The Electoral College confirmed Joe Biden as president on December 14 after a contentious post-election period fraught with disinformation about the election results.
But the Electoral College itself has always been a contentious aspect of our electoral process. There have been around 800 attempts in Congress to amend or abolish the Electoral College since the founding of the country, according to Jesse Wegman, a writer and journalist, and member of the New York Times editorial board since 2013. He joined the Free Press via Zoom on Monday, November 16th for a Q&A about his new book, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Free Press: Why did you start to look more deeply into the Electoral College? What possibility for change do you feel like there is having spent time working on a book on the Electoral College?
Wegman: I first became aware of how the Electoral College really functions and dysfunctions back in 2000, when, for the first time in anybody’s living memory, it split between the popular vote and the Electoral College. That year George W. Bush won the Electoral College and became President, despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore by about 530,000 votes. I was shocked and I was upset, not just because Al Gore was my candidate, but because of this obvious unfairness of a system that let the person who won more votes lose, and let the person who lost the vote, win.
It struck me that, if we are choosing a president to lead the whole country, that person should be chosen by the whole country, with everybody counting equally. But because of the way the Electoral College works, that’s not how it happened.
So when the 2016 election happened and the same thing happened again, only this time it was Hillary Clinton winning by about six times as much as Al Gore had won by, and still losing the White House, it was like: This is not sustainable.
You discuss the National Popular Vote interstate compact in chapter seven of your book. Can you tell us briefly what it is?
The Electoral College in the Constitution is nothing in particular. All it says is states get a number of electoral votes that equal their Congressional representation. So New York has 27 members in the House plus two Senators. So New York has 29 electoral votes. That’s all the constitution says. You get 29 electoral votes in New York: Do what you want with them. State lawmakers say how we hand these out. The state lawmakers have total control over this. We have no say over this at all. It’s their choice.
There’s nothing unconstitutional about them doing it however they want. What New York does is what all but two states in the country do, which is called winner take all. That just means whoever wins the most votes in New York gets all of New York’s 29 electoral votes. It doesn’t matter if the candidate wins by 1%, they get all New York’s electoral votes.
This is really the heart of the problem with how the Electoral College functions, in my mind, and in the minds of people who started this interstate compact. When you have a winner take all system, it erases all of the people in your state who did not vote for the winning candidate. There are millions of Republicans in New York, millions of Republicans voted for Donald Trump this year. They all were erased. They did not count in the Electoral College count from New York because all of New York’s electors went to Joe Biden. It was as though they had all voted for Joe Biden. That’s a really bad way to run a representative democracy, when somebody votes for one person and then you treat them like they voted for the other person.
The way that this [National Popular Vote Interstate] compact works is it acknowledges that states can award their electors, however they choose.. So they agree when they join the compact to award their electors, not to the winner of the statewide vote, but to the person who wins the most votes in the entire country, all 50 states and DC. What number have we been talking about for the past two weeks, 270, right? That’s the magic number. That’s the number that you need to become president.
So if states representing 270 electoral votes joined this compact, it takes effect. It is not in effect right now, even though it has 15 states that have joined on. You need enough states that have joined to reach 270 electors, and then automatically what happens, the candidate who gets the most votes in the country becomes president every time. That solves lots of problems.
One of the problems that it solves is you never have the candidate who gets fewer votes becoming president, which I think is what most people get really upset about. That’s the thing that most people were upset about in 2000 and in 2016. The guy who won the fewer votes became president. So you eliminate that problem.
The other problem you eliminate is what’s called the battleground state problem. This is that issue that I was describing with the red and blue states. When you have winner-take-all, the vast majority of states are just not competitive. We call them safe states. New York, which we live in, we’re all safe.I assume you all vote in New York.
Your vote, despite it being very important for you to vote, your vote doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered, as long as you voted in New York, because New York is now a safe, Democratic state. Most states are safe democratic, or safe Republican states. There’s only a handful, maybe half a dozen every four years, that we call battleground states. Those are the only states that matter to the candidates, because they’re the only states that the candidates could actually move enough votes in to change the outcome and get all of their electors going into one bucket or the other.
