The last Electoral College election?
An alternative system is gathering steam
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About twenty years ago, a computer scientist called John Koza - the co-inventor of the scratchcard - launched an ambitious plan to transform the Electoral College. That plan, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, now stands closer than ever to reaching its goal, and some of its proponents have started to claim that 2024 could be the last election held under the current Electoral College system. But are they right?
Just in case you need a refresher, the Electoral College is the constitutional mechanism by which the United States picks its president. Fearful as they were of direct democracy, many of the Founders wanted to create a deliberative body of elites who would select a president, and the college was it. The states - initially state legislatures rather than voters directly - picked “electors” to serve in the Electoral College, and then those people picked who the president would be. In theory, the electors would exercise independent judgement in making their choice. But in practice, right from the first election in the new republic, they were bound to a particular party. Whichever party could appoint the majority of electors to the Electoral College - today you need 270 - could then have those electors pick its candidate as president.
The flaw built into this system right from the beginning was the possibility of an Electoral College/popular vote split - in other words, that the winner of the Electoral College vote would turn out not to be the person who actually won the most popular votes. But before the year 2000, the only straightforward example was in 1888.1 Since then, it has happened twice - 2000 and 2016 - and looks very possible again this year, with Kamala Harris’ edge in the popular vote not enough to guarantee an Electoral College win.
The idea behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is simple. If enough states to constitute an Electoral College majority agree that they will always give their EC votes to the popular vote winner, then EC/popular vote splits can become a thing of the past. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the other states do - so long as you have a group of states representing 270 Electoral College votes, they can always determine the outcome of the election. Advocates of the compact spend their time trying to persuade state legislatures to agree to use their EC votes this way, and they’ve already got to 209 votes.
The plan depends on a deliberate vagueness that the Founders built into the Electoral College system - the constitution doesn’t actually say anything about how states will decide to allocate their EC votes. There’s no constitutional rule which says that a state has to give its EC votes to the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. This vagueness was designed by the Founders to discourage democratic outcomes, but now it could be used in their service.
That being said, there are some significant hurdles to enacting the compact. So far it has been accepted by 17 states plus Washington, D.C. - but every single one of them is a blue state. The reason for this partisan split is obvious - right now Republicans appear to be the main beneficiaries of Electoral College/popular vote splits, so they have little reason to overturn the existing system.
Proponents of the compact are now setting their sights on convincing swing states like Michigan to sign on, but it’s a tricky sell. It’s only Michigan’s status as a swing state which leads to it, alongside other Midwestern states, having such national prominence and having elections to a large extent revolve around the issues which affect these states. One of the reasons that deciding elections by the popular vote would be so good for America is that it would mean all Americans would be listened to rather than just the residents of the swing states. But if you were a Michigander, why would you want to make that switch? You’d be making your own voice less important.
The public favors ditching the Electoral College by a large margin. But these numbers might shift quickly if there was a real possibility of change, if only because the change would then become the focus of high-spending advertising and communication campaigns. Once a really serious societal discussion began - fuelled by huge dollops of advertising spending - we’d expect to see these polls begin to reflect partisanship more closely. The issue would become less about the abstract idea of democracy, and more about the practical consequences of a shift in terms of who was most likely to win future elections. And that would be a much more divisive way to think about the issue.
If there’s a sign of hope, then, it’s that there are some signs that the conventional wisdom about which party benefits from the EC may be becoming outdated. Many polls show Republicans’ edge in the Electoral College shrinking this year and even turning into a Democratic advantage. It’s worth pointing out that these polls are downright weird and that they might be wrong. But there’s no particular reason to think that the EC should benefit one party more than another over the long term - as recently as 2004, John Kerry came fairly close to winning the EC despite losing the popular vote.
If the GOP’s Electoral College advantage really does disappear, then that would be the quickest route to some sort of consensus on making a change. Perhaps the compact really is an idea whose time has come - as with so many other things, we’ll have to wait for the election result to find out.
In 1824, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote but lost the presidency because he failed to win a majority of the Electoral College due to EC votes being split between four different candidates. The election was eventually decided by the House of Representatives. Then in 1876, there was an Electoral College dispute which revolved around civil violence and alternative slates of electors in the dying days of Reconstruction - so again, not a classic EC/popular vote split.