort to abolish the Electoral College by constitutional amendment.

jesse wegman

He sees it as the last step in that arc of democratization.

jesse wegman

So he begins holding hearings. He begins talking to experts.

jesse wegman

By 1968, 80 percent of Americans are onboard. They want a national popular vote for president.

jesse wegman

This includes Republicans. It includes Democrats. Everybody is onboard.

jesse wegman

Bayh did something that no one in American history had done to that point, which was he tied the Electoral College's inequalities to the expanding equality of the representative democracy. And that was the moment at which everyone saw it most clearly and thought, we need a new system. So finally, we have the election of 1968. And that was the last straw for the Electoral College for most Americans. Because what happened in that election is that the race between the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, and the Republican, Richard Nixon, was nearly thrown into chaos by a third party candidate named George Wallace.

jesse wegman

He was the governor of Alabama and a staunch segregationist.

jesse wegman

And in the late 1960s, he doesn't really have a political party anymore. He runs as a third party insurgent.

jesse wegman

His goal wasn't to win the presidency himself. He knew he couldn't do that.

archived recording (george wallace)

Well, let me say this, that, yes, I'm in the race to spoil, but not to spoil in the sense that you're talking about - is to spoil a chances of both national parties electing a president.

archived recording

Well, let's try this.

archived recording (george wallace)

And that's, of course, what we are doing.

jesse wegman

And what he wanted to do was to stop Nixon and Humphrey from winning an electoral college majority and thus force them to cut deals with him in exchange for his support.

archived recording (george wallace)

So we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

archived recording

OK, Governor. Let's ask another hypothetical -

jesse wegman

It was actually a brilliant plan to weaponize the mechanism and the design of the electoral college to enhance the power of segregationists in the South over everybody else in the country.

michael barbaro

So Wallace's candidacy was designed to deliberately exploit the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, the quirks of the Electoral College system, it feels like, dating back all the way to the 3/5 compromise in the way that it gives the South a lot of sway.

jesse wegman

Exactly. So Wallace's candidacy fails in the end. But he got close enough -

jesse wegman

- that millions and millions of Americans were completely horrified at the system that they had for electing the president.

jesse wegman

Then you get to late 1968, early 1969. Even Richard Nixon, who is now the president who won under the electoral college, is on board with eliminating it and replacing it with the popular vote. There is an unprecedented push to abolish the Electoral College through an amendment to the Constitution. Senator Bayh leads this push. But remember, to get a constitutional amendment passed, you need to get it through both houses of Congress with 2/3 support. And then you need 3/4 of the states, 38 states, to ratify it. So that's a pretty heavy lift. But in late 1969, the House of Representatives, for the first time in American history, passes an amendment overwhelmingly to abolish the Electoral College, replace it with a popular vote. It looks like there is support in close to enough states to ratify this. The only hurdle remaining is the Senate.

michael barbaro

And so what happens in the Senate?

jesse wegman

The amendment gets filibustered to death. Three Southern segregationist senators lead the charge to essentially block any debate on the Electoral College. And they end up killing it a year later in September of 1970.

michael barbaro

And why would these segregationist senators care so much about blocking this amendment?

jesse wegman

Well, remember, the country in the 1960s is going through these massive political and racial upheavals where Jim Crow is finally being killed off through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. These guys, who are the descendants of slave holders themselves, had gotten used to their Black voters not existing. Because of winner-take-all, you know, there's a majority of white people in the state. They knew that they would always control their state's voice in the vote for president. And if you had a popular vote for president, they knew that those Black people in their state would have just as much voice in choosing the president as they did.

michael barbaro

So three senators from states that have long benefited heavily from the outsized power of their presence in the Electoral College and who supported, it sounds like, segregation, they block the will of the majority of Americans to create a voting system in which the will of a majority of Americans would become the method for picking a president?

jesse wegman

That's right. And the best effort we've ever had in American history to abolish the Electoral College, to elect the president by a popular vote and vindicate the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dies on the floor of the Senate in a filibuster in September of 1970. We've never gotten that close again.

[music]

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

So Jesse, if there was such broad and bipartisan consensus about the need to scrap the Electoral College in the 1970s, why is nothing ever done over the next five decades? Presumably, these segregationist senators leave the Senate. So how is it that that consensus you just described unravels so quickly?

jesse wegman

Well, one answer is that the public energy for massive large scale electoral reform doesn't linger for long. Right? There are bursts of it. And then it dies out quickly. So you really have to take advantage of this, as Birch Bayh, I think, understood and tried to do. But when that effort failed, it was very hard to rekindle the spirit. The other factor here is that the Electoral College lined up with the popular vote in all of the years from 1970 onward. So Americans don't really see the distortions caused by the winner-take-all rule. It looks like a system that's basically working. Then we get to 2000.

archived recording 1

From Channel 10, this is Eyewitness News.

archived recording 2

Tonight George W. Bush is preparing his move to the White House while Al Gore says, not so fast.

jesse wegman

So in 2000, remember that we knew on election night Al Gore had won the popular vote in the country by what ended up being about half a million votes.

michael barbaro

Right.

jesse wegman

But because of that winner-take-all rule in the Electoral College, Florida, which was an extremely close state -

jesse wegman

- ends up going to George W. Bush by just 537 popular votes.

michael barbaro

Right.

jesse wegman

Those 537 votes end up giving George W. Bush all 25 of Florida's electors.

jesse wegman

Zero go to Al Gore. That's the winner-take-all rule in action.

jesse wegman

So suddenly Americans realize, oh, our system for picking the president really is screwy.

jesse wegman

We are letting people win the White House who have lost the popular vote in the whole country.

michael barbaro

But of course, we know that this did not lead to a major set of reforms around the Electoral College.

jesse wegman

Yes.

michael barbaro

But I wonder why that was, Jesse. Because it would seem like a moment in which there's a major split between the Electoral College and a popular vote would revive that 1970s appetite for change.

jesse wegman

Well, there was shock. And there was outrage about how that election went. But remember, within nine months, the September 11 attacks happen. Then you have the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq. And Americans basically get distracted and focus on other issues. Until 2016 -

jesse wegman

- when the same thing happens again.

archived recording 1

Trump carried at least 279 Electoral College votes to Clinton's 218.

archived recording 2

Because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million votes.

jesse wegman

But this time, the popular vote loser loses by six times as much as happened in 2000.

michael barbaro

And yet, Jesse, once again, there is not a serious effort at reforming this deeply flawed system.

jesse wegman

Well now, twice in 16 years, the same party has benefited from the Electoral College and the winner-take-all rule. And the same party has suffered from it. So it really seems like a partisan issue now in a way that it never had before. Before Election Day 2000, this was not a partisan issue. But by 2016, it looks to all of us today, like, oh, of course, Republicans like the Electoral College and Democrats don't. The truth is that people like the Electoral College when they think it's going to help them win. And I think that is now the biggest hurdle to any kind of reform.

