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A Growing Number Of Critics Raise Alarms About The Electoral College

Mara Liasson 2010

Mara Liasson

essay about the electoral college

Then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi preside over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to certify the 2020 Electoral College results after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol earlier that day. Erin Schaff/Pool/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi preside over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to certify the 2020 Electoral College results after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol earlier that day.

It's hard to make an intellectual argument in favor of the Electoral College. Most people feel that the person who gets the most votes should become president.

After all, that's how we run every other election in this country, says Jesse Wegman, the author of Let the People Pick the President .

"If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It's about one person, one vote — everybody's vote counting equally," he said. "You're not going to convince a majority of Americans that that's not how you should do it."

Another way the Electoral College is unfair, says Harvard University political scientist Gautam Mukunda, is that each state gets electors based on its representation in the House and Senate, which means small states get extra votes.

"The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy," he said.

But Brad Smith, who used to be on the Federal Election Commission, disagrees.

Sure, the election may be decided by just a handful of states — swing states that can shift red or blue. But Smith, a Republican, says the battleground is diverse.

"Those states include some of the states with the heaviest minority populations in the United States, some of the states with the fewest minority populations in the United States," he said. "They include states from every region of the country, and that forces candidates to try to go out and have a platform that will appeal to the huge, diverse sections of America — or at least not grossly turn them off."

And Smith points out that for most of American history, the Electoral College amplified the popular vote, rather than contradicting it.

"Our calculus might change if pretty much every single election, you know, the person who won the most popular votes wasn't winning," he said.

The problem is that twice since 2000, the person with the most votes didn't win. Both times — in 2000 and 2016 — it was the Republican candidate who got fewer votes but ended up in the White House.

And even when that doesn't happen, Wegman sees another problem with the Electoral College system.

"In 2020, despite the 7 million-vote victory that Joe Biden won in the popular vote, people overlook the fact that 45,000 votes switch in the three key battleground states, and you're looking at a second term of Donald Trump," he said. "I mean, the fact that you could have the entire outcome of the election ride on 45,000 votes in three random states is, you know, just a huge, glaring vulnerability for any republic."

"Undue" weight of key states

That vulnerability was on full display on Jan. 6, when Trump and the violent insurrectionists pressed Congress to overturn Biden's Electoral College win. Without the Electoral College, it would have been much harder for them to have asked Congress to overturn the will of 7 million voters. Instead, Trump asked Congress to throw out the electoral votes from just a handful of battleground states.

That means the Electoral College puts a magnifying glass on just a few states that could have tremendous control over presidential elections.

"The Electoral College does mean a small number of states have undue weight in the outcome of our elections and that smaller manipulations can have broad national consequences," said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded ballot access.

What she means by manipulations are the efforts by Republicans to change election laws in their favor.

"Vote suppression is one way of doing that — subtracting voters from the electorate who you think won't vote for your preferred candidates," she said. "But this new trend of actually taking over the machinery of elections and giving themselves the power to run things or make decisions or count the votes is another way of doing this."

Republican state lawmakers in places like Georgia and Texas have advanced bills that would give new powers to legislatures to fire election officials and overturn elections.

Democrats don't have the votes in the states or in Congress to stop these laws, so Democrats are trying to build public pressure against them. Republicans say their goal is to fight future election fraud. The 2020 election was declared the most secure ever, but Trump continues to push the lie that the election was stolen from him.

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On the other hand, Republicans don't have to convince the public. They have the votes to pass ballot restrictions, and in some cases they have never held public hearings.

"This is the essence of the minority-rule position, right?" Harvard's Mukunda said. "You don't have to convince the public that the system is fair. You just have to convince them that it's not so unfair they should overthrow the system."

And for Republicans, the system, with all its minoritarian features — the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate , the filibuster , partisan gerrymandering — is, at least for now, working in their favor. But maybe it's not good for democracy when one party doesn't have to try to win the most votes in a presidential election.

A warning from Republicans

Smith says this is something fellow Republicans should consider.

"They keep losing the aggregated popular vote," he said. "Republicans aren't getting enough votes, and that's why they're losing most presidential elections. And, you know, they need to think about, how do we appeal to more people?"

In the runup to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, 12 House Republicans issued an extraordinary statement that warned about the demise of the Electoral College.

"Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years," it stated. The signers then implored their colleagues not to vote to reject the electors from battleground states, as Trump was asking them to do.

"Even looking at it from a narrow partisan lens, this process or that objection was potentially imperiling the Electoral College," said Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, one of the Republicans who signed the letter.

And that would be a bad thing for Republicans, because they depend on the Electoral College. As the statement said: "We will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024."

Correction June 10, 2021

An earlier version of this story included a misspoken quote that said people in Wyoming have 44 times the power of people in California in presidential elections. In fact, people in Wyoming have nearly four times the power of people in California.

Electoral College

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Electoral College History

How did we get the electoral college.

The Founding Fathers established the Electoral College in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. However, the term “electoral college” does not appear in the Constitution. Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment refer to “electors,” but not to the “electoral college.”

Since the Electoral College process is part of the original design of the U.S. Constitution it would be necessary to pass a Constitutional amendment to change this system.

The ratification of the 12th Amendment , the expansion of voting rights, and the States’ use of the popular vote to determine who will be appointed as electors have each substantially changed the process.

Many different proposals to alter the Presidential election process have been offered over the years, such as direct nation-wide election by the eligible voters, but none has been passed by Congress and sent to the States for ratification as a Constitutional amendment. Under the most common method for amending the Constitution, an amendment must be proposed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the States.

What proposals have been made to change the Electoral College process?

Reference sources indicate that over the past 200 years more than 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject. The American Bar Association has criticized the Electoral College as “archaic” and “ambiguous” and its polling showed 69 percent of lawyers favored abolishing it in 1987. But surveys of political scientists have supported continuation of the Electoral College. Public opinion polls have shown Americans favored abolishing it by majorities of 58 percent in 1967; 81 percent in 1968; and 75 percent in 1981.

Opinions on the viability of the Electoral College system may be affected by attitudes toward third parties. Third parties have not fared well in the Electoral College system. For example, third party candidates with regional appeal, such as Governor Thurmond in 1948 and Governor Wallace in 1968, won blocs of electoral votes in the South, but neither come close to seriously challenging the major party winner, although they may have affected the overall outcome of the election.

The last third party, or splinter party, candidate to make a strong showing was Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (Progressive, also known as the Bull Moose Party). He finished a distant second in Electoral and popular votes (taking 88 of the 266 electoral votes needed to win at the time). Although Ross Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote nationwide in 1992, he did not win any electoral votes since he was not particularly strong in any one state. In 2016, Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, qualified for the ballot in all 50 States and the District of Columbia but also failed to win any electoral votes. 

Any candidate who wins a majority or plurality of the popular vote nationwide has a good chance of winning in the Electoral College, but there are no guarantees (see the results of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 elections).

Where can I find the names and voting records of presidential electors for all previous Presidential elections back to 1789?

OFR is not aware of a centralized, comprehensive source.