Next week five hundred and thirty-eight American citizens will travel to their state capitals and elect the president of the United States. These Americans, chosen for loyalty to their political party, will vote for the presidential candidate who won their state’s popular vote.[1] Only when they sign “the certificate of ascertainment” and the votes are tallied in the United States Congress is the presidential race officially over. As we all know only too well, in practice this archaic system means that the person who wins the most votes may not win the election.
This has happened five times in American history. Three happened in the 19th century; none in the 20th century and two in the 21st century. We will focus on elections in the 20th and 21st centuries.
In the 20th century there were 25 presidential elections and none of them resulted in an Electoral College winner who lost the popular vote. However, in the five presidential elections of the 21st century, two ended up with the winner of the popular vote losing the Electoral College. In 2000 Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote against Governor George W. Bush by 543,895. After a long battle in Florida Bush won the state narrowly, giving him an Electoral College victory of 271 to 266 over Al Gore. In 2016, the results were even more dramatic. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,686 and yet lost the Electoral College vote: 304 for Trump and 227 for Clinton. And, as our colleague Bill Galston has written, the Electoral College continues to be a “ticking time bomb.” In the 2020 presidential election “a shift of just 45,000 votes in three states, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona … could have shattered Americans’ belief in the legitimacy of their political system” by creating a tie in the Electoral College and sending the election to the House of Representatives. That could have happened even though Biden won the popular vote by 7,060,087 (and counting)—a margin even larger than the margins won by George W Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012.
This can’t go on. Having the person who loses the popular vote win the presidency will seriously undermine the legitimacy of our elections.
Why is this happening now?
Today about 1.3% of those employed in the United States work directly in agriculture, and they manage to feed the entire country and beyond. This is the result of an amazing technological revolution, but what does it have to do with the Electoral College? Plenty. As the graph below illustrates, over the course of the 20th century the distance between the biggest state by population and the median state increased. For instance, in 1900 New York was the biggest state in the union with 7,268,894 people and the state with the median population, Louisiana, had 1,381,625 people. So, the state at the median had 19% of the population of the largest state. But as people moved and the economy changed so did that ratio. By 2019, the median state was Kentucky with 4,467,673 which made it 11% of the population of California, the biggest state in the union with 39,512,223 people.
Explanation:
