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NPV would reshape our political landscape by concentrating power in our largest states and cities. The way the Electoral College actually functions today isnt even enshrined in the Constitution. 2016 is on track to be the fifth election in U.S. political history in which the candidate who wins the most votes is not the one elected president -- giving rise to another round of calls to. Even though proponents of the Electoral College want it to stay so that every state can have a specific say in the outcome of the election, the candidates are already starting to behave in the same ways that people fear they would when targeting a majority population groups. And while Electoral College winning/popular vote losing presidents are formally and technically legitimate holders of the office, the perception that a broken system is anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian can have wide-reaching, penetrating, long-term consequences for the health of a democracy. /content/aba-cms-dotorg/en/news/abanews/publications/youraba/2019/october-2019/q--the-electoral-college--is-it-open-for-interpretation-by-the-c, Trade, Sports & Professional Associations, Affordable Housing & Community Development Law. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it. It no longer serves the intended job. In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. Younger voters also tended to support abolishing the Electoral College. This is because the president is not . Majority supports changing Electoral College system for U.S 5. In each state, electors meet after the presidential election on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December and cast their votes for president and vice president in separate ballots. The supporters of the NPV are not hiding their goal: They are trying to circumvent the AK constitutional amendment process and manipulate the Electoral College out of existence.11. The NPV would effectively abolish the Electoral College and co-opt even those states who did not join the compact into accepting an electoral regime they never agreed to or approved. PDF It's time to abolish the Electoral College - Brookings Two hundred years after James Madisons letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. m.startribune.com Editors Note: In 2016, we asked two professors to debate whether the Electoral College should cease to be the mechanism used for selecting the U.S. president. In 2000 Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote against Governor George W. Bush by 543,895. Here are the yea and the nay. Fully overhauling the way the president is selected would take a Constitutional amendment, which would require the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states. Maine Department of Administrative and Financial Services, The Electoral College is a ticking time bomb, Its time to abolish the Electoral College, Two cheers for the Electoral College: Reasons not to abolish it, according to the Congressional Research Service, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/10/21/can-the-electoral-college-be-subverted-by-faithless-electors/, Policy lessonsand surprisesfrom the Reimagine Rural podcast, Justice Thomas, gift reporting rules, and what a Supreme Court code of conduct would and wouldnt accomplish, Why is federal spending so hard to cut? It's time to abolish the Electoral College - Brookings The group of 16 (as of August 2019) currently control 196 electoral votes together. That means there must be a majority of states that agree with a specific candidate instead of allowing the people to decide who they want to have as president. Why did President Obama spend so much money bailing out the auto industry? That probably promotes a more national and less regional vision. Make sure to update your bookmarks! The Electoral College has given one candidate a majority win in this political structure since 1992, but there have been four times when the winner of the election didnt receive a clear majority of the votes across the entire country. But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states. Instead, theyre voting for their states representatives in the Electoral College, who will then vote for the president. Without the Electoral College in place, presidential candidates would build platforms that would speak to their base. Seventy percent of Americans between the ages of 18-29 said that the president should be chosen through a popular vote model, while just 56 percent of those over the age of 65 agreed. Using bots can streamline some law firm work, American Bar Association Remember what we said back in Myth No. Still, there would be some major changes to our elections if we abolished the Electoral College.