Dear John,

Five of our nation’s 46 presidents — and two of the last four — have come into office while losing the popular vote nationwide because of the utterly irrational and undemocratic Electoral College system.

And with the nation’s population shifting more and more toward the coasts and big cities, it’s a virtual guarantee that it will happen again in the future — possibly as soon as this fall.

But there’s real momentum for getting rid of the Electoral College system right now through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a legal agreement among the states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

Already, 16 states representing 205 electoral votes have joined the compact. Maine and Michigan are poised to join on as well. That would bring us to 224 electoral votes, just 46 away from the 270 we need to send the Electoral College system to the dustbin of history.

Now’s the time to step on the gas and get this done!

Will you make a donation to help spread the word, get the truth out, and end the undemocratic Electoral College system?

Under the Electoral College system, the votes of people in only a small handful of swing states have any real impact on the winner. If you’re one of the 280 million or so Americans — about 85% of us — who don’t live in one of those special, all-important swing states, then your votes effectively don’t count at all.

The fact is that the whole point of the Electoral College when it was included in the Constitution nearly 250 years ago was to make the system less democratic. Today we’re seeing the consequences, including a Supreme Court majority that is wildly out of step with the American people, picked by presidents who lost the popular vote.

But this isn’t just some Republican vs. Democrat issue. Whether you’re a Republican living in a deep-red state like Utah or a Massachusetts Democrat, you are equally ignored by the presidential candidates.

That’s why two out of three Americans think this system should be done away with and replaced by a national popular vote, including about half of Republican voters.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact can fix this broken system without going through the prohibitively difficult and lengthy process of amending the Constitution. But still, it won’t be easy. This effort began 20 years ago out of the ashes of the 2000 Bush v. Gore election meltdown.

But by educating the public about this opportunity and holding politicians accountable each time there’s another disaster resulting from their failure to act, we can keep making progress and eventually get over the top. In the coming weeks, we have a critical opportunity to try to convince Maine and Michigan to join the compact — and then we’ll turn our attention to the final few states we need to finish the job.

Together, we can finally have a real national popular vote for President of the United States. Will you make a donation to help spread the word, get the truth out, and end the undemocratic Electoral College system?

Thank you for helping us fight for a democracy that represents us all,

Robert Reich
Inequality Media