Enemies of the Electoral College aim to scrap the Founders’ design.
By Gary L. Gregg | December 15, 2011
During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton remarked in Federalist 68 that the method of presidential selection was “almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents.” If only we could say the same today.
From the problematic election of 1800, which resulted in tweaking the system with the Twelfth Amendment, to the Florida recount in 2000, the Electoral College has become the most maligned and least appreciated aspect of America’s constitutional order. Opponents have introduced hundreds of bills seeking to amend the Constitution to replace the college with some variation of a national popular vote.
Now its foes have given up trying to amend the Constitution through traditional methods. They have created a new scheme to get around the built-in impediments to electoral reform; they call their effort the “National Popular Vote Plan” (NPV), and they have been quietly making progress toward its adoption. One proponent, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, has been so bold as to admit, “this is an effort to circumvent the cumbersome process of amending the Constitution. That’s the only practical way of moving toward a more democratic system.”
The NPV was first advanced by computer engineer John R. Koza, best known for co-inventing the rub-off instant lottery ticket. The plan asks state legislatures to pledge all of their state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once NPV goes into effect, which will happen when enough states have enacted the legislation to control the 270 electoral votes necessary to elect a president.
Backers of the plan are carrying out a stealthy and disciplined state-by-state campaign. Over 2,100 state legislators are now on board, and the plan has already passed in eight states—Vermont, Maryland, Washington, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, and Hawaii—and the District of Columbia, which together control 132 electoral votes. It has recently cleared single legislative chambers in New York, Rhode Island, and Delaware. NPV activists are halfway to their goal of transforming presidential elections.
Though it would have radical implications for American politics, this revolution is being accomplished without a national discussion and largely without serious debate at the state level. This is just how Koza and NPV’s supporters want it. The lottery king would gamble our future on a clever scheme to void the delicate compromises created by our Founders.
• • •
The mode of selecting the chief executive was one of the most difficult problems to confront the men assembled at the Constitutional Convention during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. There had never been a similar office created and they returned to it throughout the convention.
Three basic and sometimes competing values were at stake. First, the system would need to be based upon the republican principles of the revolution, finding its legitimacy in a recognition that the people and their communities are the ultimate source of power. Second, the system should encourage the president to be sufficiently independent that he could act his part with vigor and resolve. Third, the method of selection would have to be designed to encourage the choice of a character fit for high executive office.
Various modes of electing the president were proposed during the Constitutional Convention, most attempting to achieve some balance between the three oft-competing goals. Each proposal can be placed into one of three general categories: popular election, election by the national legislature (or a part thereof), or selection by some version of a specially chosen body of electors or other non-national figures (such as state governors).
Direct popular election for president, as the proponents of NPV advocate today, was the subject of two explicit votes, and on both occasions it was overwhelmingly defeated. On July 17, 1787, Gouverneur Morris made a motion to have the president elected by the people, but only Morris’s own delegates from Pennsylvania voted in its favor. More than a month later, a popular-election plan was proposed by Maryland’s Daniel Carroll. It was defeated without any discussion and with only two states supporting the idea.
The convention’s chief advocates of popular election were Pennsylvanians—Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson. Wilson first apprehensively raised the possibility on June 1, fearing “it might appear chimerical,” and no one responded to his thoughts until he rose for a second time, when George Mason—voicing some support but finding such a mode impractical—suggested postponing the discussion until Wilson “might have time to digest it into his own form.” Perhaps tellingly, Wilson the next day proposed something closer to the Electoral College than a direct popular vote: citizens would choose a representative from their district who would then serve as one of the electors for president.
What was on the minds of the Framers? A direct popular election would, of course, adhere to the requirement that the system to be republican. It would also encourage the president to be more independent than if he were elected by Congress. But would direct election by a national populace result in the selection of a president most fit for office? Would it be representative of the genius of the balanced political framework itself?
Here again, the convention record is complex. Some delegates anticipated good results from popular choice. Morris, for instance, said, “If the people should elect, they will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character” and would choose someone of “continental reputation.” Others, such as Mason, were not so confident. But many of the Founders’ concerns about direct popular election were motivated more by electoral dynamics and constitutional balances than by animus toward the public. Fear of demagoguery, a concern about competing favorite sons from each state, the difficult logistics of a single national election, and a need to adhere to the tensions and balances of the political system all conspired against direct election as much as any concern about the public’s fitness to choose.
