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John,
Twice in the last 25 years -- in 2000 and 2016 -- the winner of the Electoral College, and hence the Presidency, did not win the popular vote. These glitches in our system brought us the Iraq War under George W. Bush, the January 6 insurrection incited by Donald Trump, and the far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
In 2016, Trump lost the national popular vote by 2.9 million -- it wasn’t even close -- yet just 80,000 votes in just 3 states gave him the Electoral College win. When so few votes can determine a national election in which 158 million Americans voted, it’s clear that the majority of Americans under the current system are disenfranchised.
How can we fix this problem, which is embedded in the Constitution? The odds of getting 3/4 of the states to ratify an Amendment to abolish the Electoral College are very low considering that more than a 1/4 of the states are over-represented by their Electoral College votes, and hence have an advantage under the status quo.
There is a solution that would work, however, without abolishing the Electoral College or requiring a Constitutional amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and if enough states sign on, we can guarantee that the candidate who wins the most votes, wins the election.
When a state joins the compact, the state agrees to assign their electors to whoever wins the national popular vote, automatically giving that candidate the most Electoral College votes. So far, 16 states plus the District of Columbia have signed on, yielding a total of 205 Electoral College votes. 270 are needed to win.
It’s time to guarantee that the candidate who wins the most votes wins. Sign the petition today to support the campaign for the National Popular Vote Compact.
Under the current system, the votes of the 80% of Americans who do not live in a “swing state” just don’t count as much as the 20% of Americans who do. In 2020, seven states had popular vote differences of less than 3% (Minnesota, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina). These are the battleground states where Presidential elections are fought.
On top of “winner take all” electoral vote policies that disenfranchise voters who don’t vote for the majority winner in their given state, the Electoral College also awards extra votes proportionally to rural states with lower density. So Wyoming’s population of 586,000 gets 3 electoral votes (a ratio of 1 vote per 195,000 people), while California’s 39 million citizens have only 55 electoral votes (1 vote per 709,000). This is quite far from the democratic ideal of “one person, one vote.”
When a candidate refuses to accept the will of the voters, there is more incentive to cheat by trying to “find” the missing votes when the target is as few as 40,000 votes in just a few states. It would be much more difficult to “find” an extra 5 million votes to win the national popular vote.
Sign the petition to tell your state legislature to sign onto the National Popular Vote Compact. Let’s make sure the winner of the popular vote also wins the Presidency!
Thank you for working for the principle of “one person, one vote.”
- Amanda
Amanda Ford, Director
Democracy for America
Advocacy Fund
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