Twice this century the popular-vote loser still became president. Is the Electoral College a vital check that protects smaller states, or an outdated relic that makes some votes worth more than others? Make your case.
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Add your commentHere is a fact that tends to end the 'EC helps small states' conversation: the five most powerful swing states by electoral impact over the past 30 years are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio. Average population of those states: around 12 million. These are NOT small states. The EC empowers medium-to-large swing states, period.
idk man both sides make decent points in this thread but can i just say that explaining our electoral system to someone from another country is genuinely embarrassing. 'so the person with more votes doesnt always win' and then you watch their face.
Counterpoint to the 'small states matter' crowd: the EC doesn't actually protect small states. It protects SWING states. Wyoming gets ignored just like California does. A voter in Wisconsin has had more influence on presidential elections than a voter in Wyoming for decades. The math is right there.
The mob rule argument is so tired. We already use direct popular votes for every Senate race, every House race, every Governor's race, every mayoral race. Are those all mob rule too? Or is mob rule just the thing you say when you want to keep a system that benefits your side?
Fun hypothetical: if the EC had consistently helped Democrats over the last 25 years instead of Republicans, the party positions on this would be EXACTLY reversed and everyone defending the system on constitutional grounds would be calling it undemocratic and everyone calling it undemocratic would be writing Federalist Papers fan fiction. We all know this is true.
Philosophy professor weighs in but the bottom line is real simple: in 2000 Al Gore got 540,000 more votes than George W. Bush and lost. In 2016 Hillary Clinton got almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump and lost. At what point does 'philosophical tradeoff' become 'the system is broken'?
I keep coming back to this: two of the last six presidents took office having been rejected by a majority of American voters. In what world is that the intended outcome of a democracy. I don't care about the theoretical arguments anymore. The practical reality is that it doesn't work.
Look I'm a Republican and I'll say something that might get me in trouble with my people: if the EC were flipped, if Democrats were winning the presidency while losing the popular vote, we'd have abolished it thirty years ago. Let's just be honest about the politics here. It's about power, not principle.
The Electoral College was designed by people who didn't trust the average citizen to make informed decisions. We've had over 200 years of education, mass communication, and democratic development since then. Time to let every American's vote count equally. One person, one vote. It's really not complicated.
The national popular vote interstate compact is already a thing and most people don't even know it exists. Fifteen states plus DC have already signed on, representing 209 electoral votes. You get to 270 and the EC is effectively neutralized WITHOUT a constitutional amendment. We're closer than people think and we didn't have to blow up the whole system to get there.
I grew up in Wyoming. Population roughly 580,000. I'm supposed to feel "protected" by the Electoral College. Protected from what, exactly? The same economic anxieties hit us as everyone else. The opioid crisis didn't check our electoral weight before it rolled through. My vote counting slightly more than someone in California hasn't done a single tangible thing for my community in my lifetime. The protection framing is a story we tell ourselves.
Here's what bothers me about the 'small state protection' talking point: Vermont, Wyoming, and the Dakotas are already reliably red or blue. Nobody campaigns there either! The EC protects SWING states, not small states. Those are completely different things and people keep conflating them and it's maddening.
My mom cried when she voted for the first time as a naturalized citizen in 2004. She had come from a country where her vote genuinely did not matter, where the outcome was decided before anyone cast a ballot. She didn't care about the EC or the popular vote. She just cared that it was real and it counted and that nobody could take it from her. I think about her every time this argument gets abstract.
I'm a political science professor and I'll tell you what I tell my students: there is no 'correct' answer here from a purely theoretical standpoint. Both systems involve real tradeoffs. What matters is which values you prioritize — geographic distribution of power or pure numerical equality of individual votes. That's a philosophical choice, not a factual one.
I've voted in every presidential election since 1988. I live in deep-red Alabama. My presidential vote has never, not once, meaningfully mattered. Under the current system I am effectively disenfranchised. Tell me again how the EC protects voters like me.
I've been a poll worker in Maricopa County for eight years. People stand in line for hours. They are serious about this. They drive from rural areas. They bring their elderly parents. And then you tell them their state's 11 electoral votes were determined before they even got in line because it's not a swing state. It's hard to look people in the eye and explain why that's okay.
I asked my 16-year-old why she thinks the EC is unfair. She said 'because one person one vote is literally the most basic thing.' I didn't have a great counter-argument that didn't sound like I was defending a technicality. Kids have a way of cutting through the noise.
