Elizabeth Warren Wants to Kill the Electoral College
On Monday night, presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren appeared in Mississippi for a lengthy CNN town hall, fielding questions from both Jake Tapper and the audience. The Massachusetts senator has frequently pushed big, ambitious ideas, including her own sweeping anti-corruption bill last year and a universal child care program she proposed as part of her 2020 campaign.
Rukia Lumumba, the sister and former campaign manager for the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba, asked Warren about voting rights, specifically how the senator would promote and expand voting rights for ex-felons, online voting registration, and enact early voting. Warren didn't directly address Lumumba's question, but she did use it as an opportunity to launch one of her more radical ideas so far in the campaign: the elimination of the Electoral College.
“Come a general election, presidential candidates don’t come to places like Mississippi, they also don’t come to places like California or Massachusetts, because we’re not the battleground states," she said, adding, "My view is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College—and every vote counts."
Warren didn't expound on how she would pursue the massive task of upending the Electoral College. It would require nothing short of a constitutional convention and the majority of state legislatures are Republican-controlled. And any move she would make as president to fight voter suppression laws would be met with fierce opposition from congressional Republicans, who have admitted that they fear high voter turnout is a threat to their minority rule. But she did get pretty riotous applause for the idea, and as a relatively high-profile candidate even in a crowded field, it's significant that she's calling for something as ambitious the abolition of one of the most anti-democratic election systems in the world.
There's a pervasive myth about the Electoral College that it's meant to "protect" people in less populous states from the whims of people living in places like New York, California, and Texas. But that's a very recent argument that we've retroactively applied: the Electoral College was designed to protect slave-holding states' political power. During the Constitutional Convention, the Northern and Southern delegations fought over representation. At the time, citizens—white male landowners—were more concentrated in the north, and any election that only counted the number of votes cast would be a win for that region. Southerners wanted to count enslaved blacks—who could not vote—in their representation; Northerners argued they were property. The "three-fifths compromise" was the dehumanizing and imperfect fix in the drafting the Constitution. In 1865, we did away with the three-fifths compromise, with the Thirteenth Amendment, but we're still stuck with its other ugly outcome, the Electoral College.
The modern-day defense of the Electoral College is also nonsense on its face. The current system awards extra weight to votes cast in smaller states, and the broadly used winner-take-all policy means that a landslide vote in South Carolina is worth the same amount of electoral votes (nine) as a narrow win in Colorado. It also exacerbates the chaos that a third-party candidate can cause. Claims that the Electoral College somehow protects the stability or integrity of the country only make sense if you accept the premise that voters are the biggest threat to election integrity. Long-shot presidential candidate Andrew Yang recently tweeted that the Electoral College was necessary to keep politicians from only campaigning in densely populated urban areas, claiming that currently they're obligated to campaign "in each state." This is either trolling or flat-out ignorance since pretty much every presidential election in recent memory has come down to a handful of battleground states like Ohio and Florida while less populated, presumably locked-in places like Mississippi and Louisiana are fully ignored.
The actual reason politicians go to the mat to defend the Electoral College is because it so disproportionately favors Republicans. The last two Republican presidents both won their first election despite getting fewer votes than their opponent, and in Trump's case it was a difference of millions. There's no serious, pro-democracy argument for its continued existence, and Republican leaders are well aware of that fact.
