What does the current occupant of the White House have in common with John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush? They all were elected president after having lost the popular vote. In the 2000 election, Al Gore received over a half-million more votes than Bush. In 2016, nearly three-million more votes were cast for Hillary Clinton than the winner. As we all know, the only votes that count are those cast by the Electoral College.
Fun fact: According to the Brookings Institute, the fewer-than-five-hundred counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate sixty-four percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-twenty-six-hundred counties that Trump won combined to generate thirty-six percent of the country’s economic activity last year.
Gore lost the Electoral College vote when the Supreme Court stopped vote counting in Florida, giving the state’s decisive electoral votes to George W. Bush.
The United States Constitution has no mention of an “Electoral College.” It lays out the mechanism for electing the President: each state would have a number of “electors,” one for each senator and representative. The various states would decide how to select the electors. The electors would vote. The winner would become President, the vice-presidency would go to second place. The Twelfth Amendment clarified the process. The electors would cast separate votes for president and vice-president. (The Twenty-third Amendment in 1961 let the District of Columbia into the club.) This voting process became known as the Electoral College.
James Madison was among a few Constitution drafters who favored popular election of the president. Southerners and some others wanted none of that. Forty percent of the population in the South were slaves and couldn’t vote. Counting a slave as three-fifths of a person gave southern states more Congressional representation than they would have otherwise.
A bi-partisan vote in the House of Representatives in 1969 overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment to elect the president by popular vote. Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans killed the bill by filibuster. (Southern Democrats soon became conservative Republicans after civil-rights legislation became law.) The same thing happened again in 1979.
In our current environment, with most states reliably red or blue, only a handful of so-called swing states determine the outcome of a presidential election. Campaigns direct their attention mostly to Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. Republicans also relentlessly push for voter suppression with their dog-whistle calls to fight non-existent voter fraud. As the head Republican inadvertently admitted, reducing voting obstacles means “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) campaigns not to abolish the Electoral College, but to require electors to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote. So far, sixteen states, representing 196 of the total of 538 electoral votes and including the three Pacific Coast states, have signed on. States totaling a majority of electoral votes are required for this to take effect. Of course, Republicans are fighting hard against this.
