The Electoral College is Undermining Democracy. Is Reform Possible?

Will the Electoral College continue to undermine American democracy? Perhaps. But efforts to reform the system are continuing. A new effort is gaining support to do an end run around the Electoral College and achieve reform without a constitutional amendment. That program is called the National Popular Vote, or NPV. It might create a solution. 

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Many commentators on American politics call the Electoral College an undemocratic and outdated institution. They say the nation would be better served if United States presidents were chosen instead by a direct popular vote. Their criticism and recommendation is spot on. One of the most troublesome aspects of the Electoral College is that it allows the candidate that came in second in national vote totals to win a presidential election. That problem occurred two times in this century. In 2000, Al Gore won more popular votes than his opposition. He had a lead of more than half a million votes, but the prize went to George W. Bush, thanks to just 537 votes in Florida and a 5-4 decision to stop the vote counting in Florida by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote. She was the choice of 48% of American voters compared to only 46% in 2016 for Donald Trump. Mrs. Clinton came out ahead nationally by almost 3 million votes. Yet Donald Trump was the one who took the presidential oath in early 2017. Will this problem of the so-called wrong winners occur again? It's possible because of the close American divide between blue voters and red voters. In the 21st century, two additional presidential elections were close calls. The 2004 election came down to a tight battle between Republican George W. Bush, the incumbent, and Democratic challenger John Curry. If less than 60,000 votes had shifted to the Democrat in the state of Ohio, John Curry would have had enough votes in the Electoral College to win the election, and he, not Bush, would have moved into the White House. It was a tight race in 2024 as well, despite Donald Trump's boast that he won in a landslide, a switch of approximately just 121,000 votes across three swing states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, would have changed the election outcome and delivered the presidency to Kamala Harris. The point is that American voters have been closely divided in many presidential races in the 21st century, and that situation could continue. There could be more so-called false winners in future elections. And that's a troubling prospect. Will the Electoral College continue to undermine American democracy? Perhaps it will, perhaps not. Efforts to reform the system are gaining momentum, yet obstacles to change remain formidable. There have been more than 700 efforts to replace the Electoral College with a different system based on population. But those attempts failed. Partisan politics blocked those efforts. Some political leaders wanted to keep advantages that benefited their political group. Vigorously, they defended the Electoral College. Nevertheless, switching to a national system of popular votes isn't mission impossible. There are two principal reasons to explain why it isn't. First, the United States Congress came close in the 1960s and 1970s to abandoning the Electoral College. Of course, there were more steps to take to create true constitutional change, but progress had been made. Secondly, a new effort is gaining support to do an end run around the Electoral College and achieve reforms without a constitutional amendment. That campaign has the potential to create extraordinary political change. Welcome to History is Relevant. I'm Robert Brent Topplin. And here's the plan. First, we'll note key flaws in the Electoral College, problems that make it undemocratic. Secondly, we'll examine that close call in the 1960s and 1970s when reform briefly looked promising, and we'll ask, why did that effort fail? Thirdly, we'll look at the intriguing proposal to reform the electoral system without a constitutional amendment. And finally, we'll discuss the relevance of this history for current affairs. Part one, the Electoral College's Shortcomings. No other major democracy in the world has an electoral college. The creators of numerous constitutions around the world smartly avoided the American model. They did not want to replicate such a complicated and flawed system. What are those principal flaws? In addition to the one I've already mentioned, electing presidential candidates that lose the popular vote. The Electoral College's winner-take-all arrangement is problematic. It delivers 100% of a state's votes to the winner, disregarding votes by citizens in a state's minority. Essentially, votes by the minority in a state have no real impact on the presidential election. For example, Republicans in Massachusetts or Democrats in Alabama can vote, but their ballots are unlikely to affect the outcome in a presidential election. They simply don't even have an incentive to vote in many situations. The system also diminishes the importance of votes by citizens in states that are overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic in the vote outcome. Voters in deep red Mississippi, for example, that voted for Trump in recent elections understood that their ballots were unlikely to affect the national elections results. The state of Mississippi was already firmly in the Republican Party's camp. Another problem is that presidential candidates give little attention to citizens in states where the opposite party dominates. They ask why channel financial resources and campaign visits by the candidate if a party's nominee has little or no chance of winning that state's electoral votes. Consequently, candidates and their campaigns focus on a few swing states. In recent elections, just seven or eight battleground states received the lion's share of media, party, and candidate attention. In the 2024 presidential election, just seven key swing states that ultimately decided the outcome were Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Those states got the maximum campaign interest of the public and the mass media. Part two, a look at the closest the United States came in modern times and past years to altering the electoral system. For a brief period in the 60s, prospects for reform seemed very strong. A Gallup poll in 1966 showed that 63% of respondents wanted to abolish the Electoral College. Members of professional organizations agreed. In 1967, the American Bar Association called the Electoral College archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous. The United States Chamber of Commerce polled its members and found they favored electoral reform by a margin of nine to one. By 1969, support for abolishing the Electoral College appeared to be an unstoppable force. President Nixon endorsed the idea. