LET THE PEOPLE PICK THE PRESIDENT
The winners of Tuesday’s elections — Republican or Democrat, for governor, mayor or dogcatcher — all have one thing in common: They received more votes than their opponent. That seems like a pretty fair way to run an electoral race, which is why every election in America uses it — except the most important one of all.
Was it just a year ago that more than 136 million Americans cast their ballots for president, choosing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by nearly 3 million votes, only to be thwarted by a 200-year-old constitutional anachronism designed in part to appease slaveholders and ratified when no one but white male landowners could vote?
It feels more like, oh, 17 years — the last time, incidentally, that the American people chose one candidate for president and the Electoral College imposed the other.
In both cases the loser was a Democrat, a fact that has tempted more than a few people to dismiss complaints about the Electoral College as nothing but partisan sour grapes. That’s a mistake. For one thing, Republicans nearly suffered the same fate in 2004. A switch of just 60,000 votes in Ohio would have awarded the White House to John Kerry, who lost the national popular vote by roughly the same margin as Trump. More important, decades of polling have found that Americans of all stripes would prefer that the president be chosen directly by the people and not by 538 party functionaries six weeks after Election Day.
Trump agrees, or at least he used to. In 2012, when he thought Barack Obama would lose the popular vote but still retake the White House, he called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy.” Last November, days after his own victory, Trump said: “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes, and somebody else gets 90 million votes, and you win. There’s a reason for doing this, because it brings all the states into play.”
He was right, even if he has since converted to an Electoral College advocate. The existing winner-take-all system, which awards all of a state’s electoral votes to the popular-vote winner in that state, no matter how close the race, is deeply anti-democratic. It treats tens of millions of Americans — from Republicans in Boston to Democrats in Biloxi — as if their voices don’t matter.
Defenders of the Electoral College argue that it was created to protect the interests of smaller states, whose voters would otherwise be overwhelmed by the much larger populations living in urban areas along the coasts. That’s wrong as a matter of history: The framers of the Constitution were concerned primarily with ensuring that the president wasn’t selected by uneducated commoners. The electors were meant to be a deliberative body of intelligent, well-informed men who would be immune to corruption. (The arrangement was also a gift to the Southern states, with their large, unenfranchised populations of slaves.)
But regardless of its original intent, the Electoral College today is, as Trump said, a disaster for a democracy. Modern presidential campaigns ignore almost all states, large and small alike, in favor of a handful that are closely divided between Republicans and Democrats — and even within those states, they focus on a few key regions. In 2016, twothirds of all public campaign events were held in just six states: Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina; toss in six more and you’ve got 94 percent of all campaign events.
This may be smart campaigning, but it’s terrible for the rest of the country, which is rendered effectively invisible, distorting our politics, our policy debates and even the distribution of federal funds. Candidates focus their platforms on the concerns of battleground states, and presidents who want to stay in office make sure to lavish attention, and money, on the same places. The emphasis on a small number of states also increases the risk to our national security, by creating an easy target for hackers who want to influence the outcome of an election. Perhaps most important, voters outside of swing states know their votes are devalued, if not worthless, and they behave accordingly. In 2012, 64 percent of swing-state voters showed up, compared with 57 percent everywhere else, a pattern that persisted in 2016. What better way to get more voters to register and go to the polls than to ensure that everyone’s vote is weighed equally?
The Electoral College has been the subject of more amendment efforts — 595 as of 2004 — than any other part of the Constitution. But amending the Constitution is a heavy lift. A quicker and more realistic fix is the National Popular Vote interstate compact, under which states agree to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The agreement kicks in as soon as states representing a total of 270 electoral votes sign on, ensuring that the popular vote will always pick the president. So far, 10 states and the District of Columbia have joined, representing 165 electoral votes. The problem is that they are all solidly Democratic, which only adds to the suspicion that this is no more than a partisan game. It’s not: When Trump is not making up stories about millions of illegal voters, he has argued that if the presidency were decided by popular vote, he would have campaigned differently and still would have won. He may well be right.
How can red states be persuaded to sign on and give all their citizens a voice? Some, like Georgia and Arizona, may not stay red for much longer. But even deep-red states would benefit from the infusion of attention and cash from campaigns seeking to rustle up every vote they can find.
This problem isn’t going away; if anything it’s going to get worse as Americans continue to cluster. Half the population now lives in just nine states. It’s time for states that have been on the fence about the national popular-vote compact to get off and sign on. Connecticut, Oregon and Delaware have all come close to passing the compact in recent years; they should get it done now. Yes, they’re three reliably blue states representing 17 electoral votes among them, but every vote counts.