I've read the Federalist Papers. Hamilton's arguments for the EC in Federalist 68 were almost entirely about preventing a demagogue with foreign backing from winning a popular election. The EC was supposed to be a deliberative body that could exercise independent judgment. It has NEVER worked that way. If anything the system has drifted so far from its original purpose that defending it on originalist grounds is incoherent.
The Founders weren't infallible. They also counted enslaved people as 3/5 of a person for apportionment purposes. The Electoral College was born from the same compromised era. Venerating it as constitutional genius requires ignoring a lot of ugly history.
The 'ungovernable country' argument is backwards. When millions of people feel their votes literally don't count because they live in a non-competitive state, THAT creates alienation. THAT creates people who feel the system doesn't represent them. We're living the consequences of that right now.
Hard no. Abolish it and you hand the entire country to California, Texas, New York, and Florida. Candidates will never set foot in Wyoming, Montana, or Vermont again. Ever. Small states might as well not exist.
The Wyoming voter having 3.6x the voting power thing is real and documented. And people just shrug it off like 'well that's the system.' Imagine if we found out that votes in one congressional district literally counted more than votes in another. There'd be riots.
I'm going to say the quiet part loud: a lot of EC defenders in my Republican circles know it currently advantages their party and the 'small state protection' argument is reverse-engineered justification. Not all of them. Some genuinely believe it. But a lot. And a lot of abolitionists are the same in reverse. This conversation would be cleaner if people were honest about that.
My hot take that nobody wants to hear: the popular vote would be MORE favorable to Republicans long-term if they invested in turning out voters in deep blue California and New York instead of treating those states as writeoffs. There are millions of Republican voters in those states whose turnout barely gets prioritized because the EC makes it pointless. Switch to popular vote and suddenly every Republican in Los Angeles County matters. The partisan calculus people assume is way less settled than they think.
At the end of the day I just want my vote to matter. I'm in California. My presidential vote is worthless under the current system. My neighbor in Ohio gets to basically pick the president. I pay the same federal taxes. I serve in the same military. I follow the same laws. Why is my vote worth less than his?
Can we acknowledge that the real reason neither party has seriously tried to abolish it is that at any given moment one of them thinks they benefit from keeping it? Pure self-interest dressed up as constitutional principle. On both sides.
My great-aunt grew up in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. She didn't get to vote at all until the Voting Rights Act. So forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of arguments about 'protecting' certain voters that have historically been used to suppress other voters. The whole system needs examining with fresh eyes.
My grandfather farmed wheat in Kansas his whole life. Voted in every election from 1952 until he died in 2011. He used to say 'nobody campaigns here because they don't have to.' He wasn't bitter about it. But he noticed. There's something quietly demoralizing about living in a state that both parties have already written off before Labor Day.
one person one vote isnt complicated. it isnt a 'values question.' its the baseline definition of democracy. everything else is an argument for why we should have LESS democracy for good reasons. those reasons might be compelling but lets be clear about what we're choosing when we choose them.
That statistic about LA County is wildly misleading, LA County has like 10 million people out of 330 million Americans. That's barely 3%. If 3% of the country scares you maybe the problem isn't the voting system.
I keep seeing the argument that small states need protection but nobody seems to ask: protection FROM WHAT exactly? From having a president who reflects what most Americans want? The 'small state protection' framing assumes that people in rural areas have inherently different interests that need to be shielded from majority rule. That's a pretty paternalistic assumption.
I always find it funny that people act like the Founders handed down sacred geometry when they built the EC. Those guys were improvising. They had no historical model for a democratic republic at continental scale. They were making educated guesses. Treating their guesses as holy writ seems unwise.
Something nobody's addressed yet: under a national popular vote system, voter suppression in ANY state becomes a national problem, not just a local one. Right now if a state suppresses votes it mostly affects that state's outcome. Under NPV, suppressing votes in a big state could directly swing the national total. That's a new attack surface we should think carefully about.
every single time this debate comes up the people saying abolish it are from states that lose under the current system and the people saying keep it are from states that benefit. its almost like people's policy preferences track their self interest? wild stuff. maybe evaluate the system on principle not on whether your team won lately
I want someone to make the steel-man case for the EC to me without using the phrases 'small state protection,' 'Founders' wisdom,' or 'republic not a democracy.' Those three arguments have been so thoroughly picked apart in this thread and elsewhere that if your entire case rests on them you don't actually have a case. I'm genuinely open. Show me something new.
The thing that gets me is that we call ourselves the world's greatest democracy while simultaneously defending a system specifically designed to limit democratic outcomes. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. You can't have it both ways.
