Why does the hated Electoral College endure?
In November 2000, as the Florida recount gripped the nation, a newly elected Democratic senator from New York took a break from an upstate victory tour to address the possibility that Al Gore could wind up winning the popular vote but losing the presidential election.
She was unequivocal. “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people,” Hillary Clinton said, “and to me that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.”
Sixteen years later, the Electoral College is still standing, and Clinton has followed Gore as the second Democratic presidential candidate in modern history to be defeated by a Republican who earned fewer votes, in his case by George W. Bush.
In her concession speech Wednesday, Clinton did not mention the popular vote, an omission that seemed to signal her desire to encourage a smooth and civil transition of power after such a divisive election. But her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, wasted little time highlighting her higher vote total than Donald Trump’s in introducing her.
And the disparity left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Democrats, whose party won the country’s national popular vote for the third consecutive election but no longer controls any branch of government.
“If we really subscribe to the notion that ‘majority rules,’ then why do we deny the majority their chosen candidate?” said Jennifer M. Granholm, a former governor of Michigan.
Trump himself has been critical of the Electoral College in the past. On the eve of the 2012 election, he called it “a disaster for a democracy” in a Twitter post. Now, after months of railing against what he called a “rigged” election, he has become the unlikely beneficiary of an electoral system that allows a candidate to win the race without winning over the most voters.
None of Clinton’s supporters have gone so far as to suggest the popular vote tally should delegitimize Trump’s victory, and the popular vote margin in Tuesday’s election was in fact narrower than the one that separated Bush and Gore in 2000. But the results are already renewing calls for electoral reform.
“I personally would like to see the Electoral College eliminated entirely,” said David Boies, who represented Gore in the Florida recount in 2000. “I think it’s a historical anomaly.”
Defenders of the system argue that it reduces the chances of daunting nationwide recounts in close races, a scenario that Gary L. Gregg II, an Electoral College expert at the University of Louisville, said would be a “national nightmare.”
Calls to change the system, which would require a constitutional amendment, are likely to fall on deaf ears with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress.
And though there was some momentum for reform after Gore’s defeat, it dissipated after Bush and Barack Obama won both the popular and electoral votes in 2004, 2008 and 2012.
For reformers, the best hope may lie in the so-called National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award all of their respective electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in a given election. So far, 10 states and the District of Columbia have joined the agreement. But it will only go into effect when enough states have signed on to guarantee that the winner of the popular vote will win the election.