Expand the Electoral College, Don’t Abolish It
By: Darren Richardson
Tags: Electoral College, Elections, Politics, History, Voting

Expand the Electoral College, Don’t Abolish It

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Whether you voted for Joe Biden, Donald Trump or someone else in the November presidential election, chances are you have an opinion — maybe a strong one — about the Electoral College.

It may be that your feelings about the Electoral College are so intense that you don’t even bother to vote in presidential elections.

I’ve talked with several people over the past few decades who told me they saw no point in voting until the Electoral College was abolished and a one-person, one-vote democracy became the rule of law in the United States.

My response to these idealistic nonvoters usually goes something like this: “Don’t hold your breath.”

I take this attitude because of how the Electoral College came to be in the first place.

“The Founding Fathers established the Electoral College in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.” — The National Archives website

Getting closer to a one-person, one-vote reality will require compromise between those who want to keep the Electoral College and those who want to abolish it. Ironically, the most effective way to please both sides may be by expanding it.

Room for Improvement in the Electoral College

The U.S. has had 59 presidential elections, with the popular vote winner losing the Electoral College and the presidency five times: in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. According to the National Archives, Congress has introduced more than 700 proposals over the past 200 years to reform or eliminate the Electoral College.

If the candidate who won the national popular vote were awarded a substantial bloc of electoral votes for that victory, in addition to the votes won under the current structure, it would go a long way toward ensuring that the winner of the popular vote and the electoral vote are the same person.

This would need to be done by constitutional amendment rather than the legislative process or through something like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, because it would add to the number of electoral votes spelled out in Article II of the Constitution rather than just changing the way they are awarded.

And frankly, a change this big should require a constitutional amendment.

That would be in keeping with the spirit of the original compromise while also giving the popular vote winner a tangible reward in the form of additional electoral votes.

If it ever becomes operative, the popular vote compact could lead to serious problems in reflecting the will of voters in a given state.

Let’s say Candidate A wins some medium-sized states by decent margins, a few larger states like Texas and Florida by large margins, and takes the national popular vote over Candidate B, 75 million to 74 million votes. Candidate B wins California and New York by at least 20 points in each state and wins very close contests in enough other states to secure the electoral college — if not for the compact.

Do you really think California and New York voters, and those from other Candidate B states, would be happy to see their electoral clout allotted in a way that does not align with how their state voted? Of course not.

The Popular Vote Electoral College Amendment

Under what I am calling the Popular Vote Electoral College Amendment (PVECA), current electoral votes would be awarded just as they are today. But the amendment would create an additional bloc of electoral votes to be awarded to the national popular vote winner.

Voters would get to have their say both as citizens of their respective states and as U.S. citizens.

As it stands now, states have an electoral vote for each U.S. senator and one per congressional district. The number of congressional districts per state are determined by the results of the decennial Census, whereas the number of Senate seats stays fixed at two per state. By way of the 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961, the District of Columbia currently gets three electoral votes.

Since the 1960 election, after the addition of Alaska and Hawaii to the United States, there have been 538 electoral votes in play, with 270 needed to win the presidency.

PVECA would change that.

As noted earlier, the number of electoral votes awarded to the popular vote winner would have to be significant. Right now, California has the most electoral votes with 55. It stands to reason that winning the national popular vote should be worth more electoral votes than any single state’s total, even the most populous state. So let’s just say PVECA would establish 100 electoral votes to be awarded to the popular vote winner. That would result in a total of 638 electoral votes in play, with 320 needed to win the presidency.

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton; images U.S. Government works in the public domain

How Would PVECA Have Affected the 2000 and 2016 Elections?

Then-Vice President Al Gore won the national popular vote in 2000 by nearly 550,000 votes. Still, he lost the Electoral College to George W. Bush, who went on the become the 43rd president.

But had something like PVECA been law at the time, Gore would have won the presidency with 366 electoral votes to Bush’s 271 instead of losing 271 to 266. (One D.C. elector abstained in protest of The District’s lack of representation in Congress.)

Hillary Clinton, who beat Donald Trump by nearly 3 million popular votes — almost six times Gore’s margin of victory over Bush — nonetheless lost the Electoral College by a larger margin, 304 to 227, with seven electors resorting to write-in votes.

Under PVECA, Clinton would have won the presidency with 327 electoral votes to Trump’s 304, assuming the seven faithless electors still chose to write in names rather than doing what their state’s voters directed them to.

A Popular Vote Winner Could Lose, but It Would Be Far Less Likely

Suppose Candidate X won several states by large margins on the way to a popular vote victory, while Candidate Y won enough states by much tighter margins to reach 320 electoral votes overall. This could lead to a scenario where Candidate Y already secures the win before electoral votes from the popular vote win were added in, rendering PVECA moot in an election with these kinds of voting patterns.

As you can see, however, both Gore and Clinton would have won the presidency by virtue of their popular vote wins.

Another potential drawback has to do with the time it would take to tally the national popular vote with full confidence in the totals. If the popular vote were close, it could take several weeks to determine who won the PVECA electoral votes — and with them the presidency.

Yet the nation survived court battles and a prolonged waiting period in the aftermath of the 2000 election, and it appears we will survive 2020 and the incumbent’s unprecedented litigious attacks on the integrity of the U.S. electoral system.

This time around, at least, it appears the Electoral College and the majority of U.S. voters will have selected the same person — the person who will eventually become president.

If support for PVECA or something like it gains traction, however, what happens in 2024 and beyond could depend as much as or more on a one-person, one-vote modification to the Electoral College as it does on how we currently elect a president.

Darren Richardson worked as a professional copy editor and headline writer in daily print journalism for more than 15 years. He also created and served as the managing editor of The American Pundit political writing contest, which ran on Allvoices.com in 2012 and 2013. More of his political articles can be found below: