It is time to abolish the Electoral College in favor of a single national popular vote where all votes count equally, Stanford political experts say.
The Electoral College is responsible for disenfranchising, in effect, huge swaths of American voters, said Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology who studies American politics. A single national popular or “constituency” vote would determine the president based on who won the most votes total across the country.
Otherwise, McAdam said, “The great majority of American voters exercise no real political voice in the outcome of presidential elections.”
Under the U.S. Constitution, the Electoral College determines who is the U.S. president, based on vote totals in each state. The candidate who receives a majority of electoral votes (270) wins the presidency. Each state’s number of electors is equal to its number of members of Congress (representatives plus senators). Washington, D.C., also has three electors, so the total number of Electoral College members is 538.
According to McAdam, four out of five Americans exercised no real electoral voice in the 2012 presidential election due to the winner-take-all Electoral College system, which made campaigns focus on the handful of “battleground” states that were up for grabs heading into the election.
“If we define ‘battleground’ states as those where the final margin of victory was 5 percent or less, only six of the 50 states qualify. They were Colorado, 4 percent; Florida, 1 percent; North Carolina, 3 percent; Ohio, 2 percent; Pennsylvania, 5 percent; and Virginia, 3 percent,” he said.
McAdam noted that the mean margin of difference in the remaining 44 states was a whopping 19 percent. “Even with such populous states as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio in the mix, the total population of the 2012 battleground states was barely 20 percent of the country’s total,” he said.