That’s a really distorting influence on a representative democracy, when the candidate only has to pay attention to slivers of people in a few states, randomly distributed, to become president of the whole country. So Donald Trump has been saying blue state Democrats as if: (A) those states are somehow less important because they’re not voting for him, and (B) that there are not millions of his supporters in those states too, who are being ignored. It’s a really distorting issue.
What are the limitations of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact?
196 electoral votes worth of states have now joined [the compact], so only 74 votes away. It does have several hurdles. It’s gotten further than any effort in American history to change the way we elect the president. I think it’s really important for some of those states to be Republican led states, ‘red states’. Right now it’s only blue states- only states with democratic leadership- have passed it because for an obvious reason. Democrats are upset and they think it’s unfair. Republicans are like: Hey, the system works great for us, why would we change it?
The truth is it’s going to screw both parties sooner or later. That’s how you convince them to adopt the system.
If it were to pass, it would also face constitutional challenges. The compact clause of the constitution is a hurdle. I won’t get into it now, but it is one of the main constitutional challenges that has been raised to this compact.
So let’s say in the future, the election is run by a popular vote, there’s more voter turnout. Do you see a chance for an independent party or a third party to come into play?
I think there’s two questions there. One is turnout. Absolutely, turnout goes up. This is not a theory. We know this as a fact. Battleground states have significantly higher turnout than safe states. For an obvious reason: when people know their vote matters, they’re more likely to vote. This year we had this incredible turnout. It was an astonishing thing in American history. It was the highest turnout by rate in more than a century. I think it’s going to end up being close to 67, maybe 65%. Really an amazing number, for America anyway.
I think you could bump it up another 10 or 20 or 30 million if you had a true national popular vote election. To me, the more people who participate, the better it is for democracy, the better it is for representative government.
The question about independent or third parties is a good one. Right now there’s no incentive to run as an independent, other than to be a spoiler. You’re never going to win enough votes in a state to get their electors. So what are you doing?
We know that Ralph Nader’s candidacy played a role in Al Gore’s loss in 2000. We have a pretty strong sense that Jill Stein’s candidacy hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016. If you had a popular vote election, there’s no disincentive for these people to run for themselves, right? Because it doesn’t matter, whoever gets the most votes wins.
I think it would be a great thing to have more parties that participate, giving the American people more of a choice rather than just making them feel like it’s a binary decision between the lesser of two evils. How much would that affect the overall race? I don’t know.
There’s something called rank choice voting, which I won’t get into here, but I think is a great way to allow for multiple parties to be running and multiple candidates without creating that kind of spoiler effect or creating a situation where there’s 12 candidates and each of them gets 8% of the vote, which is not ideal.
I don’t think that will happen, but rank choice voting is a way to deal with that. That’s a separate conversation.
The critique that you’re making is very much grounded in liberal democracy. This is a country founded on slavery and settler colonialism. I’m wondering how open this strategy is to a coalition with more radical critiques?
To me, that’s an essential component of this argument. That the Electoral College, like so many other parts of the American political and governmental system, was designed by people who owned other people. [People] who assumed that that was their God-given right, who treated women as second-class citizens who had no voting rights, who treated poor white people as that. [People] who committed a genocide against native Americans in this country.
I think that argument is absolutely central. When the rubber meets the road, for a lot of people living today, that’s not the most compelling argument for them to change the system. They’ll say, ‘Well I’m not a slave holder. I don’t believe in slavery. I just want to be heard by my government.’ And then what you say to them is: ‘Right, and you’re not being heard right now because you live in Wyoming or you live in Louisiana, or you live in Missouri or wherever it is that you live, where the candidates don’t care about you because you’re in a safe state.’
I think that, while you acknowledge the history and you tie it into all of the racial subjugation that is at the heart of the American experiment, you also acknowledge two things. One is: I don’t know how much you make that the centerpiece of your argument. How many people do you turn, who aren’t already on your side to make when you make that argument? Two is: I do think that argument has to take place in the broader context of what has happened since. In fact, that is the broader democratization issue.
