Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center shows the majority of Americans would like to move away from using the Electoral College, but it’s been the way U.S. presidential elections work for over 200 years.
This week, Civics 101 host Nick Capodice joins Julia to talk about the Electoral College, who benefits from it and why it’s still around.
Transcript
Nick, let’s start with a quick review of the electoral system. What is it?
So first off, why do we do it this way? Well, the reason we do it is that the framers wanted a bulwark. They wanted a wall between the people and the choice for a president. So they decided that each state should have a group of wealthy, white, landowning men who know what's best for the country, who protect the people from themselves. They, the electors, vote for the president about a month after the November election.
How it works is the number of electoral votes in your state is the number of representatives you have in Congress. So we, in New Hampshire, have two members in the House plus two senators. That's four. We have four electoral votes. There are 538 of them total, and it takes 270 to win.
Who really benefits from the Electoral College?
Well, originally, Julia, Virginians. Since enslaved Americans in the Constitution counted as three-fifths of a person for determining population, and therefore representation—people who could not vote and were not represented, by the way—it is no coincidence that seven of our first 12 presidents were from Virginia, a large state with a massive enslaved population.
But as to who benefits now, it shifts back and forth. As of right now, Republicans have an enormous benefit from the electoral system. In 2020, Democrats needed 52% of the vote to have a 50% chance at the presidency.
So why don’t we just use the popular vote instead?
I believe it's because, first, it's in the Constitution, which is hard to change. And second, whomever it benefits at a given time doesn't want to give it up. There is an argument that abolishing the Electoral College would result in Americans who live in cities getting more power than those in rural areas. But I’ve recently read that about 80% of Americans live in urban areas, many in “red states.”
And there's another argument that small states will be ignored if we abolish the system. They won't be campaigned in. They won't be given favor. But if you look right now at what states matter in this election, we're looking at Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those are two big states with lots of big cities in them.
Could the U.S. get rid of the Electoral College system? I mean, is that likely?
It's not very likely to change it outright, Julia. To abolish the Electoral College, that would require a constitutional amendment. Amendments are really hard. They require two-thirds of both houses and three-fourths of all states. I don't believe that's a viable path in our lifetime.
However, there's another path, which is interesting. It's called the National Popular Vote Compact. This is how it works. If states with a combined total of 270 electoral votes all agree they'll pass a state law that they'll give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, in essence, that removes the Electoral College without an amendment. So far, 17 states and Washington, D.C. have signed on to this – five of them notably small states. New Hampshire is not among them. The current total they have is 209 out of those 270 votes.