Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Bloc voting is a bigger problem than electors going rogue. Here's a fix.

Electoral College protest

The Supreme Court's ruling on faithless electors could pave the way to removing the human component of the Electoral College.

Mark Makela/Getty Images
Johnson is executive director of Election Reformers Network, a nonprofit founded by international election specialists to promote electoral improvements in the United States.

The Supreme Court has disarmed one time bomb ticking away in our presidential election system — the risk of "faithless" electors throwing an election to an undeserving candidate. Other critical problems remain, which the decision can play a part in helping us address.

The court's conclusion this week that the Constitution does not "establish that electors must have discretion" should end the claim that electors play an important role in our system of checks and balances. The electors have never checked or balanced anything, and we wouldn't want them to.

Debates about the role of electors usually include conservatives citing our founding compromise between small and large states and the resulting electoral advantage for the smaller ones — which many Republicans perceive as critical protection against tyranny of the majority. But "Why electors?" is a separate question from "Why an electoral advantage for small states?"

Nothing is gained and no party benefits from keeping human electors, as compared to states' simply reporting their electoral votes. Monday's unanimous decision, supported by all five of the conservative justices, should help establish consensus on this point.

We should also be able to build consensus that most remaining problems with our presidential system stem from the winner-take-all electoral votes rules of 48 states, not the Electoral College advantage for small states.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Some facts help demonstrate why.

First, the United States is not exceptional internationally in having votes from different regions carry different weight. Every constitution addresses both citizens and territory, and in that balance many convey greater voting impact to less populated regions. In Britain, the smallest parliamentary district has one-sixth the voting population — and thus six times the impact on who becomes prime minister — as the largest.

Second, polls consistently show roughly two-thirds of Republicans oppose electing the president by national popular vote, the mechanism often proposed to end the advantage for sparsely populated states.

This is the context that makes amending the Constitution to switch to a direct popular vote effectively impossible. It also should shape our thinking about the viability of the National Popular Vote Compact, under which states agree to award their electors to the national popular vote winner once states with a combined 270 votes (a majority) sign on.

Lastly, contrary to conventional wisdom on the left, Republican nominees do not now gain a major advantage from the distribution of electoral votes.

Small-state voters certainly have more impact, but in 2016 the impact of the average red state voter was almost exactly the same as her blue state counterpart. Similarly, Donald Trump did not become president because of small states: The 16 least populous split, eight to eight. Instead, Trump won from second place because he carried states with smaller margins of victory than Hillary Clinton did.

Winner-take-all is the reason our elections effectively sideline two-thirds of the states, making voting largely meaningless in most of the country. Presidents in office respond to this odd incentive, often prioritizing swing states over the nation as a whole.

Either party can end up on the short end of margin-of-victory math. Republicans were in 1960 and could easily be again, particularly if Texas transitions to thin margins for Democrats. And, at the state level, neither party likes that both tickets ignore all but a handful of battlegrounds.

So it ought to be possible to build support for replacing winner-take-all with a new system that nonetheless maintains an advantage for small states.

Winner-take-all is nowhere in the Constitution, but became entrenched through competition among states to maximize their impact. The Founders quickly regretted this, and most advocated for amendments to prevent states' using winner-take-all.

The best known alternative is what's used by Maine and Nebraska: two electoral votes for the statewide winner and one for carrying each House district. But that injects gerrymandering into presidential elections and, applied nationwide, would still have yielded a Trump victory in 2016.

Far better for states to allocate their electoral votes proportionally to the candidates, with the proportional calculation carried to the right of the decimal point to reduce rounding.

Seventy years ago, senators voted 64-27 to amend the Constitution with exactly the features discussed here: replacing human electors with electoral votes, replacing winner-take-all with proportional allocation, and retaining the advantage for small states.

The version electoral reformers are pushing now is an improvement, because it would limit the proportional allocation to the top two vote-getters nationwide.

Here are four reasons this is a good idea:

1. The president would nearly always be the popular vote winner.

2. With shares of electoral votes available in every state, candidates would have incentive to campaign nationwide — because every state would matter.

3. The "spoiler" problem would largely be fixed. (The 1 percent in Michigan for the Green Party's Jill Stein probably swung 16 electoral votes to Trump four years ago; with top-two, her impact would have been .05 of an electoral vote.)

4. Our state results would finally reflect our true preferences, replacing the image of warring red and blue with just different shades of purple.

In the Supreme Court's decision this week, it's possible to see the justices' concern over a problem that was not even mentioned: the exceptionally high hurdles to altering the Constitution.

In less polarized and less chaotic times, maybe the court would have treated the textual questions more strictly, with the amendment path cited as an available remedy to the risk of electors permitted to be "faithless" with their votes.

If there are such doubts on the court about the prospects for amending the Constitution, we should not share them; there is no future for a country that cannot update its founding document. The outlines of a viable amendment to fix our presidential system are in plain sight. It's time to start transforming them into reality.

Read More

Ballot box with North Carolina flag
Veronaa/Getty Images

Election Overtime Project heads to North Carolina

The Election Overtime Project, an effort to prepare journalists to cover the outcome of the 2024 election, is hosting its third swing-state briefing on Oct. 18, this time focused on North Carolina.

The series is a part of an effort to help reporters, TV anchors and others prepare America to understand and not fear close elections. Election Overtime is an initiative of the Election Reformers Network and developed in partnership with the Bridge Alliance, which publishes The Fulcrum.

Keep ReadingShow less
House chamber

Rep. Scott Perry objects to Pennsylvania's certification of its Electoral College vote during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 7, 2021.

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

What voters need to know about the presidential election

It is quite clear that the presidential election is going to be incredibly close. In each of the seven swing states, the margin of error is less than 2 percent.

As citizens, this is not something to fear and it is critically important that we all trust the election results.

As part of our ongoing series for the Election Overtime Project, today we present a guide explaining in detail what you, as a voter, need to know about the role of state legislatures and Congress in a presidential election. The guide was prepared by the Election Reformers Network, a nonprofit organization championing impartial elections and concrete policy solutions that strengthen American democracy.

Keep ReadingShow less
Capitoll colored red and blue, split down the middle
Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

Prepare for heightened political trench warfare beyond Nov. 5

Merloe is a member of the Election Reformers Network Advisory Council and provides strategic advice on democracy and elections in the U.S. and internationally.

Political trench warfare is in full swing as the 2024 pre-election period draws to a close. And the signs are clear that battles will heat up all the way to Nov. 5 — and beyond — over voter qualification, voting, canvassing, certification of results and the allocation of Electoral College votes. With such a close election, both sides know that gaining inches can make a decisive difference, and they are skirmishing accordingly.

Keep ReadingShow less
cheering crowd
Nicholas Green/Unsplash

Voters, activists set to rally for open primaries ahead of historic elections

Griffiths is the national editor of Independent Voter News, where a version of this story first appeared.

The 2024 election cycle is already a historic year for election reform. Six states plus the District of Columbia have measures on the Nov. 5 ballot that open taxpayer-funded primary elections to voters outside the Republican and Democratic parties.

It is the first time in U.S. history that this many statewide primary reform initiatives have been offered up in the same election, something reform leaders are celebrating as they rally citizens to show their support for open primaries.

Keep ReadingShow less