Opponents of the Electoral College are disturbed by the possibility of electing a minority
president (one without the absolute majority of popular votes). Nor is this concern
entirely unfounded since there are three ways in which that could happen. One way in
which a minority president could be elected is if the country were so deeply divided
politically that three or more presidential candidates split the electoral votes among
them such that no one obtained the necessary majority . . . there are two possible
resolutions: either one candidate could throw his electoral votes to the support of
another (before the meeting of the Electors) or else, absent an absolute majority in the
Electoral College, the U.S. House of Representatives would select the president in
accordance with the 12th Amendment. . . .A second way in which a minority president
could take office is if, as in 1888, one candidate's popular support were heavily
concentrated in a few States while the other candidate maintained a slim popular lead
in enough States to win the needed majority of the Electoral College. . . . A third way of
electing a minority president is if a third party or candidate, however small, drew
enough votes from the top two that no one received over 50% of the national popular
total. Far from being unusual, this sort of thing has, in fact, happened 15 times including
(in this century) Wilson in both 1912 and 1916, Truman in 1948, Kennedy in 1960, Nixon
in 1968, and Clinton in both 1992 and 1996.
Opponents of the Electoral College system also point to the risk of so called "faithless"
Electors. A "faithless Elector" is one who is pledged to vote for his party's candidate for
president but nevertheless votes for another candidate. There have been 7 such
Electors in this century and as recently as 1988 when a Democrat Elector in the State of
West Virginia cast his votes for Lloyd Bensen for president and Michael Dukakis for vice
president instead of the other way around. . . .

Arguments against the Electoral College

© 2012 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
www.gilderlehrman.org
Opponents of the Electoral College are further concerned about its possible role in
depressing voter turnout. Their argument is that, since each State is entitled to the same
number of electoral votes regardless of its voter turnout, there is no incentive in the
States to encourage voter participation. Indeed, there may even be an incentive to
discourage participation (and they often cite the South here) so as to enable a minority
of citizens to decide the electoral vote for the whole State.
Finally, some opponents of the Electoral College point out . . . its failure to accurately
reflect the national popular will in at least two respects. First, the distribution of
Electoral votes in the College tends to over represent people in rural States. This is
because the number of Electors for each State is determined by the number of
members it has in the House (which more or less reflects the State's population size)
plus the number of members it has in the Senate (which is always two regardless of the
State's population). The result is that in 1988, for example, the combined voting age
population (3,119,000) of the seven least populous jurisdictions of Alaska, Delaware, the
District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming carried the
same voting strength in the Electoral College (21 Electoral votes) as the 9,614,000
persons of voting age in the State of Florida. Each Floridian's potential vote, then,
carried about one third the weight of a potential vote in the other States listed. A
second way in which the Electoral College fails to accurately reflect the national popular
will stems primarily from the winner-take-all mechanism whereby the presidential
candidate who wins the most popular votes in the State wins all the Electoral votes of
that State. One effect of this mechanism is to make it extremely difficult for third-party
or independent candidates ever to make much of a showing in the Electoral College. If,
for example, a third-party or independent candidate were to win the support of even as
many as 25% of the voters nationwide, he might still end up with no Electoral College
votes at all unless he won a plurality of votes in at least one State. And even if he
managed to win a few States, his support elsewhere would not be reflected. By thus
failing to accurately reflect the national popular will . . . the Electoral College reinforces
a two-party system, discourages third-party or independent candidates, and thereby
tends to restrict choices available to the electorate. . . .