I spent twelve years as an election lawyer and I can tell you the nightmare scenario nobody talks about is what a national popular vote recount looks like. A Florida 2000 situation but NATIONAL. Every county in every state suddenly under a microscope. The EC actually contains disputes geographically. That's not nothing.
Abolish it yesterday. We are the only major democracy on earth that uses something like this. France, Germany, Canada, Australia — none of them do anything remotely like the EC. 'But we're special' is not a governing philosophy.
What bothers me most isn't actually the fairness question — reasonable people can disagree on that — it's the CAMPAIGN ATTENTION question. I have lived in Illinois my whole life. Presidential campaigns do not come here. They don't advertise here. They don't hold town halls here. They don't care what I think because the outcome is predetermined. A neighbor of mine in the same income bracket living in Wisconsin has had three presidential candidates knock on doors in her neighborhood. That disparity in democratic engagement is real and it is happening right now and I don't understand how anyone defends it.
does anyone else feel like we've been having this exact debate since at least 2001 and nothing ever changes and nothing ever will and we'll be having it again in 2028 and 2032 and our grandchildren will be having it and the answer will always be nothing changes because the people who benefit from the current system control enough of the amendment process to block it forever
Both parties have won the presidency while losing the popular vote so let's stop pretending this is a purely partisan argument. Oh wait. It's only happened to Republicans this century. Carry on.
Just because something is politically difficult doesn't mean it isn't worth fighting for. The 19th Amendment was politically impossible right up until it wasn't. So was every major civil rights advance. 'It's hard' is the lamest argument against reform.
I think people confuse two separate questions: 1) is the Electoral College fair? and 2) would a national popular vote be better? You can believe the answer to #1 is 'no' and still have serious concerns about #2. I'm in that camp. Reform, don't abolish.
Genuine question for the abolish crowd: what happens to third party candidates under a national popular vote? Right now a third party getting 5% nationally means almost nothing. Under a popular vote system a candidate who pulls 30% in a three-way race could win the presidency with 38% of the vote. You want that? Because that's a real possibility without ranked choice as a companion reform.
Abolish it AND reform campaign finance AND fix gerrymandering AND expand voting access. Piecemeal reform of one thing while leaving the other structural problems intact is just rearranging deck chairs. The whole system needs a comprehensive overhaul. But nobody in power benefits from that so here we are.
What I find genuinely fascinating is that this is one of the very few political debates where you can find libertarians, progressive democrats, AND some constitutional conservatives all agreeing on abolition while establishment Republicans AND some rural Democrats defend it. The coalitions don't map onto the usual culture war lines. That's interesting.
You want to talk about whose votes count more? A voter in Wyoming has roughly 3.6 times the electoral weight of a voter in Texas when you do the math per capita. Conservatives arguing FOR the EC should maybe sit with that for a second since Texas is a big red state getting diluted.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is actually a really clever workaround that doesn't require a constitutional amendment. States representing 270 electoral votes agree to award their electors to the national popular vote winner. We're at 209 and counting. Watch this space.
the idea that a national popular vote would mean candidates ignore rural areas assumes rural areas have nothing to offer as a voting bloc. 60 million Americans live in rural areas. that is not nothing. campaigns would absolutely compete for those votes under a popular vote system. stop treating rural America like it needs a handicap to matter.
The recount argument is overstated. A national popular vote margin is almost always going to be in the millions. The exact scenario where a recount matters — an election close enough that a few thousand votes swing the result — becomes dramatically less likely at national scale. The EC is actually MORE vulnerable to this because a few hundred votes in one state can flip the whole thing. See: 2000.
Both options have real tradeoffs and I think anyone who tells you this is simple is lying to you or doesn't understand the issue. A pure national popular vote changes campaign incentives dramatically. The EC distorts representation dramatically. Neither is clean. Pick your poison.
the suppression argument actually cuts both ways. under the current EC system, suppressing votes in a non-swing state is consequence-free for the presidential race. you can suppress a million votes in california or texas and it changes nothing nationally. a popular vote at least means every suppressed vote matters everywhere.
Popular vote sounds great until you realize that means Los Angeles County alone would have more say than 40 entire states combined. No thanks.
Even granting every problem with the EC, do you really trust Congress to design a better replacement? The same Congress that can't pass a budget? Hard pass on letting them restructure presidential elections.
I'm a civics teacher in rural Ohio and I'll tell you my students — 16 and 17 year olds in a swing state — are actually MORE engaged with presidential politics than any students I've ever heard about in safe states. They get it. They feel it. That matters. I don't know what the right answer is but I think about what disengagement would do to turnout in places like this.
my grandfather was a farmer in rural Ohio his whole life and he used to say 'son, the cities dont know how we live out here.' The Electoral College is the only reason anyone in Washington even pretends to care about places like where he grew up. I'm not ready to throw that away.