The Electoral College is a compromise. The executive would be selected from special representatives of the people in the states, a republican process. The president would not have an institutional rival within the government to which he would owe his election, so he would be a free and independent actor. The threat of demagogic and pandering candidates would be reduced. Finally, because of the select nature of the electors and their meetings in their respective states, where they might discuss the merits of the candidates before voting, the likelihood was that a person of outstanding moral and intellectual virtues would be chosen.
The system worked as planned in only its first two elections, with George Washington being unanimously chosen. By 1800, the development of political parties undermined the deliberative nature of the college, with discussion replaced by party loyalty as the basis for electoral voting. This change was institutionalized when the Twelfth Amendment permanently created national tickets of presidents and vice presidents within parties. Though not required to do so by the Constitution, every state now awards Electoral College votes to the popular winner chosen by its citizens. (Though two states, Nebraska and Maine, divide their electoral votes between the candidate who wins statewide and whoever wins each congressional district.) The race for the presidency today is in every way a democratic and popular election, although the elections are run and votes counted separately in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The modern Electoral College may not be exactly what the Founders intended, but it fits the spirit of their decentralized federal system, which treats states as more than just administrative arms of a national majority.
• • •
The de facto abolition of the Electoral College might make presidential selection easier for some to comprehend. It would be reducible to the formula, “he got the most votes.” But our Founders believed that only a rather complex structure would serve the needs of order without threatening the goal of liberty. Such a simplification of the system would radicalize our politics, undermine the rule of law, lengthen the political process, render small states irrelevant, and enthrone urban areas as undisputed kingmakers. Most importantly, there is no guarantee, or even likelihood, that it would result in what should be the key goal of any electoral reform—selecting better people for office.
Opponents of the Electoral College came closest to prevailing in Congress during the 1970s. In that debate, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan passionately recounted how he had once sat in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations and stared at a board containing the names of the 143 nations then part of that assembly. He wondered how many of them had existed before 1914 and how many had not had their governments changed by force since then. Only seven, he discovered. Among the nations of the world, what could account for America’s remarkable political stability? The answer, Moynihan said, was the genius of the American Constitution—and at the heart of that document’s success he found the lowly Electoral College. He called the proposal to abolish the college “the most radical transformation in our political system that has ever been considered.” He added that it was “so radical and so ominous” as to require from the Senate “the most solemn, prolonged, and prayerful consideration, and in particular a consideration that will reach back to our beginnings, to learn how we built and how it came about that we built better than we knew.”
The Electoral College is “the basic institution that has given structure to American politics,” Moynihan said, and expresses the core American principle “that power is never installed, save when it is consented to by more than one majority.” This idea is seen everywhere in our system: federalism, the bicameralism of Congress, and the majority vote on the Supreme Court exercising judicial review. The establishment of a simple national plebiscite at the center of the constitutional order would undermine the delicate system of concurrent majorities, he ominously warned, and would leave us vulnerable to “the ever-present threat of an overwhelming issue, an over-powering person, and the end of liberty.”
Moving to a simple national vote would radicalize American politics in several ways. With states giving their electoral votes to whoever wins a national plurality, the more extreme elements of each party would be empowered. Under the prevailing system of winner-take-all, a candidate whose support is not localized within particular states has no incentive to run. Without this moderating system, the extremes of each party would be empowered to blackmail more prudent candidates: “Make me director of the EPA or I run and siphon enough votes to cost you the presidency!” In a divided nation, one candidate with the power to draw just a few percentage points of the vote nationally could completely change the outcome of the election. Corrupt bargains would be routine.
Our politics would also be moved out of the center, particularly in the Democratic Party, as the path to the presidency became one where smaller states and rural areas could be ignored with impunity. Currently, an urban politician seeking the highest office is forced to travel to rural areas and hear concerns that might otherwise be alien to him. By compelling candidates to mingle at state fairs, speak with coal miners, throw bowling balls, and visit small-town churches, the Electoral College system gives candidates some appreciation of the great diversity of the nation.
By contrast, under NPV an aspirant might be able to win the presidency by campaigning only in major metropolitan areas—recall the county-by-county electoral map of 2000 that showed how Al Gore won the national popular vote but could fly from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles without passing over a single county where he prevailed. A campaign waged to maximize voter turnout in and around urban areas would be divisive and lead to more radical public policy from the victor. Imagine a Barack Obama without the need to appeal to at least some voters clinging to guns or religion.
