Dan Greenberg: Point
The Electoral College
protects minority views
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution designed a unique system to choose our president in 1787: the Electoral College. More than two centuries later, it remains an invaluable institution that helps safeguard us against the tyranny of the majority and vote fraud.
Back then, it was experimental. The notion of an elected chief executive was novel — unheard of, even. At first, the Framers didn’t agree on what to do. Some wanted Congress to pick the president. Others wanted to vest that power with the states by having state legislatures determine the nation’s chief executive. And still others favored a national popular vote. Making matters worse, the debate was embroiled in the politics of the terrible institution of slavery.
Yet, the men of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, representing their respective states, shared a distrust of executive power in the wake of a hard-fought war for independence from Great Britain. The Electoral College became the compromise that won ratification of the Constitution.
Every state is allotted electoral votes equivalent to the number of representatives it has in Congress. On Election Day, voters cast a vote for a slate of delegates affiliated with a corresponding candidate on the ballot. Whichever candidate wins a majority vote in that state, the corresponding delegates later cast all the state’s electoral votes for that candidate.
Citizens and lawmakers periodically call for scrapping the Electoral College (often just after they have lost an election) in favor of a popular vote. This change would require amending the Constitution. That would be a catastrophic mistake for our democratic republic because the complex Electoral College system is integral to safeguarding the voice of minority populations and deterring election fraud.
In elections, candidates campaign where the votes are. A national election decided by a national popular vote would encourage candidates to spend most of their time in densely packed population centers like New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago. Those candidates would steer clear of rural areas or other low-density locales, and the values and interests of those minority populations would go unheard. A president would be disproportionately beholden to the values and interests of the most populous regions of our republic.
Another strong argument favoring the Electoral College, perhaps unfamiliar to most citizens, is that it confines problems like contentious recounts or fraud within state boundaries. The notorious recount fiasco in Florida in 2000, for example, was indeed a lesser problem than the prospect of a nationwide recount would have been. For weeks, the news was dominated by political drama and litigation. The election results weren’t even determined until five weeks after Election Day. Imagine a national version of the Florida recount … every four years.
And consider that no matter how many fraudulent votes for president sprout up in one state, under the Electoral College system, that fraud cannot spill over into the vote results for other states.
The election of Lyndon B. Johnson to the Senate in 1948, understood as fraudulent today, illustrates this point. The decisive runoff election took a week to resolve as the Democratic State Central Committee counted votes. Somehow, day after day, new batches of votes in far-off counties emerged. Johnson was announced the winner by 87 votes out of 988,295.
Johnson’s margin lay in 200 additional ballots, reported six days after the election. All those ballots were associated with a list of voter signatures at the very end of the voter rolls. This list of 200 names, in alphabetical order, was all written with the same pen and all with the same handwriting.
Counting the votes is at the center of every election. The bigger the number of votes, the more possibilities for fraud. Imagine the dynamics of LBJ-style voter fraud in a national election.
Three Democratic senators — Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Peter Welch of Vermont — proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College system, touting the “simple” notion that “the person who gets the most votes should win.”
Simple? Yes. Fair, equitable and safe from fraud? No.
Dan Greenberg is general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Rob Richie: Counterpoint
The Electoral College
must be reformed
How we elect our presidents has never been more broken — and that’s saying something for an Electoral College system subject to more proposed constitutional amendments than any other topic. We urgently need popular vote elections that treat every voter equally — and can do so by 2028.
When Congress recently certified the presidential election, it was based on the votes of 538 faceless electors, not the people. Those electors were selected according to laws that partisans in 48 states have ensured the awarding of 100% of electors to the candidate with the most votes in that state. Because of these laws, campaigns ignore states where the outcome is certain — which today means 44 of our 51 states (counting the Districts of Columbia).
In 2020 and 2024, 19 of every 20 presidential campaign events occurred in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. The concerns of Americans in spectator states aren’t relevant to campaigns and are under-served between elections. Because only swing states matter, five presidents have assumed office after losing the popular vote.
The yawning gap between swing and spectator states destroys common Electoral College defenses. Less populous states are ignored, with Nevada the only battleground among the 31 smallest states. Most rural Americans haven’t cast a meaningful vote for president in their lifetimes.
Big-city voters should matter, too, but they won’t decide popular vote elections more than anyone else. That explains why Republicans since 2000 have won gubernatorial elections in 49 states and how Donald Trump comfortably won the popular vote in 2024.
Having seven predictable swing states incentivizes fraud and divisive litigation. Trump lost in 2020 by 7 million votes, but he could claim fraud because a shift of merely 21,461 swing state voters would have reversed the outcome. In 2024, Trump won by 2,284,338 votes, but he would have lost with a shift of 115,000 voters.
Minor parties affect presidential elections far more than in other elections, with the decisive swing state winning without a majority in five of our last nine elections. With operatives cynically weaponizing voter choice, expect increasing shenanigans involving minor parties if swing states don’t join Alaska and Maine in protecting majority rule with ranked-choice voting.
The Electoral College gets even worse when candidates fall short of 270 electoral votes, as can happen with an Electoral College tie or if independents win states. Imagine the chaos if Congress decided the presidency, with the House electing the president and the Senate able to pick a different party’s vice president.
The status of being a spectator state is nearly cemented. Consider that Republicans hold all 48 Senate seats in the spectator states won by Donald Trump but only one in the 19 states he lost. Democrats hold 198 of the 200 House seats with a partisan index favoring them by at least 4%, while Republicans have 213 of 216 seats comparably favoring them. With such predictable outcomes, don’t expect a new swing state in 2028.
Yet, we can take action. Barely a century ago, Americans amended the Constitution to establish Senate elections and enfranchise women. In 1969, the House overwhelmingly approved an amendment abolishing the Electoral College. It’s time for a robust debate about a popular vote amendment and whether it should strengthen voting rights, allow citizens in the territories to vote, and uphold majority rule with ranked-choice voting.
States don’t have to wait. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws joining the National Popular Vote compact, which is grounded in constitutional provisions giving states exclusive control over how to award electoral votes and the power to bind their agreements.
The popular vote compact establishes that once the law in states with a majority of electors, participating states will award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in all 50 states and D.C. We can have a popular vote election as soon as 2028 if just a few more states join the compact by initiative or if it wins legislatively in states where at least one chamber has passed it.
History shows that Americans can do anything when duty calls. Let’s live up to our proud tradition by reforming the Electoral College.
Rob Richie is the president of Expand Democracy and co-founder of FairVote. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