michael barbaro

Right. Because what incentive does half the country, anybody who is a Republican Party member, have to reform the system that keeps giving them an outsized place in picking a president?

jesse wegman

And that's the unfortunate thing. Although I think that the key thing that people need to remember is that the Electoral College hurts basically everybody. When winner-take-all is used, it creates two kinds of states. It creates safe states, which are most states - states where nothing that any candidate does is going to change the outcome. Those states get completely ignored. Their interests get ignored. Their fears get ignored. The candidates don't pay attention to them. The only states that matter are the states we call battleground states.

michael barbaro

Right.

jesse wegman

Because those are the states where a candidate can actually move enough votes to switch all of the electors in that state from one pot to the other. And as a result, candidates focus all of their attention, all of their advertising dollars, all of their policy platforms on the interests of voters in those states, and sometimes on just a sliver of voters. I mean, look at what happened at the debates.

archived recording (mike pence)

You yourself said, on multiple occasions, when you were running for president, that you would ban fracking.

archived recording (kamala harris)

So first of all, I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact.

archived recording (mike pence)

More taxes, more regulation, banning fracking, abolishing fossil fuels.

jesse wegman

The candidates spent 5 or 10 minutes debating fracking and who was supporting fracking and who didn't support fracking. I mean, fracking is an important issue. But it's not that important that they should have ignored all the other issues that other states care about, such as climate change or things that matter to tens of millions of Americans. Instead, we're talking endlessly about this issue that affects a relatively small number of people, mostly in Western Pennsylvania, which happens to be a battleground state.

michael barbaro

So you're saying while people may view the Electoral College right now as a red issue or a blue issue, as a Republican issue or a Democratic issue, you're saying anyone who doesn't live in a battleground state - in a Pennsylvania or a Wisconsin or a Florida - should be upset with the system and feel invested in remaking it, because of the way that it not just cancels out their vote, but cancels out their presence in the presidential race and their interest in how a president governs for four years?

jesse wegman

That's exactly right. And that's roughly 80 percent of Americans who don't live in battleground states. And yet, who should count just as much as those who do live there. Why should a New Yorker's vote or a Texan's vote or a Californian's vote count less than, say, someone in Florida or Michigan or Wisconsin? It makes no sense. The president represents all Americans equally, no matter where they live. And yet because we have these winner-take-all rules, presidents can effectively act as battleground state presidents.

michael barbaro

Presidents for literally six states.

jesse wegman

Exactly.

michael barbaro

But Jesse, even if lots of Americans - the 80 percent you just mentioned - do become offended by this system, wake up and say, I want to toss out the Electoral College, there's still the issue of just how much bipartisan support would be required to do it in Congress and in the states, and Republican lawmakers, no doubt, being quite resistant to that.

jesse wegman

It's true. But remember, the winner-take-all law is a state law. They can change those laws whenever they like. And if they do that, we can actually get to a popular vote for the president without touching the Constitution.

michael barbaro

So you're saying there's a workaround to what Senator Bayh tried in the 1970s that would effectively get you to where many people want to go?

jesse wegman

Well, I wouldn't call it a work around. There's an idea of how to do it differently, which has been circulating among the states for the last 15 years or so. This is called The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. And this is states agreeing to award their electors differently. They give all of their electors to the candidate who wins the most votes in all 50 states and D.C. combined. And what that means is, the candidate who wins the popular vote becomes the president. And it kicks in when states representing a majority of electoral votes join.

michael barbaro

How many states representing how many Electoral College votes have joined this agreement so far?

jesse wegman

Right now, there are 15 states plus D.C. that have joined. And they total, together, 196 electoral votes. So they're 74 votes short of the 270 you need to become president. So with states representing 74 more electoral votes, this agreement would take effect and would elect the president by, effectively, a national popular vote.

michael barbaro

Hm. I'm curious which states you think might get this compact to that 270. And are they controlled by Republican legislatures?

jesse wegman

So that's part of the problem. Right now, all the states that have joined this agreement are led by Democrats. And so it looks, from the surface, like a Democratic plot to overtake the election and to install Democrats in the White House. But actually, in 2016, there were three Republican-led states that were on the cusp of joining this agreement. And then we had the election and everybody ran back to their partisan corners.

michael barbaro

So once again, and this is a familiar feeling in this conversation, we're hitting a wall, where it looks like America is going to be stuck with this winner take all Electoral College system for the foreseeable future.

jesse wegman

It does look like that. I agree. But I think it's really important to remember that states do change over time. And right now what we're seeing is some really big and important Republican majority states are shifting demographically in ways that are very likely going to turn them into Democratic majority states in the very near future. Texas has 38 electoral votes. It is the biggest prize for Republicans right now, every four years. And Texas is going to turn blue. It's probably not going to happen this year. But I think it's very possible that it happens in 2024 or 2028. The fact that we're talking about it at all this year should freak Republicans out. Because suddenly, they are going to become the minority in their state in the presidential election, and their votes will now be erased completely from that tally, the way that Democrats' votes are now. If Republicans can't win Texas, I think their paths to an Electoral College victory are basically eliminated.

michael barbaro

But then the question becomes, would Democratic support for keeping the system start to grow? Would they forget the wounds of 2000 and 2016 if suddenly the system begins to win for them?

jesse wegman

I think that's always a risk. And it's what we've seen in the past. I think, at this point, given the traumas of 2000 and 2016, Democrats are not going to so quickly jump back on board with the Electoral College. I think they've seen how much damage it causes close enough in history that they will stick with this reform.

michael barbaro

Hm. So in your head, sometime soon - maybe it's next year, maybe it's four years from now, maybe it's eight years or 16 years - the electoral wounds suffered by both parties will lead Republicans and Democrats in each state to decide the system really doesn't work, and sign up for this state-by-state compact that would assign Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote. That's how you see this playing out over time.

jesse wegman

Exactly. So then I think, you know, we're 230 years into this system of electing the president. When does it end? When do we change it? And I mean, I just think it's going to have to be when both parties have suffered enough in a short enough time period that they realize that it doesn't help anybody. And then I think we have the opening to switch to a system in which everybody counts equally, and everybody's vote matters. And the person who gets the most votes in the country wins the election.

michael barbaro

So when there is enough back-to-back pain for both parties is when this all finally changes?

jesse wegman

Yes. I would like to say that everyone believes in political equality and majority rule and these grand principles of representative democracy. But in the end, it comes down to people suffering enough that they want to change the system.

michael barbaro

Well, Jesse, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

jesse wegman

Thank you.