I grew up in a competitive state and moved to a safe state at 25. It was like going from being a valued customer to being invisible. The restaurant doesn't care about your feedback when you're already locked in. That's what living in a non-competitive state feels like every four years. It hollows something out in you.
The entire 'small states need protection' argument collapses the second you look at what the EC actually protects them FROM. Tyranny of California? California can't actually do anything to Wyoming legislatively just because it has more people. The Senate already gives small states equal representation. The EC is redundant protection for something that isn't even a real threat.
Here's something I never see in these discussions: the EC was also designed with the assumption that voters wouldn't directly choose electors based on a presidential preference — the original design had legislatures choosing electors. We've already departed so massively from the founders' actual vision that appeals to their intent are pretty selective at this point.
Okay real talk: even people who want to abolish the EC have to admit that the path to doing it runs directly through the states that benefit most from it. Asking those states to vote to reduce their own influence is asking turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving. Not happening without a complete political realignment.
Fun fact: if we went to popular vote, the most efficient campaign strategy would be to maximize turnout in already-friendly dense urban areas. So Democrats would focus on NYC and LA. Republicans would focus on... I don't know, Houston and Phoenix? Rural America disappears for BOTH parties. Think about that.
Unpopular opinion but the Electoral College forces candidates to build geographically broad coalitions. A pure popular vote candidate could theoretically win by dominating urban cores and completely ignoring rural America. That's a recipe for a very ungovernable country.
I actually had to explain to a coworker last week that winning the popular vote doesn't automatically mean you should be president under our current rules — same as how winning more innings doesn't win you a baseball game if you lost more runs. She looked at me like I had three heads. And honestly I get it. The rules are counterintuitive from the outside. That doesn't make them wrong. It just means we've done a terrible job teaching civics for about 50 years.
Honestly the most underrated argument for keeping some version of the EC is that it forces candidates to build genuinely broad geographic coalitions rather than just running up the score in population centers. Whether that outweighs the one-person-one-vote principle is a values question, not a facts question. Reasonable people land in different places and I wish this debate reflected that more.
as someone who spent a decade working in field organizing in pennsylvania let me tell you: the EC doesnt just affect who wins it affects where resources go, which communities get listened to, which issues get elevated. rural PA gets tons of attention. rural california gets none. its a weird distortion
with all due respect to the civics teacher that's not a reason to keep an unfair system. 'some people feel more special under the current rules' is not a principled defense of constitutional structure. people in ohio shouldn't matter more than people in new york or alabama. thats the whole point.
what about faithless electors tho. in 2016 seven electors voted for someone other than who they were pledged to. SEVEN people almost changed the course of history. that's insane. whether you want to keep the EC or not that specific problem needs to be fixed immediately
idk man i feel like we could spend this energy on literally any other electoral reform that would actually help. ranked choice voting? automatic voter registration? getting rid of gerrymandering? the EC debate is kind of a distraction from the stuff thats actually stealing elections in broad daylight
Greatest democracy comment assumes 'most democratic' equals 'best.' That's a value judgment not a fact. Some democracies have proportional representation. Some have ranked choice. Some have compulsory voting. Direct popular vote isn't the only alternative and isn't automatically superior.
Keep the EC. Change the winner-take-all allocation within states. Nebraska and Maine already do it by congressional district. That's a reform that could actually pass and would make every state genuinely competitive. You wouldn't have candidates writing off California OR Texas. This is the conversation we should be having instead of chasing an amendment that will never happen.
that fun fact above assumes campaigns don't adapt their strategies. of course they would. you'd suddenly see massive competition in suburbs everywhere, not just swing state suburbs. the whole map reshuffles. we don't actually know what it looks like because we've never tried it.
counterpoint though: the senate being malapportioned is actually a much bigger structural problem than the EC and nobody talks about it with this much energy. rhode island and wyoming each get two senators. wyoming has 580,000 people. california has 39 million. that gap dwarfs anything the EC does and its basically permanent. why arent we angrier about THAT
Gore and Clinton losing with more popular votes is not evidence the system is broken. It's evidence the system is working exactly as designed. You can argue the design is bad, sure. But it's not malfunctioning.
Abolish it. Full stop. One person one vote. I am so tired of elaborate justifications for a system where my vote in Texas means less than someone's vote in Pennsylvania. The founders were brilliant men working with 18th century assumptions about communication, travel, and democracy. We can do better.
