WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — A handful of Democrats have proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would abolish the Electoral College in favor of a pure popular vote, in a gesture to placate disgruntled activists who have long abhorred the system by which America has elected its presidents since the Founding.
The Epoch Times reports that Sens. Dick Durbin, Brian Schatz, and Peter Welch are spearheading the joint resolution proposing the simple amendment, which states, “Each voter shall cast a single vote for two persons who have consented to the joining of their names as candidates for President and Vice President,” and “The pair of candidates having the greatest number of votes for President and Vice President shall be elected.”
Durbin panned the Founders’ design as an “18th-century invention that disenfranchises millions of Americans,” while Schatz declared that “No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live.”
“In all but five presidential elections, the winner of the election received the most votes. Two of those five times came in the last 25 years, handing the presidency to candidates the majority of voters rejected,” the senators argued in a press release, referring to George W. Bush’s defeat of Al Gore in 2000, and Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The system of government that America’s founding fathers established in the U.S. Constitution was designed to be a representative republic rather than a pure, direct democracy. The public ultimately chooses its leaders, but its will is filtered through checks, balances, and mediating processes, theoretically to ensure different parts of government have different levels of responsiveness and resistance to popular sentiment, hopefully cultivating reasoned deliberation over rash, emotional action.
As part of this framework, the Electoral College gives every state a number of electors “equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress,” which in turn determines the president based on how a state votes. Today, that means whoever wins 270 electoral votes becomes president, and every state but Maine and Nebraska awards all of its electors to whichever candidate wins a majority of its vote, with the loser getting nothing in that state.
As a reflection of its congressional representation, a state’s number of electors is based primarily on its population size, and most of America’s presidents have also won their popular votes. But on rare occasions a close election can come down to a combination of states such that a candidate can win the Electoral College and become president despite losing the popular vote.
That the two most recent times this happened benefited Republicans has made abolishing the Electoral College a passion of many left-wing activists, who argue that only a pure popular vote can faithfully reflect the will of the people and embody a democratic character.
Defenders of the Electoral College argue that it is essential to maintaining trustworthy election results that reflect the country as a whole. By making the margin of victory within each state irrelevant, it limits the ability of a ruling party to cancel out the will of other states through its dominance at the state level, whether through vote fraud, beneficial voting rules, or conformity of thought in dense population centers. Supporters cite maps of the 2000 and 2016 election results showing that the vast majority of counties favored the Republican both years, and the Democrat’s popular vote advantage came primarily through the party’s control of certain high-population cities.
The latest amendment proposal comes despite the 2024 election having rendered the subject temporarily moot, as Trump won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College last month. Regardless, it is little more than a symbolic gesture, given the difficulty of amending the U.S. Constitution.
Article V provides several methods by which amendments can be proposed, but to succeed, they must be ratified by three-fourths of the states (which today means 38 states). Excluding the Bill of Rights, the Constitution has only been amended 17 times in the 236 years since it was ratified.