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. The maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, has agreed to settle a major case brought by the federal government, by pleading guilty to criminal charges and paying penalties of up to $8.3 billion. The case revolves around illegal payments that Purdue made to doctors so that they would prescribe its painkillers, including OxyContin, a highly addictive drug responsible for thousands of deadly overdoses across the country. Purdue has demanded that the federal charges against it be resolved before it reaches an even larger settlement with thousands of cities, tribes, states and individuals, who claim that the company's aggressive marketing of OxyContin directly hurt them and their communities. And in his latest embrace of gay people, Pope Francis appeared to break with the position of the Roman Catholic Church by supporting civil unions for same-sex couples. Officially, church teachings consider homosexual acts, quote, "disordered." And the church is opposed to gay marriage. But in comments made to a documentary filmmaker, Francis unexpectedly called for a civil union law to protect gay couples.

That's it for "The Daily." I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

In two of the past five presidential elections, the Electoral College awarded the White House to the loser of the popular vote. Is the system broken?

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Luke Vander Ploeg, Rachel Quester, Leslye Davis and Rachelle Bonja; and edited by M.J. Davis Lin.

The winner-take-all system used by the Electoral College in the United States appears nowhere in the Constitution. It awards all of a state's electors to the candidate with the most votes, no matter how small the margin of victory. Critics say that means millions of votes are effectively ignored.

The fairness of the Electoral College was seriously questioned in the 1960s. Amid the civil rights push, changes to the system were framed as the last step of democratization. But a constitutional amendment to introduce a national popular vote for president was eventually killed by segregationist senators in 1970.

Desire for an overhaul dwindled until the elections of 2000 and 2016, when the system's flaws again came to the fore. In both instances, the men who became president had lost the popular vote.

Jesse Wegman, a member of The Times's editorial board, describes how the winner-take-all system came about and how the Electoral College could be modified.

Jesse Wegman, a member of The New York Times's editorial board.

Image

In the 1960s and 1970s, Senator Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, led the push to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote. Credit... Charles Bennett/Associated Press

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Jesse Wegman contributed reporting.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
transcript michael barbaro From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is "The Daily." In two of the past five presidential elections, the Electoral College has awarded the White House to the loser of the popular vote, raising questions about the legitimacy of how America picks its leader.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With Hillary Clinton more than 300,000 votes ahead of President-elect Donald Trump in the popular vote count as of Thursday, calls have already begun to ditch the Electoral College system enshrined in the Constitution for choosing presidents.

If Clinton's lead holds, she would be the second contender in modern times - joining fellow Democrat Al Gore in 2000 - to win the popular vote but lose the White House by failing to amass the 270 electoral votes needed to capture it.

Filmmaker and progressive activist Michael Moore colorfully summed up Democratic feelings about Trump's victory: "The only reason he's president is because of an arcane, insane 18th century idea called the Electoral College."

But those clamoring to dump the system cobbled together by the nation's Founders - which gives each state as many electoral votes as it has members of Congress - should be careful what they wish for. Adopting a national popular vote would trade one set of problems for another.

Electoral College opponents argue that the system pushes candidates to ignore states that Republicans or Democrats consider sure things and focus on a dozen battleground states during the campaigns. But Tuesday's election showed that the Electoral College map is more fluid than many people believed. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, considered reliably Democratic, swung Republican.
Adopt our plan for a popular vote: Opposing view
If the national popular vote were the ultimate decider, candidates would gravitate toward the voter-rich big cities and their suburbs and ignore everyone else. If candidates felt obliged to blanket the entire country with visits and advertising, it would set off a scramble for even more campaign money, leaving candidates more beholden to special interests.

A popular vote contest involving multiple candidates could produce a winner with, say, only 35% of the vote, provoking an outcry to create a runoff process involving the top two vote-getters. And if the U.S. popular vote were so close that a nationwide recount were needed, the process could turn into a nightmare dwarfing the Florida fiasco of 2000.

For those seeking change, there are two avenues: Amend the Constitution, which is extraordinarily difficult, or do an end run around the Constitution, which a group called National Popular Vote has been trying. The group seeks to pass state laws mandating that the states' electoral votes be cast for whoever wins the U.S. popular vote. Ten states and Washington, D.C., representing 165 electoral votes, have signed on, and it has been most popular in states with Democrat-controlled legislatures. The compact would take effect when it's ratified by states representing at least 270 electoral votes.

This scheme sounds clever, but dig down and you find problems. Imagine for a moment what would happen when New Yorkers, reliably Democratic in presidential elections, learned that their legislature was casting all its electoral votes for a Republican candidate because he or she won the popular vote. Uproar is too modest a word.

The current system is far from ideal, and one idea worth considering is to shift away from winner-take-all in each state to a proportional allocation of electors based on statewide vote totals. But any change to a system that has generally served the nation well for more than two centuries should be both bipartisan and carefully considered.

Democrats are the wounded party now, but going into this election they thought they had a "blue firewall" of states that gave them a big Electoral College advantage. The way to win is to run better campaigns and better candidates under the existing rules, not try to change the rules after a painful loss.
USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view - a unique USA TODAY feature. To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion email newsletter.

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With Hillary Clinton more than 300,000 votes ahead of President-elect Donald Trump in the popular vote count as of Thursday, calls have already begun to ditch the Electoral College system enshrined in the Constitution for choosing presidents.

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Story Highlights

61% prefer amending Constitution to use popular vote to elect president

89% of Democrats, 23% of Republicans favor popular vote

Democrats' preference for popular vote highest in two decades

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Heading into the 2020 presidential election, three in five Americans favor amending the U.S. Constitution to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote system, marking a six-percentage point uptick since April 2019. This preference for electing the president based on who receives the most votes nationwide is driven by 89% of Democrats and 68% of independents. Far fewer Republicans, 23%, share this view, as 77% of them support keeping the current system in which the candidate with the most votes in the Electoral College wins the election.

Thinking for a moment about the way in which the president is elected in this country, which would you prefer -- to amend the Constitution so the candidate who receives the most total votes nationwide wins the election, or to keep the current system, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in the Electoral College wins the election?

Gallup has periodically measured public attitudes about the process of electing the president using this question since shortly after the 2000 election when George W. Bush won the electoral vote, and Al Gore won the popular vote. The latest findings, from an Aug. 31- Sept. 13 Gallup poll, are similar to readings after the 2000 election and in 2004 and 2011.

Of the seven times this question was asked over the past two decades, support for amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College only fell below the majority level once -- in November 2016 after Donald Trump won the electoral vote and Hillary Clinton the popular vote. At that point, 49% of Americans wanted the current system to be replaced, and 47% wanted it to remain in place. By 2019, support for using the national vote totals over the Electoral College had risen to 55%.

Line graph. Americans' preference for the way to elect a president in the U.S. since 2000. Currently, 61% would prefer to amend the Constitution so the candidate who receives the most total votes nationwide wins, and 38% would prefer to keep the current system.

