Government
What Is the Electoral College and Should It Be Abolished?
The Electoral College is the most counterintuitive feature of American democracy for people from everywhere else in the world. You can lose an election by millions of votes and still win. That is not how most people define winning.
It was created at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 for a combination of reasons, some principled and some nakedly political. The principled argument was that direct popular election would favor large states and that educated electors could serve as a buffer against popular passion. The political reality was that Southern states needed a system that gave them extra weight for their enslaved population (who could not vote but counted for representation under the three-fifths compromise) and small states wanted outsized influence to sign onto the Constitution at all.
The three-fifths compromise is gone. The small state advantage remains.
Wyoming has approximately 580,000 people and 3 electoral votes — 1 electoral vote per 193,000 people. California has 39 million people and 54 electoral votes — 1 electoral vote per 722,000 people. A Wyoming voter has about 3.7x the Electoral College influence of a California voter. (National Archives, Electoral College data)
The practical consequence is that presidential elections are decided by a handful of swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada. The other 40+ states effectively do not matter. Candidates campaign almost exclusively in swing states. Policy tends to favor swing state interests. The 80 million Americans in California and Texas — deeply non-competitive in opposite directions — are largely irrelevant to the presidential outcome.
Abolishing the Electoral College requires a constitutional amendment — two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states. That will not happen because small states would never vote to reduce their own influence.
The NPVIC — where states agree to give their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote nationally — is the most viable reform. It does not require a constitutional amendment. It just requires enough states to join. At 209 electoral votes committed, it needs 61 more. The political resistance is significant, but it is the only path that does not require changing the Constitution.
Whether you think the Electoral College should be abolished depends largely on whether you think the person who gets the most votes should win. In most democracies, the answer to that question is obvious.