But those focusing on the Electoral College might do better to train their gaze on a different component of the electoral system that has done greater damage than the Electoral College ever could: voter ID laws. Think that's a long way off? Arguments about the merits of the electoral college often turn to how it affects certain categories of voters. Take the World Series. Electoral College critics seem to regard its abolishment as something of a silver bullet. And it is cumbersome. But 2016 set off a swell of complaints nonetheless. Democrats are not fond of the Electoral College these days, for obvious reasons. Full stop. 2. This means, for instance, that the 39 million Californians (who have 53 representatives in Congress, along with their two U.S. senators) are allocated 55 electoral votes for a presidential candidate. Those disadvantaged by the electoral college are Hispanics (21.8%) and those who fall into other racial categories (19.0%). The US has elected two minority presidents in the last 20 years because of the Electoral College.

But the Electoral College system is not only embedded in the structure of our constitutional governance; it is also emblematic of the fact that we are a federal republic. You can sign up as a subscriber with a range of benefits, including an opt-in to receive the print magazine by mail. , Erwin Z, Comment Closed. Please try again. Is the best solution to such inequity, then, to break up the Electoral College? 3. Hence the chorus of denunciation — the Electoral College is undemocratic; the Electoral College is unnecessary; the Electoral College was invented to protect slavery — and the demand to push the institution down the memory hole. So, break up Illinois — and send still more Republican senators and representatives to Congress. The Electoral College, then, is an engine of legitimacy: Since 1900, 17 out of 29 U.S. elections have been decided by 200 or more electoral votes. What makes the Texas team’s study convincing on this point is that they don’t just simulate election results and reach their conclusions using a single model, or even a handful of different models. But are these thing true? These electors are the ones who are responsible for casting their votes for both the Vice President as well as the President. The three-fifths clause gave no advantage to slave states until the Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery. (For example, one District of Columbia elector cast a blank ballot in 2000; one Minnesota John Kerry elector cast a vote for John Edwards in 2004; and in 2016 five Clinton electors and two Trump electors bolted for other candidates.) Breaking out the civilian voting-age population by census tract density tests the hypothesis that the electoral college reduces the voting power of urban voters. Its authors were trying to weigh the probability that a candidate would have won the White House while losing the popular vote through history, not forecast the next race. , subhasish The stories you need to read, delivered daily. But Geruso told me he sees no reasons why the Electoral College should favor the GOP any less going into 2020. Allen Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era, and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. The Electoral College system also distinguishes the United States from other systems where the highest vote-getter automatically wins. They focused on three specific periods: the antebellum era, Reconstruction, and the years 1988 through 2016, which they call the “modern era.” (In the paper, they explain that they picked those timespans because the political parties in the United States were relatively stable during them.). Benefits of Electoral College Every vote would be counted for and assist the candidate for whom it was cast – just as votes from every county are equal and important when a vote is cast in a Governor’s race. The Constitutional Convention, meeting in Pennsylvania, had a front-row seat for observing the impact of the state's constitution. The Electoral College has also awarded the presidency to candidates with a plurality of the popular vote (under 50 percent) in a number of cases, notably … For Republicans or Independents, casting a ballot for the election could seem pointless because Clinton’s win seemed like a foregone conclusion. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, and an absolute majority of at least 270 electoral votes is required to win the election. In 2004, candidates concentrated over two-thirds of their money and campaign visits in five states; over 80% in nine states; and over 99% of their money in 16 states, and candidates concentrated over two-thirds of their money and campaign visits in five states and over 99% of their money in 16 states. But wise old Roger Sherman of Connecticut replied that it might be better to have the new Congress select the president; he feared that the direct election of presidents by the people might lead to monarchy. The benefits of the Electoral College come from the need to win state-by-state. Instead, the chance that your vote matters is dependent on which state you live in, and the political composition of voters who happen to live within that state's borders. Simply doing away with the existing process without putting a new one in its place could create the biggest political crisis in American history since the Civil War. The state legislators who will be in charge of redistricting will be elected in the next few years. Can you win on this day, and can you win again on that day? The bill has been endorsed or voted for by 1,922 state legislators (in 50 states) who have sponsored and/or cast recorded votes in favor of the bill. The advantage of the electoral college is that it promotes fairness from a regional perspective. No elector has changed the outcome of an election in the United States by not voting for the candidate their individual voters wanted, but the structure of the Electoral College makes it a possibility. It continues to do so today, even though the US is much larger than it was during the first elections. Take New York and Virginia, the largest slave states in the North and South, respectively, according to the 1790 census, just after the Constitutional Convention. Academics call these sorts of results “electoral inversions,” and economists Michael Geruso and Dean Spears wanted to know how likely they were to actually occur, and which parties were most likely to benefit from them.


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