Between 1967 and 1980, Gallup tracked the public's appetite for changing the electoral system with a similarly worded question and found majorities of 58% to 80% approved of amending the Constitution to "do away with the Electoral College and base the election of a president on the total vote cast throughout the nation."

Democrats and Republicans Consistently Differ on Electoral Preference

Republicans have been consistently less supportive of eliminating the Electoral College throughout the past 20 years compared with Democrats and independents. Yet, the divergence between Republicans and Democrats has been much greater since 2016. After Trump defeated Clinton, Democrats were more than four times as likely as Republicans to favor using the national popular vote to elect U.S. presidents. This was due both to Democrats becoming more supportive and Republicans less supportive of the Electoral College system in the wake of Trump's victory.

While Republicans have become slightly more supportive of this concept since then, Democrats are still far more likely to favor it.

Line graph. Partisans' preferences for the way to elect a president in the U.S. since 2000. Currently, 89% of Democrats, 68% of independents and 23% of Republicans would prefer to amend the Constitution, so the candidate who receives the most total votes nationwide wins. Democrats and independents have consistently been more supportive of abolishing the Electoral College than Republicans.

In contrast, data from the similar question about doing "away with the Electoral College" between 1967 and 1980 found majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents alike favored the concept.

Bottom Line

Presidential candidates have only won the electoral vote and lost the popular vote four times in U.S. history, and two of these occurrences have been in the last five presidential elections. In both 2000 and 2016, the Republican candidates won the Electoral College while the Democratic candidates won the popular vote. This is likely the main reason behind Democrats' strong support -- and Republicans' strong opposition -- to changing the current system to use the popular vote to elect the U.S. president. That is, Americans' opinions are increasingly driven by what would benefit their party.

Amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College system in the U.S. requires support from two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the 50 states. Given the current polarization among partisans on the issue, there is little chance that such an amendment will happen anytime soon. An alternate proposal that would not require a constitutional amendment -- The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact -- is an agreement between states to award all of its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the overall popular vote. It has been adopted by 15 states and the District of Columbia, but it, too, is sharply politicized.
View complete question responses and trends (PDF download). Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.

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61% of Americans Support Abolishing Electoral College

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Story Highlights 61% prefer amending Constitution to use popular vote to elect president 89% of Democrats, 23% of Republicans favor popular vote Democrats' preference for popular vote highest in two decades WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Heading into the 2020 presidential election, three in five Americans favor amending the U.S.

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Political participation | AP®︎ US Government and Politics | Khan Academy

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This unit covers how citizens participate directly and indirectly in the government of the United States. Learn about voting rights and voter turnout, how presidential and congressional elections work, and how linkage institutions like the media, political parties, and interest groups connect individuals with government.

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Sal teaches Grover about the Electoral College

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Sal teaches Grover about the Electoral College

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- Vote for me. Vote for cute and adorable Grover. I am pro-ABCs and for one, two, threes. Plus I promise I have no skeletons in my closet. I do not even have one in my body. - Hey, Grover, what are you doing? - Oh, hello there, Sal Khan. I am just running for president of the United States of America. I heard there was an upcoming election, so I figured, ah, why not? - Well, that's great, Grover. - Yeah! - Maybe we can help more people vote. - Oh, that would be terrific. So exactly how many votes do I need to win? - Well, you know about the electoral college, right? - Of course, Sal, baby. - I know exactly what the electrical-- - Electoral. - Electoral college is. - Great, so why don't we explain it together for those who don't know? - Oh, why certainly. What a brilliant idea. - Umm. Why don't you start us off? - Sure. In a direct democracy, I as a citizen will vote for a candidate. And whichever candidate has the most popular votes in the country, they will become president. But we do not have a direct democracy. We have an indirect democracy. So what happens is, is I vote in my state. I live in California. And whichever candidate gets the most votes in California will get all of California's 55 electoral votes. And that's true in most states. Whoever gets the most votes in that state gets all of the votes for that state. And that number comes from the number of Congresspeople California has. - Um, dah, I am not following you. - So how can I explain it in a way that you might understand? - Chickens. (chickens clucking) I know chickens. Chickens, they are my biggest demo. (chickens clucking) - OK, chickens. So instead of electors, we'll say chickens. Instead of the electoral college, I'll say chicken college. - OK, that I can follow. - OK. The number of chicken votes for each state is equal to the number of Congresspeople for that state. - [Grover] In every state? (chicken clucks) - [Sal] Yes, Grover. - From California to the New York island? From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. - Yes. The 50 states. (Grover laughs) And so there are a total of 538 chicken votes in the chicken college. For example, Florida has 29 chicken votes. (chicken clucks) And that's the same as the 29 Congresspeople that they have, two senators and 27 representatives. - [Grover] Oh, hello there, chickens. (chickens clucking) OK, then, so how do I, candidate Grover, win the presidency? - Well, since there are 538 chicken votes in total, you just have to get more than half of those. - More than half. Hmm, let me see here. (trumpets play line from "Stars and Stripes Forever") One, carry the two, divided by eight. - Grover, we, we know the actual number. You just have to get at least 270 chicken votes in the chicken college. - Just 270 chickens? I could do that. 300 chickens just crossed the road to hear me speak at the rally. (chickens clucking) - Oh, great, do you have your speech? - Oh, yeah, it's just right here, yeah. Where did I put it, it? Ah, I'll just wing it. Bye, Sal. - Bye, Grover. Now get out there and vote. (chickens cluck) (violins play "Hail to the Chief")

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Sal teaches Grover about the electoral college (video) | Khan Academy

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Vote for me. Vote for cute and adorable Grover. I am pro-ABCs and for one, two, threes. Plus I promise I have no skeletons in my closet. I do not even have one in my body. - Hey, Grover, what are you doing? - Oh, hello there, Sal Khan.

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In order to ratify the Constitution, the delegates made several compromises, including the system for electing the president.

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How the Electoral College is Tied to Slavery

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How the Electoral College is Tied to Slavery

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This article is part of In Session: The Teen Vogue Lesson Plan. Find the full lesson plan .

White supremacy is systemic. It lives in policies like law-and-order policing and access to public goods and services. It thrives in politics with systems that Americans rely on to elect leaders, like the electoral college, a process originally designed to protect the influence of white slave owners, which is still used today to determine presidential elections.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, state delegates came together to draft what would become the U.S. Constitution, establishing the rule of law for the newly founded United States of America. The country, still in its infancy, had liberated itself from the colonial rule of Great Britain's King George III in the American Revolution.

With George Washington presiding, the delegates discussed the current state of affairs among the 13 states governed under the Articles of Confederation, which was proving insufficient in maintaining federal governance among the states. At the urging of Virginia Delegate James Madison and others, they began to draft a new national constitution, which would design the role and power of the new government, including elections of head of state. But steeped in the throws of the slave trade, and a little less than 100 years before the Civil War, there was already a divide between the interests of northern and southern states.