That’s not just a sort of liberal democracy argument. That’s saying: Our country is founded on this principle of human equality, universal human equality, Yet they couldn’t have been further from actually living that in practice at the beginning.
So, okay, they were men of their time. Some of them were slaveholders. These were bad things. But almost every transformation in American democracy since then has been toward greater inclusion of people who were previously excluded. To me, the argument that is perhaps the most compelling is that’s the direction that a modern representative democracy should go in. The failure of the Electoral College to adhere to that modern conception of what a democracy is, is one of the last steps on that arc toward greater democratization.
The Senate is another one. The Senate is another kind of relic of slavery and of the protection of slavery. It’s not just slavers who enjoyed the benefits of the Senate. It was their descendants in the 1960s, who used the filibuster to kill off civil rights legislation. All of these things are connected.
I don’t mean to downplay the significance of the role of slavery in every sort of every deal that was struck at the constitutional convention. It’s threaded through all of our constitutional language and that’s critical to this story too. I’m not trying to downplay that.
You were mentioning earlier that there’s a lot of myths about the Electoral College, and I’m sure I’ve heard a bunch of mythical arguments, but what’s one major myth that you want to debunk?
Oh, that’s a good one. I’ll tell you what the big one is. In terms of defense of the Electoral College is: ‘If we get rid of the Electoral College in New York and California is going to decide every election for us. it’s not going to matter, none us here in fly-over country are going matter at all.’
You know what they mean when they say people in the cities, right? It’s people who look a certain way or love certain types of people. That’s what they mean. It’s a code. But they always say the big cities are going to dominate the election, and none of us will have a voice.
There’s multiple answers to that. First of all, it’s just statistically untrue. The big cities aren’t anywhere near big enough to decide the outcome of the election. The same number of people live in the hundred biggest cities in the country as live in the rural areas of America. And they both vote roughly in contradistinction to each other. About 60:40 for Democrats in the cities, about 60:40 for Republicans in rural areas- it’s basically a wash. The election gets decided in that middle 50%, which is the suburbs and the excurbs and small towns, which tend to be a lot more closely divided than the cities or rural areas.
The other point I would make about that is, and this is a more theoretical point, which is if cities, to the extent that cities do have a bigger say in the outcome of the election than other parts of the country, it’s because that’s where people live. The whole point of this is people should count equally, no matter where they live. A voter in New York city should count no less and no more than a voter in Wyoming.
Everyone should count equally. That’s one person, one vote, the principle at the heart of a representative democracy. You can’t count certain people more because of where they happen to live or the color of their skin or the size of their bank account or the God they pray to. All of these things are not okay. They’re not allowed.
That’s the more normative argument that I would make.
But the straight-up myth is that the cities would dominate, which they just wouldn’t. It’s also super old. It actually goes way back. White people complaining about cities dominating elections is a very old trope in American political history. They’re fixated on this idea that Black people are going to just overrun the country. They’re going to rule in payback for all the years in which they were kept in bondage or subjugation. First of all, the numbers just don’t add up. But second of all, it’s very telling that the thing that freaks you out is that the Black people would actually have political power in this country equal to yours.
I think even though most people won’t admit it, and people hate being called racist, that’s what’s at the heart of a lot of these sort of ‘Big cities will dominate’ arguments. Look at where Donald Trump is attacking the vote. He’s attacking it in majority Black cities. It’s no surprise that he’s picking these cities. We knew it. I said this before the election.
Donald Trump is going to target urban areas and say that’s where the fraud is happening, even though there’s no fraud. Philadelphia actually voted more for Donald Trump this year than it did in 2016. He got more votes in Philadelphia County then he got in 2016. It’s the only County in the entire state of Pennsylvania where he got more votes [than in] 2016.
This is a long, dirty history of racism. It begins with the Electoral College’s adoption and it comes right through to today. I think we need to make that a really salient point in talking about moving forward and having a fair and more equitable system of electing the President.