When (not whether) to eliminate the Electoral College?

A recent Pew Research Center poll reported that 63 percent of U.S. adults supported doing away with the Electoral College system and relying on popular vote to determine who wins the presidency. That sounds like a strong reason to do so. Yet, in today’s politically divided environment, this is not the right time to change the Constitution and end the Electoral College system. 

There have been just four two-candidate presidential elections in U.S. history where the winner in the Electoral College did not also win the popular vote: Rutherford Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and most recently, Donald Trump in 2016.

Therefore, in most elections, the two measures have been remarkably consistent. 

It is likely that in 2024, if the Republican candidate wins the presidency, they will also lose the popular vote. This is a function of how voters and their political leanings are distributed across the country. This distribution has made the Electoral College a gerrymander of the nation.

The Founding Fathers who created the Electoral College did not intend it to be so. They established it as a compromise between electing the president by popular vote of the people and a vote by Congress. It also over-weights less populous states, with two electors added for each state’s senators (independent of population) and one elector added for each congressional seat (proportional to population). This now favors Republicans, whose support in less populous Midwest states get amplified. Indeed, the gerrymander is a byproduct of political leanings that have bifurcated voters based on where they choose to live: roughly between urban or rural areas. 

If the Electoral College is a gerrymander, then a different result from the popular vote may occur when the election is highly competitive. In a nation that values democratic principles, should this provide ample reason to end the gerrymander and focus solely on the popular vote? 

Not exactly. The Electoral College is indeed a gerrymander. However, it is not a gerrymander by politicians, something that is common when state legislators map congressional districts. It is a gerrymander by the voters themselves. Moreover, this gerrymander was done unwittingly. 

The state of California is a poster child for this phenomenon. With a population of just over 39 million people and 54 Electoral College votes up for grabs in 2024, the current politics of the state gives all these votes to the Democrat candidate.

In the 2020 election, President Biden won 63.5 percent of the vote in California, to 34.2 percent for former President Donald Trump, resulting in over 5 million more votes for Biden compared to Trump.

For the entire country, Biden had more than 7 million more votes than Trump, with over 70 percent of this vote surplus provided solely by Californians. Therefore, by California being a populous state with a high concentration of Democrat voters, these voters have effectively packed themselves to their own detriment.

Two other large Democratic leaning states are New York and Illinois, where Biden won a total of 3 million more votes than Trump. These three states covered the entire national popular vote surplus for Biden. 

In contrast, Trump won two large states, Texas and Florida, by a total of just 1 million votes. 

The phenomenon of winning some entities (in this case, states) by a small margin and losing other entities by a large margin illustrates the effect of packing and cracking, the tools of gerrymandering.

Although Biden defeated Trump 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, several states, including Georgia and Arizona, that were close, could have swung the Electoral College. These states have also been the target of voter fraud accusations, although no evidence has been found that any such activities would have changed the election results.

Democrats may argue that the Electoral College is antiquated and should be discarded in favor of the popular vote. Yet, the Electoral College gerrymander was created by Democrat voters themselves, in where they choose to live — and vote.

Given the divisiveness in our country and the polarization of the population, discarding the Electoral College at this time would fuel further division. It would be viewed by Republicans as highly partisan, with Democrats gaining an advantage.

The ideal time to make such a change is after the country has had several elections with the Electoral College and the popular vote providing consistent outcomes, for both Democrat and Republican winners. When that will occur is anyone’s guess. Based on the current state of affairs, this may take some time.  

There may be good reasons to end the Electoral College system, based on popular opinion. There are also good times to do so. Now is not such a time. 

Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A data scientist, his research group on computational redistricting is committed to bringing transparency to the redistricting process using optimization algorithms and artificial intelligence.