The idea of a simple popular-vote election struck fear in delegates from slaveholding states because while their states boasted large populations, much of the populace was comprised of enslaved black people who could not vote. By contrast, northern states had smaller populations with a greater number of eligible voters (read: white, male, and generally property-owning).

"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 Negroes," said Madison, who would later become the nation's fourth president. "The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections."

Fearful of being outnumbered, Madison pushed for the electoral college, and championed representative government by state as a solution. Seats in the House of Representatives would be based on population size, and delegates from slave-holding states sought to have slaves included in the count for total population. Those opposed recognized this would mean fewer seats from the smaller states.

And so the states made several compromises. The first, known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, was a racist, manipulative policy that outlined the rules for legislative representation and taxation of the states. It read, "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

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The Electoral College Is Tied to Slavery

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As the electoral college has come under scrutiny, its history illustrates that its very design was intended to grant slave states more political influence.

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Advantage the Electoral College Gives to Republicans

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Advantage the Electoral College Gives to Republicans

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In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In 2000, George W. Bush pulled off a similar trick. According to a new study, these are not flukes. They are the kind of results we should expect from the Electoral College.

The study, by three economics researchers at the University of Texas, quantifies just how often the Electoral College will produce an "inversion" - that is, an election where one candidate wins the popular vote but the other walks away with the presidency. The numbers are simply astonishing.

In modern elections where one party prevails by just 2 points in the two-party popular vote, "inversions are expected in more than 30% of elections." That number rises to 40 percent in elections with a 1 percentage-point margin.

Republicans, moreover, are far more likely to benefit from an inversion than Democrats. "In the modern period," the study suggests, "Republicans should be expected to win 65% of Presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote."

This Republican advantage can shift elections where the Democrat was a fairly clear winner in the popular vote. "A 3.0 point margin favoring the Democrat," the study concludes, "is associated with a 16% inversion probability." In other words,Republicans will win nearly one in six presidential races where they lose the popular vote by 3 points.

Indeed, to understand the magnitude of the GOP's advantage in the Electoral College, consider this chart:

The chart shows the probability of a Republican Electoral College victory across 92 different models. Notice that the chance of a GOP victory reaches 50 percent when Republicans have less than 50 percent of the vote. At the extremes, the chart suggests that there is still a small chance of a Republican victory even in elections where Democrats win the popular vote by about six points.

The study is authored by University of Texas at Austin economics professors Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, and Geruso's research assistant Ishaana Talesara, who is also a student at UT Austin.

To reach their conclusions, the research team ran hundreds of thousands of simulated elections under various election models. The paper as a whole studies three periods in American history: the Antebellum period from 1836 to 1852, the Reconstruction period from 1872 to 1888, and the modern period from 1964 to 2016 (although many of their modern samples only look at the period from 1988 to 2016). These periods were selected to exclude eras when one party typically won in a landslide.

Overall, they conclude that "the high probability of inversion at narrow vote margins is an across-history property of the Electoral College system." The Electoral College has, at various times, given an advantage to Democrats, Republicans, and the now-defunct Whig Party. Now itgives a clear advantage to Republicans.

The Electoral College skews elections by giving a structural advantage to small states. Each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to the number of United States House of Representatives members from that state, plus two. These two additional votes effectively triple the voting power of the smallest states, while having only a negligible impact on the voting power of large states.

Additionally, modern-day Democrats are disadvantaged because they "have tended to win large states by large margins and lose them by small margins." In 2016, for example, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won California by nearly 3.5 million votes. Meanwhile, she lost the crucial swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by fewer than 80,000 votes combined.

It's not hard to imagine 2020 producing an even starker inversion. Historically red states like Texas and Arizona are trending toward Democrats, but most likely not enough to flip those states in the next election. If Democrats narrow Trump's margins in those states, while Trump barely holds onto states like Florida or Wisconsin, the next Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by 5 million votes or more - and still lose the Electoral College.

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The astounding advantage the Electoral College gives to Republicans, in one chart

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In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In 2000, George W. Bush pulled off a similar trick. According to a new study, these are not flukes. They are the kind of results we should expect from the Electoral College.

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Real Reason the Electoral College Exists

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Real Reason the Electoral College Exists

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The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists

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The Founding Fathers had something particular in mind when they set up the U.S. presidential election system: slavery

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Under the Electoral College system, it is possible for a presidential candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote, yet be elected president of the United States by winning in only a handful of key states. Should you ever forget this fact, critics of the Electoral College will be sure to remind you of it every four years.

What could the Founding Fathers-the framers of the Constitution-have been thinking in 1787?

Did they not realize that the Electoral College system effectively took the power to select the American president of out of the hands of the American people? Yes, they did. In fact, the Founders always intended that the states-not the people-select the president.

Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the power to elect the president and vice president to the states through the Electoral College system. Under the Constitution, the highest-ranking U.S. officials elected by the direct popular vote of the people are the governors of the states.

Beware the Tyranny of the Majority

To be brutally honest, the Founding Fathers gave the American public of their day little credit for political awareness when it came to selecting the president. Here are some of their telling statements from the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

"A popular election in this case is radically vicious. The ignorance of the people would put it in the power of some one set of men dispersed through the Union, and acting in concert, to delude them into any appointment." -- Delegate Gerry, July 25, 1787

"The extent of the country renders it impossible, that the people can have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the candidates." -- Delegate Mason, July 17, 1787

"The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men." -- Delegate Gerry, July 19, 1787

The Founding Fathers had seen the dangers of placing ultimate power into a single set of human hands. Accordingly, they feared that placing the unlimited power to elect the president into the politically naive hands of the people could lead to a "tyranny of the majority." In response, they created the Electoral College system as a process to insulate the selection of the president from the whims of the public.

Preserving Federalism

The Founding Fathers also felt the Electoral College system would enforce the concept of federalism-the division and sharing of powers between the state and national governments.

Under the Constitution, the people are empowered to choose, through a direct popular election, the men and women who represent them in their state legislatures and in the United Sates Congress. The states, through the Electoral College, are empowered to choose the president and vice president.

Are We a Democracy or Not?

Critics of the Electoral College system argue that by taking the selection of the president out of the hands of the public at large, that Electoral College system flies in the face of democracy. America is, after all, a democracy, is it not? Let's see.

Two of the most widely recognized forms of democracy are:

Pure or Direct Democracy -- All decisions are made directly by a majority vote of all eligible citizens. By their vote alone, citizens can enact laws and select or remove their leaders. The power of the people to control their government is unlimited.

Representative Democracy -- The citizens rule through representatives who they elect periodically in order to keep them accountable. The power of the people to control their government is thus limited by the actions of their elected representatives.