I moved from Illinois to Wisconsin seven years ago and suddenly I went from invisible to courted. Politicians actually showed up in my state. I got mailers. Town halls. My local issues got national attention for six weeks every four years. I kinda get it now, even if I don't fully support it.
Nope. Keep it. The United States is a constitutional republic of states, not one undifferentiated national population. That distinction matters and it has always mattered.
The NPVIC is constitutionally dubious at best. Interstate compacts of that magnitude require congressional approval under Article I. This would get litigated into oblivion the first time it actually mattered.
Hard truth: the popular vote winner has also lost before 2000. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in 1824 and lost. So this isn't a new problem or a partisan one, it's structural. We've had this tension baked in since basically the beginning.
That fatalism is understandable but the interstate compact route is real. It doesn't require an amendment. It requires winning state legislatures. That's hard but it's not amendment-hard. Don't give up on the process just because the nuclear option is blocked.
What no one mentions is that abolishing the EC also changes how ties and disputed elections get resolved. The contingent election process in the House would disappear. That sounds like a feature until you realize we'd have no clear mechanism for a scenario where the popular vote margin is 0.1% and every state is lawyering up simultaneously.
We're also the only country with our specific history, geographic size, federal structure, and constitutional framework. Comparing us to Germany is apples and aircraft carriers.
the congressional district method actually creates MORE problems not fewer. gerrymandering would suddenly have presidential implications on top of everything else. you'd have states drawing districts specifically to capture more electors. that's a nightmare scenario nobody seems to think through.
That comment above about self-interest is doing a lot of work but misses something: Democrats have also won under the EC. Obama won twice, Clinton in the 90s twice. This isn't purely partisan. Some Republicans in safe red states are disadvantaged too. The issue is swing states vs everyone else, not just partisan affiliation.
My dad is a diehard conservative and even HE said last Thanksgiving that he thinks we should go to popular vote. Said 'a win is a win, let the people decide.' Sometimes the most surprising people hold the most reasonable positions.
Pure democracy = mob rule. Republic = rule of law. The founders built a republic for a reason. You want mob rule, go ahead and abolish it. See how that works out.
lol at everyone acting like abolishing the EC is just a simple vote in congress. you need 38 states to ratify a constitutional amendment. 38. states. do the math on how many small states would vote themselves out of outsized influence. this conversation is mostly academic at this point.
i grew up in nevada and watched my state go from ignored to a swing state and back again. when we were a swing state suddenly everyone cared about us. roads funding, campaign visits, news coverage. lose that status and poof. the EC creates these weird little moments of relevance for states and i genuinely dont know if thats better or worse than just counting all the votes
can we get ranked choice voting before we even have this conversation. fix the binary choice problem first THEN figure out how to count the votes
The embarrassment argument isn't a policy argument though. Lots of democracies have weird systems. Germany has a constructive vote of no confidence, Israel has coalition governments that collapse every two years, the UK gave us Brexit with 52%. 'It looks bad' isn't a reason to change constitutional architecture.
that hypothetical is probably right but it doesn't actually tell us which position is correct on the merits. the fact that people are hypocrites doesn't resolve the underlying question.
constitutionally speaking the EC isnt going anywhere without a 3/4 state ratification threshold and small states will never vote to dilute their own influence. so like. enjoy the debate i guess. its genuinely fascinating as political philosophy but as practical reform its roughly as achievable as abolishing the senate
Nope. Hard disagree. The second you go pure popular vote you get candidates spending 100% of their time in six cities and the rest of the country doesn't exist anymore. Been saying this for twenty years and nothing has changed my mind.
okay so i took a constitutional law class last semester and my professor basically said abolishing the EC would require a constitutional amendment and that is NEVER happening in our lifetime. so can we please talk about something actually achievable instead of this fantasy
Constitutional amendment requires 38 states. At least 30 of them benefit electorally from the current system and would never ratify abolition. So this whole debate is theoretical. The EC is not going anywhere in our lifetimes. Can we move on?
I'll be honest I don't fully understand how the Electoral College works beyond like the basics and I've been too embarrassed to ask. Is there actually a good explainer somewhere? Genuine question. I want to have an informed opinion.
the thing that actually gets me is election night coverage. under the EC we get this absurd horse race where one county in one swing state effectively decides everything and every network is breathlessly watching a single precinct in suburban Philadelphia or wherever. under a national popular vote election night is just... counting. no magic county. no inflection point. just math. i think id miss the drama honestly. thats a pathetic thing to admit but its true
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