With the election over, let’s scrap the Electoral College and fix U.S. democracy

Like many of you, I spent election week glued to my computer, phone, and television as the presidential balloting results slowly trickled in. “Dad,” my 8-year-old daughter regularly admonished me, “too much screen time.” She was right.

But who can blame us? After all, we were witnessing something unprecedented: a hotly contested election, with extraordinarily high stakes, conducted during a pandemic. And the health crisis, which prompted a record number of Americans to vote by mail, meant that counting ballots took much longer than normal, particularly in states like Pennsylvania, where the Republican-controlled legislature blocked mail-in votes from being processed before Election Day.

Yet there is another, all-too-familiar reason that Americans spent the week obsessively refreshing our browsers: the Electoral College, the often undemocratic system the country has used to select its president since 1788.

If Americans awarded the presidency to the candidate who attracted the most support from eligible voters — as we do in races for every other political office — then last week wouldn’t have left so many of us bleary-eyed and exhausted. Less than 24 hours after counting began, Joe Biden was already up by 3 million votes. He will likely win by over 6 million. Judging by the popular vote, the race was not close.

But, of course, it was tighter in the Electoral College. If Donald Trump had managed to squeak out wins in several states he won in 2016, then he would have been able to claim victory, despite losing the popular vote by a hefty margin — just as he did in 2016 and just as George W. Bush did in 2000.

Fortunately, the Electoral College and popular vote totals aligned this year. America got lucky. But we shouldn’t take this as a sign that the system is working. We would do well to scrap the Electoral College before it undermines the will of the people again.

The Electoral College’s shortcomings date back to its birth. The framers of the Constitution spent months debating how the country would choose its chief executive, settling on our flawed system only at the last minute. The Electoral College was a “Frankenstein compromise,” in one expert’s words, forged to appease delegates representing small and slaveholding states as well as those who harbored misgivings about the wisdom of everyday citizens.

According to the bargain, each state would select a slate of electors equal in number to its total congressional delegation. These electors, in turn, could each cast two votes. The presidency went to whomever received the most votes and the vice presidency to the second-place finisher. Initially, many states didn’t give the American people any say in who those electors were — and thus who the president would be — leaving the decision up to their state legislatures.

Not only was the Electoral College not particularly democratic early on, it has also rarely functioned the way that its supporters imagined it would. Many boosters, for one, believed that electors would be independent, civic-minded actors who would put aside partisanship and select the best person for the job. Instead, the role quickly became the purview of individuals handpicked for their allegiance to party, not country.

And several presidential elections, but especially the 2016 contest, have put the lie to Alexander Hamilton’s claim that the Electoral College would ensure that only the most qualified candidate would be chosen as president.

Just as problematic as the Electoral College itself are the winner-take-all laws that 48 of 50 states employ to choose their electors. These laws, which are not mentioned in the Constitution, give a state’s full complement of electoral votes to the popular vote winner, thereby rendering ballots cast for another candidate meaningless.

Little wonder that America has tried to modify or abolish the Electoral College 700 times. But with the exception of the Twelfth Amendment, which fixed a design flaw that didn’t require electors to distinguish between their votes for the president and vice president, none of these proposals has been successful.

Why? Chiefly because Southern political leaders representing slaveholders and segregationists resisted them at every turn. Unwilling to enfranchise their African American populations, white southerners recognized that substituting a national popular vote for the Electoral College would undercut their influence in presidential elections.

Still, a majority of Americans today favor replacing the Electoral College, and the most likely alternative, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, has some momentum. Colorado just joined California and 13 other blue-leaning states, along with the District of Columbia, that have signed on to this agreement. Once the compact is adopted by states representing an additional 74 electoral votes, which would ensure its members controlled a majority of electoral votes, the presidency will go to the popular vote winner.

Alas, this compact has yet to attract significant support among Republicans, whose candidates have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential contests.

It will be difficult to convince red-leaning states to join the compact, but that fact shouldn’t deter us from trying to fix our democracy. Replacing the Electoral College, in the end, is the right thing to do. And who knows, it might even help us all get more sleep on election night, too.