Colorado latest state to eye ending Electoral College
DENVER – As the presidential election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden focuses increasingly on a few swing states that could determine the winner, millions of Americans are asking why their votes are essentially taken for granted.
Now, a long-running effort to make the nation’s presidential election a “one person, one vote” system is gaining favor among partisan Democrats still angry that Trump won the 2016 presidency despite losing the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes.
Colorado is the latest state to consider adopting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which seeks to essentially abolish the Electoral College without going through the near-impossible task of amending the U.S. Constitution. Coloradans are voting on the measure now, and polls show support is evenly split.
The idea of abolishing the Electoral College has been around for decades, but the current proposal became more popular after Al Gore lost the 2000 election. It hinges on states agreeing to dedicate their electoral votes to whoever wins the overall popular vote for president, rather than dedicating their votes to the candidate who won their individual state.
Unlike most elections in the U.S., the presidency is decided not directly by voters but by members of the Electoral College, who are assigned based on the results of the popular vote in each state.
If approved by voters, Colorado would join 14 states and Washington, D.C., as members of the compact, which takes effect once states with a total 270 electoral votes sign on. Colorado’s nine electoral votes would take the total to 196.
Supporters say the measure would force candidates to campaign in states often taken for granted because they vote so reliably Democrat or Republican that they can be safely ignored.
The proposal received new attention after the U.S. Supreme Court in July ruled that Electoral College electors in 32 states are legally obligated to cast their vote for the winner of their state’s vote, rather than selecting someone else.
While the plan’s longtime backers
have pushed it in large part on a philosophical basis, some frustrated Democrats have hopped aboard in hopes of avoiding a repeat of the 2000 and 2016 elections, where Republicans George W. Bush and Trump lost the popular vote but still claimed the presidency.
Many of the former 2020 Democratic presidential candidates generally supported either abolishing the Electoral College entirely or just using the compact to make it obsolete. Biden, however, has said he opposes changing the current system.
“The 2016 election was a good reminder of our democracy and what we need to do protect every single piece of it,” said Daniel Ramos, former executive director of the LGBTQ advocacy group One Colorado. “The conversation (supporting the initiative) seemed even more prominent given that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and Donald Trump still became the president.”
Electoral College votes are generally distributed based on population, but highly populated states like California and New York, which tend to favor Democrats, have proportionally fewer votes. That’s because the Electoral College system was also designed to give rural states a larger vote than they might otherwise be entitled to, especially those at the time with large populations of enslaved African Americans.
Today, California, for instance, has 40 million residents and 55 electoral votes, while Wyoming has 560,000 residents and three votes. That means Wyoming’s electors represent about 186,300 voters apiece, while California’s are proxy for more than 727,000 each. In other words, Wyoming’s Electoral College votes count almost four times more than California’s on a per-person basis.
Each state has as many Electoral College votes as it does members of Congress. The 2020 Census will likely cause some states to lose votes while others gain as the nation’s population shifts.
Because most states have a “winner take all” policy for awarding those electoral votes, a candidate who just barely loses a large state’s popular vote gets zero electoral college votes. That means candidates are increasingly focusing on swing states they might win while largely ignoring states that will either reliably support them or their opponent.
The League of Women Voters, the nonpartisan elections advocacy group, has long called for the Electoral College to be abolished or changed, and it has backed the popular-vote compact for 50 years. The league argues every vote should be weighted the same, regardless of who it benefits politically, because the concept of “one person, one vote” is so central to the American ideal.
Among the states that have adopted the compact: Vermont, California, New York and Illinois.
“We think elections should be done with ‘one vote for one person’ for every election, right down to student council,” said Ruth Stemler, president of the Colorado League of Women Voters.
Supporters of a popular vote point out that while independent presidential candidate Ross Perot won 19% of the overall vote in 1992, he didn’t collect a single electoral vote because he didn’t “win” a single state. And while generally the winner of the popular vote becomes president, the Electoral College picked someone else five times, in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.
A poll in Colorado a year ago by Magellan Strategies found that support for joining the compact split largely along party lines, strongest among younger Democrats and opposed most strongly by older Republicans.
In the 2016 general election campaign, half of all campaign events were held in just Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio, highlighting their importance in the Electoral College calculations, according to compact backers.
But critics say the measure would actually give more power to Democratdominated coastal cities in New York and California, where in 2016 Clinton ran up huge overall margins but still lost the Electoral College and therefore the presidency to Trump. Under the popular vote, a Democrat could campaign more efficiently by focusing on large cities that already tend to lean liberal, counting on their support to overwhelm less-populated but more conservative areas.
In Colorado, conservative commentator Krista Kafer, who opposes the popular vote, said she’s convinced the current system forces more coalitionbuilding. Many conservatives joke that direct democracies are the equivalent of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner.
“Politicians would spend the season courting Californians, New Yorkers, Illinoisans and Floridians,” Kafer said. “Those of us in flyover country and our concerns would be ignored.”
Supporters of the current system say the Electoral College has served the nation well for generations by ensuring rural areas are heard.
“The Constitution, in a lot of ways, is designed to make sure we don’t have big cities just running everything,” said Trent England, director of Oklahoma-based Save Our States, which opposes the popular-vote compact.