The proponents of NPV point to the election of 2000 as evidence of the need for reform. But the opposite lesson should be drawn. The recounts in Florida were ugly, yet because of the Electoral College they were concentrated in one state. Now imagine an election that close under a national system, with two candidates separated by only a few hundred thousand votes. Under NPV, lawyers would descend on every voting precinct in every county in every state of the nation. Recounts would be nationwide spectacles fought in county courthouses and in front of state and federal benches across the land.
NPV would eventually turn presidential elections into a version of a Jamaican limbo dance. A great advantage of the current Electoral College system of winner-take-all is that it funnels votes into two candidates with relatively broad bases of support and exaggerates the margin of victory for the winner, no matter how close the popular contest. With Ross Perot in the race in 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency with just 43 percent of the popular vote, but with 68 percent of the Electoral College. Will Americans be satisfied if a president takes office after receiving only 40 percent of the national vote? How about 30 percent in a five-candidate race?
(Although it’s not part of the current NPV plan, we could eventually be driven to adopt a run-off election, allowing the top two candidates to face each other in a second round. Imagine the expense, the length of the campaigns, and the legal controversies of such an approach.)
The NPV would also be a blow to federalism and the dignity of the states. Small states like West Virginia or Colorado would never see a presidential candidate again. Large urban areas would grow in power and pull candidates to the left. A new national bureaucracy might eventually be empowered to certify an official national vote winner.
The supporters of the NPV are halfway to their goal. Only a vigilant and determined debate in the states will preserve the system that has served America since 1792. It is time for that debate to begin.
Gary L. Gregg is editor of Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College.
[Without this moderating system, the extremes of each party would be empowered to blackmail more prudent candidates: “Make me director of the EPA or I run and siphon enough votes to cost you the presidency!” In a divided nation, one candidate with the power to draw just a few percentage points of the vote nationally could completely change the outcome of the election. ]
I’m not sure how this blackmail would work. It sounds like an awful lot of work to get some political job. However, it does look like minor parties with a national presence but no regional heartland could get a boost.Currently, an urban politician seeking the highest office is forced to travel to rural areas and hear concerns that might otherwise be alien to him.
{By compelling candidates to mingle at state fairs, speak with coal miners, throw bowling balls, and visit small-town churches, the Electoral College system gives candidates some appreciation of the great diversity of the nation.}
These are just silly scripted video ops. I don’t think the candidate learns much.
{A great advantage of the current Electoral College system of winner-take-all is that it funnels votes into two candidates with relatively broad bases of support and exaggerates the margin of victory for the winner, no matter how close the popular contest. }
Now you’re getting somewhere, an argument more serious than “we always did it this way” Such a method could, just maybe, lead to a true multi-party electoral landscape. This could lead to a quasi-parliamentary system in practice, with the horse trading and log rolling taking place inter-party after the conventions, than intra-party during the primaries and runups. Being a Greenie myself, I think my interests would be better represented.
Just as the solution to the complaint, if such it be, that every state has two Senators regardless of population is the existing constitutional provision for the creation of new states out of parts of old ones, so the solution to complaints, if such they be, about the Electoral College is the nomination of candidates with the necessary broad appeal. In fact, the Democratic Party did nominate such a candidate in 2008, as the eventual result confirmed.
On the same day as Barack Obama received their Electoral College votes, California and Florida voted to re-affirm traditional marriage. Missouri and Ohio voted not to liberalize gambling. Colorado voted to end legal discrimination against white men. From coast to coast, the people who voted for Obama were the mainstays of, especially, the black and Catholic churches. Obama supporters included Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak and others of like mind. Obama supporters included Jim Jones, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Christopher Buckley, the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec, and Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. And Obama supporters included the recently deceased Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor and a stalwart of Opus Dei.
Obama has signed healthcare into law after having promised not to do so if there were any provision for federally funded abortion, which there is not; would that there were a public option or a single-payer system alongside that ban, so as to make abortion practically impossible, but one thing at a time. The Hyde Amendment, banning federal funding of abortion, was proposed by a very conservative Republican, but it was passed by a Democratic Congress, signed into law by Jimmy Carter, and subject to an annual renewal which it has never been denied no matter how large the Democratic majority in either House. Likewise, both of George McGovern’s running mates were pro-life Catholics, in stark contrast to the record of his party’s supposed “centrists”.