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and the Republican Minority Leader Gerald Ford supported it as well. In September 1969, the United States House of Representatives passed a proposal to abolish the Electoral College, and the vote was by a whopping 338 to 70. Polling at that time revealed growing public enthusiasm for the proposed change. A Gallup poll found 81% of Americans approved the reform. In the U.S. Senate, however, resistance was intense. Southerners were the strongest opponents of change. Alabama Senator James Allen described the white Southerners' rationale. The Electoral College, he said, is one of the South's few remaining political safeguards. Let's keep it. From many Southern senators' perspective, racial segregation was at stake in this battle. Mississippi Senator James Eastland, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, postponed the vote on the reform measure for several months. And when a cloture vote came up in 1970, a majority, 54 senators, voted to end the debate and move on and vote, but they lacked the two-thirds needed to overcome a filibuster. That's how that program went down to defeat. Since then, it's become increasingly difficult to abandon the Electoral College. Republicans have become greatly supportive of that program, the Electoral College, in recent years, because it gives them a powerful advantage. Two insightful professors of government at Harvard, the authors of a previous book called How Democracies Die, are Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblat, and they explain the GOP's commitment to the Electoral College in another follow-up book called Tyranny of the Minority. Their title summarizes the key argument. Levitsky and Ziblat call the United States Constitution a pernicious enabler of minority rule. They say the Constitution allows partisan minorities to thwart and even rule over popular majorities. An important way the GOP minority implements that dominance is through the Electoral College. Is a constitutional amendment possible in these severely partisan times? Of course, the challenges are daunting, and there's a high bar for passing constitutional amendments. Two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states must agree to have the Electoral College replaced. There is, however, another type of remedy, one that does, as I mentioned before, an end run around obstacles created by the Constitution. And that program is called the National Popular Vote, or NPV. And it might provide a solution. Here's how it would work, as explained by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. In the current electoral college system, the presidency is awarded to the candidate who wins at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes. The Constitution gives state legislatures the right to choose how presidential electors are chosen. In each state, with the exceptions of Maine and Nebraska in recent years, awards go to all the electoral votes, all the electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in that state. It's a winner-take-all system. But under the national popular vote, states commit to award their electoral votes instead to the winner of the national popular vote. The compact will go into effect only when states controlling at least 270 electoral votes have joined. After that threshold is reached, the national popular vote states would ensure that the winner of the national popular vote becomes the president. While the compact would not abolish the electoral college, it would guarantee that the winner of the electoral college vote and the popular vote are the same person. As of April 2026, 18 states and the District of Columbia have enacted that National Popular Vote Compact. Virginia became the 18th state to join in April 2026. That brought the Compact to 222 electoral votes, 82% of the 270 required votes to activate the agreement and bypass the traditional Electoral College system. Even if enough states join the compact, success is not guaranteed, of course. Defenders of the Electoral College will resist by raising numerous legal questions, and some will insist that a constitutional amendment is still necessary. Yet if enough additional states join the compact to make the case for implementing a national popular vote, that political conflict at the time of the big debates will be very interesting. Finally, the relevance of this history for our times. The system of choosing presidents through the Electoral College now looks embarrassingly out of date. The Electoral College was established in 1787 as a compromise to balance competing interests at the Constitutional Convention, including tensions between small and large states, disagreements about how to elect a president, clashes about protecting slaveholding interests in the southern slave states, and other matters. Compromises made by the nation's founders also related to their fears, at least of some delegates, that ordinary Americans could be influenced and manipulated by unscrupulous, power-hungry demagogues. At that time, many citizens lacked formal education, and the founders rejected, for that reason, a direct popular vote for president. They did not trust voters to make wise choices. Those founders feared direct democracy. They stuck with the program of an electoral college. But times have changed, and now many Americans champion and praise democracy. Yet we violate the principles of democracy frequently in national elections by maintaining an antiquated, undemocratic system that denies many voters opportunities to register their choice for president in ways that can truly affect the election's outcome. In view of this troubled history of the Electoral College, the proposal to create a national popular vote to elect presidents seems to make a heck of a lot of sense. Years ago, an influential American made an argument for the popular vote clearly and emphatically. In 2012, that person said, the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy. He called the Electoral College a total sham and a travesty. In 2016, he declared, I would rather see it where you went with simple votes, meaning the popular vote. That influential American was Donald Trump.