The United States is a representative democracy operated under a "republican" form of government as provided for in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution which states, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of Government..." (This should not be confused with the Republican political party which is merely named after the form of government.)

In 1787, the Founding Fathers, based on their direct knowledge of history showing that unlimited power tends to become a tyrannical power, created the United States as a republic -- not a pure democracy.

A direct democracy only works when all or at least most of the people participate in the process. The Founding Fathers knew that as the nation grew and the time required for debating and voting on every issue increased, the public's desire to take part in the process would quickly decrease.

As a result, the decisions and actions of taken would not truly reflect the will of the majority, but small groups of people representing their own interests.

The Founders were unanimous in their desire that no single entity, be it the people or an agent of the government be given unlimited power. Achieving a " separation of powers" ultimately became their highest priority.

As a part of their plan to separate powers and authority, the Founders created the Electoral College as the method by which the people could choose their highest government leader-the president-while avoiding at least some of the dangers of a direct election.

But just because the Electoral College has worked just as the Founding Fathers intended for over 200 years does not mean that it should never be modified or even abandoned completely. What will it take for either to happen?

What Would it Take to Change the Electoral College System?

Any change to the way in which America chooses its president will require a constitutional amendment. For this to come about, the following will have to happen:

First, the fear must become reality. That is, a presidential candidate must lose the nationwide popular vote, but be elected through the Electoral College vote. This has happened exactly three times in the nation's history:

In 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, with 4,036,298 popular votes won 185 electoral votes. His main opponent, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote with 4,300,590 votes but won only 184 electoral votes. Hayes was elected president.

In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, with 5,439,853 popular votes won 233 electoral votes. His main opponent, Democrat Grover Cleveland, won the popular vote with 5,540,309 votes but won only 168 electoral votes. Harrison was elected president.

In 2000, Republican George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by a margin of 50,996,582 to 50,456,062. But after the U.S. Supreme Court halted vote recounts in Florida, George W. Bush was awarded the state's 25 electoral votes and won the presidency through a 271 to 266 vote margin in the Electoral College.

It is sometimes reported that Richard M. Nixon received more popular votes in the 1960 election than winner John F. Kennedy, but official results showed Kennedy with 34,227,096 popular votes to Nixon's 34,107,646. Kennedy won 303 Electoral College votes to Nixon's 219 votes.

Next, a candidate that loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote must turn out to be a particularly unsuccessful and unpopular president. Otherwise, the impetus to blame the nation's woes on the Electoral College system will never materialize.

Finally, the constitutional amendment must get a two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress and be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

Even if all of the above were to happen, it remains highly unlikely that the Electoral College system would be changed or repealed.

Under the above circumstances, it is probable that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats would hold a strong majority of seats in Congress.

Requiring a two-thirds vote from both houses, a constitutional amendment must have strong bi-partisan support -- support it will not get from a split Congress. (The president cannot veto a constitutional amendment.)

To be ratified and become effective, a constitutional amendment must also be approved by the legislatures of 39 out of the 50 states. By design, the Electoral College system grants the states the power to elect the president of the United States. How likely is it that 39 states are going to vote to give up that power? Moreover, 12 states control 53 percent of the votes in the Electoral College, leaving only 38 states that might even consider ratification.

Come on critics, can you really say that in 213 years of operation, the Elector College system has produced bad results? Only twice have the electors stumbled and been unable to choose a president, thus throwing the decision into the House of Representatives. Who did the House decide on in those two cases? Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.

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Learn Why the Founding Fathers Created the Electoral College

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Under the Electoral College system, it is possible for a presidential candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote, yet be elected president of the United States by winning in only a handful of key states. Should you ever forget this fact, critics of the Electoral College will be sure to remind you of it every four years.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Under the Electoral College system, it is possible for a presidential candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote, yet be elected president of the United States by winning in only a handful of key states. Should you ever forget this fact, critics of the Electoral College will be sure to remind you of it every four years.

What could the Founding Fathers-the framers of the Constitution-have been thinking in 1787?

Did they not realize that the Electoral College system effectively took the power to select the American president of out of the hands of the American people? Yes, they did. In fact, the Founders always intended that the states-not the people-select the president.

Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the power to elect the president and vice president to the states through the Electoral College system. Under the Constitution, the highest-ranking U.S. officials elected by the direct popular vote of the people are the governors of the states.

Beware the Tyranny of the Majority

To be brutally honest, the Founding Fathers gave the American public of their day little credit for political awareness when it came to selecting the president. Here are some of their telling statements from the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

"A popular election in this case is radically vicious. The ignorance of the people would put it in the power of some one set of men dispersed through the Union, and acting in concert, to delude them into any appointment." -- Delegate Gerry, July 25, 1787

"The extent of the country renders it impossible, that the people can have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the candidates." -- Delegate Mason, July 17, 1787

"The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men." -- Delegate Gerry, July 19, 1787

The Founding Fathers had seen the dangers of placing ultimate power into a single set of human hands. Accordingly, they feared that placing the unlimited power to elect the president into the politically naive hands of the people could lead to a "tyranny of the majority." In response, they created the Electoral College system as a process to insulate the selection of the president from the whims of the public.

Preserving Federalism

The Founding Fathers also felt the Electoral College system would enforce the concept of federalism-the division and sharing of powers between the state and national governments.

Under the Constitution, the people are empowered to choose, through a direct popular election, the men and women who represent them in their state legislatures and in the United Sates Congress. The states, through the Electoral College, are empowered to choose the president and vice president.

Are We a Democracy or Not?

Critics of the Electoral College system argue that by taking the selection of the president out of the hands of the public at large, that Electoral College system flies in the face of democracy. America is, after all, a democracy, is it not? Let's see.

Two of the most widely recognized forms of democracy are:

Pure or Direct Democracy -- All decisions are made directly by a majority vote of all eligible citizens. By their vote alone, citizens can enact laws and select or remove their leaders. The power of the people to control their government is unlimited.

Representative Democracy -- The citizens rule through representatives who they elect periodically in order to keep them accountable. The power of the people to control their government is thus limited by the actions of their elected representatives.

The United States is a representative democracy operated under a "republican" form of government as provided for in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution which states, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of Government..." (This should not be confused with the Republican political party which is merely named after the form of government.)

In 1787, the Founding Fathers, based on their direct knowledge of history showing that unlimited power tends to become a tyrannical power, created the United States as a republic -- not a pure democracy.

A direct democracy only works when all or at least most of the people participate in the process. The Founding Fathers knew that as the nation grew and the time required for debating and voting on every issue increased, the public's desire to take part in the process would quickly decrease.

As a result, the decisions and actions of taken would not truly reflect the will of the majority, but small groups of people representing their own interests.

The Founders were unanimous in their desire that no single entity, be it the people or an agent of the government be given unlimited power. Achieving a " separation of powers" ultimately became their highest priority.

