Too late for 2020, but Electoral College must go

Here is a statistical analysis that should keep Democrats up at night: Joe Biden could win the popular vote by two to three percentage points and his chances of becoming the next president would be just 46%. In a narrow election — a Biden plurality over President Trump of less than one percentage point in the popular vote — he would have a 6% chance of being inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021. Could there be a more compelling argument against the anachronistic Electoral College system and its potential to thwart the will of the people?

The possibility of a 2016 replay — in which Hillary Clinton prevailed by two percentage points in the nationwide vote, but lost the Electoral College, 227 to 304 — is very real. Nate Silver, the statistics whiz and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight, laid it out in a recent tweet.

“You’ll sometimes see people say stuff like ‘Biden MUST win the popular vote by 3 points or he’s toast,’ ” Silver tweeted Wednesday. “Not true; at 34 points, the Electoral College is a tossup, not necessarily a Trump win ... (on the other hand) the Electoral College is not really *safe* for Biden unless he wins by 5+.”

And to think Trump complains about the prospect of a rigged election.

In truth, the nation’s Founding Fathers created the Electoral College in 1787 out of the regional sensitivities of the day, rather than to advance any particular candidate or ideology. One of their concerns was whether the 4 million voters in 13 states along 1,000 miles of Eastern Seaboard would have sufficient access to information about candidates from distant points; another more insidious motivation was deference to Southern states that feared domination by the North (as reflected in the compromise that counted a nonvoting slave as threefifths of a person for congressional representation).

The system endured through the centuries because it so rarely produced a conflict between the popular vote and the ultimate winner — just three times between the founding and 1888. Now the candidate with the votes of more Americans has lost two of the past five elections (Clinton in 2016, preceded by Al Gore to George W. Bush in 2000).

Would yet another anomaly finally force Americans to demand change? It should, but it won’t.

The straightforward approach would be an amendment to the Constitution, which would require a twothirds vote in each house of Congress, followed by ratification by 38 states.

Republicans would be unlikely to cede their Electoral College advantage. Small states would be unwilling to give up their outsize clout in a system that provides a baseline of three electors (reflecting one House member, two senators). As a result, a Wyoming vote is worth 3½ times a California vote in a presidential election.

Not that the major party campaigns will spend any time or money in solidly Republican Wyoming or solidly Democratic California.

The even greater distortion of democracy is the way the Electoral College reduces the selection of a leader for nearly 330 million people to a handful of potentially competitive states. The battleground has shifted slightly from 2016

— with Arizona, Georgia and Texas coming into play, joining with perennials such as Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin — but most of the rest of the nation will be taken for granted by the campaigns.

A shortcut to establishment of the “one person, one vote” principle in presidential elections would be the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact being pushed by some reformers. Here’s how it would work: States would essentially pledge to award their electors to whichever candidate who received the most votes nationwide, regardless of the results of their individual states. The compact would take effect once it assembled enough states to reach the magic 270 electoral votes to decide the winner. So far, 15 states (including California) and the District of Columbia — 196 electoral votes — have signed on to the deal. It won’t be a factor in 2020.

My issue with the compact is that it merely replaces one convoluted system with another. Also, it almost certainly would produce a legal challenge. The Supreme Court recently affirmed the right of states to require electors to vote in accordance with their states’ outcome, thus preventing “faithless electors” from becoming free agents after an election. But that left open the question of whether a state could order its electors to vote

against state voters’ wishes to comply with the compact.

The last thing Americans should want is another presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, as we saw in 2000, when the justices ruled 5to4 to halt the Florida recount. It’s far better to do the hard work for a constitutional amendment that settles it once and for all: The candidate with the most votes wins. Full stop.