The News
With days before the Nov. 5 US presidential election, the debate — and criticism — over how Americans vote for the president is back in the spotlight.
The Electoral College — a system whereby state electors award votes to the candidate that wins the state’s popular vote — has been criticized for decades for giving voters in a handful of key states disproportionate power over choosing the president. Prominent politicians, including Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, have called for the presidency to be decided by the popular vote instead. If that were the case, then the outcome of some federal elections would be very different: Hilary Clinton would have won the presidency in 2016, for example, and Al Gore would have won in 2000.
Fueling the debate is a larger conversation over voting rules and partisan politics. Republicans have recently benefited from the makeup of the electoral college, although their advantage appears to be waning as the voting patterns of suburban America change and there’s no guarantee it will favor one party or the other in the future.
SIGNALS
Desire for change shows a partisan divide, but the gap is narrowing
More than 60% of all Americans believe that the president should be elected by a national popular vote as opposed to the Electoral College, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. However, that support is split along a partisan divide: 80% of Democratic voters support switching to a popular vote system, compared to just 46% of Republicans. Still, many more Republicans want to switch to a popular vote now than they did in 2016, Pew found, with the number of Republican voters who support reform increasing by some 19 percentage points over the last 8 years.
If Trump wins the popular vote but loses the election, calls for change could grow louder
This election season has seen a kind of reversal in long-held voting norms: Trump has made historic gains with Black and Hispanic voters, while Democrats are cutting into traditionally Republican suburban areas — shifts that could erode the Republicans’ Electoral College advantage, Politico reported. In a scenario where Trump wins the popular vote but loses the election, that could “make electoral reform less of a strictly partisan issue,” the outlet wrote, with potentially many more Republicans becoming eager for change.
Electoral Count Reform Act neutralizes some of the Electoral College’s vulnerabilities
In 2020, the Electoral College process “was anything but typical,” University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller wrote for The Conversation, with Trump and his allies trying to recruit alternative state electors who would cast their votes for Trump in states where President Joe Biden had won the popular vote. The Electoral Count Reform Act, passed in 2022, was designed to remove such ambiguity in the states’ certification process. The law gives states a deadline to certify their electors, forces disputes to be resolved in federal court, and states that the vice president has an administerial role in counting states’ electors. “No law can completely stop the risk of subversion after an election,” Muller wrote, but the integrity of the Electoral College is better fortified this election.