As a part of their plan to separate powers and authority, the Founders created the Electoral College as the method by which the people could choose their highest government leader-the president-while avoiding at least some of the dangers of a direct election.

But just because the Electoral College has worked just as the Founding Fathers intended for over 200 years does not mean that it should never be modified or even abandoned completely. What will it take for either to happen?

What Would it Take to Change the Electoral College System?

Any change to the way in which America chooses its president will require a constitutional amendment. For this to come about, the following will have to happen:

First, the fear must become reality. That is, a presidential candidate must lose the nationwide popular vote, but be elected through the Electoral College vote. This has happened exactly three times in the nation's history:

In 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, with 4,036,298 popular votes won 185 electoral votes. His main opponent, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote with 4,300,590 votes but won only 184 electoral votes. Hayes was elected president.

In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, with 5,439,853 popular votes won 233 electoral votes. His main opponent, Democrat Grover Cleveland, won the popular vote with 5,540,309 votes but won only 168 electoral votes. Harrison was elected president.

In 2000, Republican George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by a margin of 50,996,582 to 50,456,062. But after the U.S. Supreme Court halted vote recounts in Florida, George W. Bush was awarded the state's 25 electoral votes and won the presidency through a 271 to 266 vote margin in the Electoral College.

It is sometimes reported that Richard M. Nixon received more popular votes in the 1960 election than winner John F. Kennedy, but official results showed Kennedy with 34,227,096 popular votes to Nixon's 34,107,646. Kennedy won 303 Electoral College votes to Nixon's 219 votes.

Next, a candidate that loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote must turn out to be a particularly unsuccessful and unpopular president. Otherwise, the impetus to blame the nation's woes on the Electoral College system will never materialize.

Finally, the constitutional amendment must get a two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress and be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

Even if all of the above were to happen, it remains highly unlikely that the Electoral College system would be changed or repealed.

Under the above circumstances, it is probable that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats would hold a strong majority of seats in Congress.

Requiring a two-thirds vote from both houses, a constitutional amendment must have strong bi-partisan support -- support it will not get from a split Congress. (The president cannot veto a constitutional amendment.)

To be ratified and become effective, a constitutional amendment must also be approved by the legislatures of 39 out of the 50 states. By design, the Electoral College system grants the states the power to elect the president of the United States. How likely is it that 39 states are going to vote to give up that power? Moreover, 12 states control 53 percent of the votes in the Electoral College, leaving only 38 states that might even consider ratification.

Come on critics, can you really say that in 213 years of operation, the Elector College system has produced bad results? Only twice have the electors stumbled and been unable to choose a president, thus throwing the decision into the House of Representatives. Who did the House decide on in those two cases? Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.

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Learn Why the Founding Fathers Created the Electoral College

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Under the Electoral College system, it is possible for a presidential candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote, yet be elected president of the United States by winning in only a handful of key states. Should you ever forget this fact, critics of the Electoral College will be sure to remind you of it every four years.

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THERE was a time when American presidential candidates won real landslides. In 1964, 1972 and 1984 voters re-elected incumbents by margins of around 20 percentage points; all three of those victors (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) won over 90% of electoral college votes. More modest wins have also brought resounding mandates for new presidents, thanks to the winner-take-all arithmetic of the electoral college. Reagan won 91% of electoral votes in 1980 while "only" beating Jimmy Carter by ten percentage points. His successor, George H.W. Bush, secured 79% of the college in 1988 with just a 7.7-point victory over Michael Dukakis.
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Such lopsided electoral-college margins now appear to be a thing of the past. Although Barack Obama beat John McCain in 2008 by 7.3 points, roughly the same margin as the elder Mr Bush achieved, he only secured 68% of electoral votes. The main reason is that the electoral college is less sensitive to changes in the popular vote than it once was. From 1948 to 1996, a gain of one extra percentage point in the popular vote corresponded to a pickup of four percentage points in the electoral college. Since 2000, that ratio has fallen to three.

For example, in the 1976 election, which Mr Carter won by two percentage points, 20 states were decided by a margin of five points or less. In contrast, George W. Bush won the 2004 vote by a similar amount, but the candidates were separated by fewer than five points in only 11 states. Similarly, half as many states were within a five-point margin for Mr Obama's first victory than for George H.W. Bush's.

According to Stacey Hunter Hecht and David Schultz, two political scientists who outlined the history of American "swing states" in a book published last year, one explanation for this trend is political and demographic "sorting" along geographic lines. In recent years liberals have tended to move to already liberal-leaning states. The same has gone for their conservative cousins. As a result, even presidential candidates who lose the national vote decisively can amass lopsided margins on their "home turf". Mitt Romney, for example, won Wyoming by 41 points in 2012, even though Mr Obama beat him by four overall. These migration patterns have also increased the likelihood that states will vote for the same party from one election to the next, regardless of which side wins the presidency. That has made it harder for so-called bellwether states, with a long record of siding with the victor-as Maine did from 1832 to 1932, and Missouri from 1904 to 2004-to sustain this pattern.

Nonetheless, even a highly sorted America is not immune to massive swings in the national mood. In 2008 Mr Obama won Indiana, a state that had not voted for a Democrat since 1964. This year polling indicates that two states previously seen as firmly in the Republican camp, Arizona and Georgia, now look competitive. South Carolina, an even more conservative stronghold, is not far behind. Donald Trump is prone to boasting of his ability to accomplish improbable feats. But turning the Deep South and Sun Belt blue is probably not what he has in mind.

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THERE was a time when American presidential candidates won real landslides. In 1964, 1972 and 1984 voters re-elected incumbents by margins of around 20 percentage points; all three of those victors (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) won over 90% of electoral college votes.

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Room for Debate: Should Electoral College be Abolished

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Room for Debate: Should Electoral College be Abolished

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Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University, is the author of " The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era."

Charles Fried is a law professor at Harvard Law School. He was solicitor general of the United States from 1985 to 1989.

The Electoral College Is Important Because It Reflects the Will of the States

We have a direct democracy: Senators, representatives and members of the Electoral College are all elected directly by the people. They do not, however, elect the president directly. This is a feature of the kind of government we have chosen from the beginning in which the states are important subsidiary (in some instances, primary) units of government.

Sometimes there will be a divergence between who is chosen by the Electoral College and who wins the popular vote, and that disparity can act as a caution to the elected president. But when the elected president's party controls the House and Senate, caution is less likely.

Even after a civil war and two world wars, the states control a large measure of the laws, administration and finance that have an impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. The states have their own political cultures, personalities and traditions which persist in spite of our far more transient population, an interconnected national economy and national news media.

In order to reflect this mode of governance, the interactions between the national government and the states in important matters often utilize the local units and personnel. The notion is that the states are not simply administrative units of the national government or its local offices. In that context it is quite appropriate that the head of state is elected state-by-state, albeit by popular vote in each state. That way at the most focused democratic moment, every four years the candidates and parties must take the states into account.

