Do you think the electoral college should be changed/ended?

So tired of 6% of the states being the entire focus during elections because they are "swing" states. Just get rid of it already.

This is how I feel too. I think it’s messed up that a candidate can receive several *million* fewer votes and still end up being the winner.

Yes, in a perfect world, the EC should go away, and we should move to one person/one vote. But that isn't realistic.

I read the other day that while getting rid of the EC is near impossible, another possible solution is to expand the house past its current membership, putting fewer people in each congressional district (better representation) and doing away with smaller states have disproportionately stronger voices in the EC.

Ending the EC takes a constitutional amendment, which would never be passed and ratified, but expanding the house (and thus the EC) would only take passage of a law. For best effect, the law would also have to outlaw partisan gerrymandering and require congressional districts within each state to be set by an independent commission. From what I've read so far, I feel like the next Democratic trifecta (House/Senate/Executive), if we should ever have that again, should make this a priority. 

A positive benefit for all people, including those who currently find themselves party-less, is that both parties would have to come up with ideas that appeal to a majority of people, not just their fringe elements.

To further increase fairness (and end taxation without real representation), DC and PR should also become states.

This website explains it pretty well: www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/initiative/enlarging-house-representatives

I would be happy if it went away and was replaced with the popular vote. But, as Merge pointed out, that's nearly impossible. Another option - stop the winner takes all and divide the electoral points like Nebraska and Maine. All of the states used to do this, but that changed. HCR wrote something about it, I will see if I can find it.


eta -

heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-20-2024

In the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams won, but Thomas Jefferson, who led the Democratic-Republicans (which were not the same as today’s Democrats or Republicans) was keenly aware that had Virginia given him all its electoral votes, rather than splitting them between him and Adams, he would have been president.

On January 12, 1800, Jefferson wrote to the governor of Virginia, James Monroe, urging him to back a winner-take-all system that awarded all Virginia’s electoral votes to the person who won the majority of the vote in the state. He admitted that dividing electoral votes by district “would be more likely to be an exact representation of [voters’] diversified sentiments” but, defending his belief that he was the true popular choice in the country in 1796, said voting by districts “would give a result very different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the US. were they assembled together.”

Virginia made the switch. Alarmed, the Federalists in Massachusetts followed suit to make sure Adams got all their votes, and by 1836, every state but South Carolina, where the legislature continued to choose electors until 1860, had switched to winner-take-all.

This change horrified the so-called Father of the Constitution, James Madison, who worried that the new system would divide the nation geographically and encourage sectional tensions. He wrote in 1823 that voting by district, rather than winner-take-all, “was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted.” He proposed a constitutional amendment to end winner-take-all.

The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states.

In the twenty-first century the earlier problems with the Electoral College have grown until they threaten to establish permanent minority rule.

In our history, four presidents—all Republicans—have lost the popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy appears to be to do it again (or to create such chaos that the election goes to the House of Representatives, where there will likely be more Republican-dominated delegations than Democratic ones).

In the 2024 election, Trump has shown little interest in courting voters. Instead, the campaign has thrown its efforts into legal challenges to voting and, apparently, into eking out a win in the Electoral College.

In a perfect world, get rid of it. It no longer (or never did) makes any sense.
The electoral college and the red/blue star maps go hand and hand. Land doesn't vote, people do and each should count equally.

Much as I would love to be rid of it, I just don’t think that it feasible right now. We need to reform the filibuster so that it’s not so easy, and at least put term limits on the SC.Thomas has been on the SC since 1991.

i would prefer that electoral votes be allocated proportionally to the popular vote in each state rather than the "winner take a''" method that is used in most states.

yessssssssssssss OMG