And sometimes it will happen that, as this year, there will be a significant divergence -- millions of votes -- between who is chosen by the Electoral College and the winner of the overall popular vote. Sometimes that disparity can act as a caution to the elected president, but where the House and Senate are in the hands of the elected president's party that caution is less likely to operate.

States Don't Use an Electoral College to Choose Their Leader, Neither Should the Nation

I prefer direct national election of our president. I take states seriously and value federalism, but in a different way than do most defenders of the status quo. Consider the fact that each state picks its own president-equivalent - its governor - quite directly: one person, one vote. All votes are counted equally and in close races recounted carefully. America should copy this state-tested model when choosing the governor of us all: the president.

The fact that no state uses an Electoral College for its governor suggests that many standard arguments for the Electoral College - recount nightmares, fairness for rural areas, etc. - are makeweight. If these arguments were truly sound, then states are stupid. And states are not stupid.

Future direct national elections could happen, even without a constitutional amendment if the two major presidential candidates in 2020 themselves agreeing, solemnly and publicly long before Election Day, to abide by the national popular vote. Keep your eye on 2020.

Indeed, direct presidential election would harness state creativity in exciting ways. Currently, states have little incentive to encourage voting. A state gets a pre-set number of electoral votes regardless of voter turnout. But in a direct election system, states with higher turnout would have more clout in the final tally, giving state governments incentives to encourage voting. States may do this different ways - early voting in some states; same-day registration in others; making Election Day a holiday in still other jurisdictions. Federal oversight would be necessary to keep state competition within fair boundaries, but state creativity could drive a race to the top - democratic experimentalism and federalism at their best.

Some states are already experimenting with a creative plan for future presidential races. Under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that has gained momentum in recent years, states in the compact are promising that, if enough states ultimately join the bandwagon, these states will give their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. It's an interesting idea - in 2001 I floated a precursor of this plan - but the current version does have technical wrinkles that need to be ironed out. (What if some noncooperating states refuse to hold proper elections or careful recounts? What if some states lower the voting age in ridiculous ways - letting 12-year-olds vote - to maximize their clout?) To work well, strong federal oversight would be needed.

There is at least one other way that future direct national elections could happen, even without a constitutional amendment. This way - which I also floated in 2001 - would involve the two major presidential candidates themselves agreeing, solemnly and publicly long before Election Day, to abide by the national popular vote. Keep your eye on 2020.

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The New York Times

Hillary Clinton's growing lead over Donald J. Trump is now over 1 million votes, making this the second time a president has been elected without a popular majority since 2000. That year, Akhil Reed Amar wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that the Electoral College should be abolished, and Charles Fried disagreed. Here they are again.

This is part of the Issues for Trump and America series.

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Should the Electoral College Be Abolished?

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Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University, is the author of " The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era." Charles Fried is a law professor at Harvard Law School. He was solicitor general of the United States from 1985 to 1989.

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Watch video AND read article

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How Campaigns Would Work If We Ended the Electoral College

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Strategists who have worked on presidential campaigns say that ending the Electoral College would change the way elections run dramatically.

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Should we abolish the Electoral College?

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Should we abolish the Electoral College?

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Editor's 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. Here are the yea and the nay. By Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science.
Yes.

In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. So, let me make the case for its abolition and its replacement by a simple national popular vote, to be held in an entity we will call (what the heck) the United States of America.

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. The first is easily dismissed. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch.

A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the "senatorial bump" giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states. If, say, environmental sustainability or abortion or the Second Amendment is your dominant concern, it does not matter whether you live in Wyoming or California, Pennsylvania or Delaware. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does.

Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. 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. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. Having a state-based system for electing both houses of Congress should be adequate to that task. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be "running against Washington."

What are the positive arguments in favor of replacing the existing electoral system with a national popular vote? Here, again, there are three main points to make.

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. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery.

First, and most obviously, such a system would conform to the dominant democratic value that has prevailed in American politics ever since the one-person, one-vote reapportionment rulings of the early 1960s. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. No other mode of presidential elections would be fully consistent with our underlying commitment to the equality of all citizens.

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. "Swing" or "battleground" states are mere accidents of geography. They do not matter because they have any special civic characteristics. 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. 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.

Third, a national election might provide a cure for the delegitimation of presidential authority that has afflicted the last three presidencies. It is no secret that the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suffered, from the outset, from efforts to imply that there was something improper and unworthy or even suspicious in their elections. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. This perception is reinforced by the red- and blue-state imagery that controls our view of the electoral process. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it.
By Michael W. McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, director of the Constitutional Law Center and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
No.

The Electoral College is not going to be changed, and there are far more urgent and promising topics for reform of our presidential selection system.

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. There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. We survived. Not one was a first-rank president, but their selection did not seriously injure the democratic character of our system.

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. Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representation-the three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromise-and guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully!), and the big state-small state divide no longer animates our politics, if it ever did. The two-party system solves the fractured vote problem more effectively than the Electoral College ever did, and the electors never exercised genuine independence. The Electoral College thus presents democratic risks without serving any of its original purposes.

That is not to say the Electoral College is without its advantages. It gives a slight edge to candidates with broad-based support in many states over those who rack up huge majorities in just a few large states. That probably promotes a more national and less regional vision. It channels presidential politics into a two-party system, which is superior to multiparty systems where fringe factions can exercise too much leverage. It probably reduces the cost of presidential campaigns by confining television advertising to the battleground states (and spares the rest of us the tedium of endless repetitive ads). And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America.

Still, the advantages are uncertain and relatively minor. Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. 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. We should be talking about other things.

The great problems with our presidential selection system today stem from the haphazard way we choose the two major party presidential candidates. This year is the poster child for the need for reform. The two parties have chosen the same year in which to nominate a person whom large numbers of Americans, probably a majority, regard as unfit (though not for the same reason). Generally, we count on the Republican and Democratic parties to nominate not the best people, but candidates who combine a degree of popular support with the experience and temperament to govern. Not this year.

Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems.

We need to think hard, and quickly, about how to reform three aspects of the presidential nomination process: the debates, the primary elections and the conventions. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays and appeals to narrow special interests. The party structures-which, 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 govern-have been sidelined.

For almost the first half century of the republic, presidential candidates were chosen by the caucuses of the two parties in the House and the Senate. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. The elected officials of both parties have incentives to choose candidates with an eye toward popular electability and governing skill. Interestingly, the congressional caucus system is very close to the system the British used to replace Prime Minister David Cameron. 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. Now is the time for sober and spirited citizens from both parties to devise a new system for 2020.

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Should We Abolish the Electoral College?

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Editor's 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. Here are the yea and the nay. By Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science.