Nor is there coverage for illegal immigrants, still less the amnesty being promoted by Senate Republicans. Traditional marriage is Obama’s own stated view. He has kicked the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and instead endorsed Casey’s Pregnant Women Support Act as well as concentrating on the Employee Free Choice Act supported by pro-life stalwarts such as Stupak and Marcy Kaptur. Kaptur declined to endorse either him or Hillary Clinton because neither was offering enough to the victims of the “free” trade agreements that she and Stupak are now prominent in seeking to repeal.
In November 2011, Democratic Governor Steve Beshear was re-elected by a margin of 20 points. In Kentucky. Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Democrats won a special election to retain control of the State Senate. In New Jersey, the land of Chris Christie, they increased their majority in the State Assembly and retained control of the Senate. Voters in the key swing state of Ohio rejected by 61 percent to 39 a proposal drastically to reduce the collective bargaining rights of public employees. And in Mississippi, the constitutional recognition of personhood from conception, while opposed by the outgoing Republican Governor, was supported not only by the Republican nominee to succeed him, but also by the Democrat, who is black.
So, joining the Rust Belt Catholics, the Southern Democrats are on the way back. Only this time, they come in both colors. The Democratic Party is winning back its old Northern base of “white ethnic” Catholics to add to the blacks whom it picked up as they moved North and as Johnson backed Civil Rights, all the while slowly but steadily re-conquering the South on a biracial basis not far short of miraculous.
Consolidation beckons, by means of reaching out to the successors of Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War, took an even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, declined to intervene in Indochina, denounced the military-industrial complex, and advocated nuclear power as “atoms for peace” 10 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: civil nuclear power as the ultimate beating of swords in ploughshares. In 1960, John F Kennedy branded Eisenhower and Nixon as soft on the Soviets. But then, in 1954, Eisenhower had written to his brother, Edgar N. Eisenhower, that, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Consolidation beckons, by means of reaching out to the successors of Nixon, who suspended the draft, pursued détente with China, and ended the Vietnam War in union with Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee who went on to sign the Helsinki Accords. Nixon believed in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded education) and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely as that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Zionist dissidents.
Consolidation beckons, by means of reaching out to the successors of Reagan, who withdrew from Lebanon in 1983, and who initiated nuclear arms reduction in Europe. The successors of James Baker, who called on Israel to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel” in order to “foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity”, and who negotiated the voluntary disposal of all nuclear weapons by Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The successors of the Republicans who opposed the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration. The successors of George W Bush, who removed American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil.
I don’t see this succeeding. Notice all the adopters so far are Democratic states. Are we really to believe that they are going to put their votes to a Republican if he wins the popular vote, in defiance of the voters of that state? Neither party really cares for anything but winning, and they despise each other far too much for this to ever happen.
But look at it this way. With direct popular vote for the Presidency, New York and California would not longer matter very much.
Scrapping the Electoral College for a straight national popular vote would lead to radical fraction, I agree. And as the poster above notes, it would be a chimerical facsimile of a parliamentary system. That’s problematic because we don’t have any other parliamentary institutions to support this change in the Constitution. There’s no relationship between the legislature and the executive except for breaking deadlock in the Electoral College (extremely rare), and the designed antagonism inherent in separation of powers.
The cause of democratic reform would be better served by proportional electoral representation of the analog House votes in the College, plus the Senatorial electors to the state plurality as lagniappe. The smallest 3-vote states would never divide their support, yet smaller states with medium urban areas, and larger states with regularly dissenting cities would give voice to both of the major tendencies. I can’t see how this breaks the two-party system and consensus building necessitated by it.
Cities would matter more, yes. But the cities being canvassed more often wouldn’t be the massive urban agglomerations, but rather places like Omaha, Indianapolis, Wichita, Fresno, San Diego, Spokane, Richmond or Cary. Revolt of the second-tiers.
Its a system that has worked, basically for 240 years. Why screw around with it.
“The NPV…asks state legislatures to pledge all of their state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once NPV goes into effect, which will happen when enough states have enacted the legislation to control the 270 electoral votes necessary to elect a president.”
I do not like the Electoral College system for the simple reason that it assumes that the members of that body are intellectually and morally superior to the millions of people who vote in presidential elections. Until someone can adduce some evidence to prove that they are, I would rather trust the voters. Having said that, I do not believe that the electoral system would be improved by corrupting it further with some underhanded workaround. Our national leaders should be chosen by you and me without any distortion by either the Electoral College or the state legislatures.
1. Straight Proportional representation in the Electoral College would be ideal. Since people could/would be rewarded by voting 3rd party, the electoral college would return to its original purpose as a deliberative body to select the best person or at least find a consensus on which candidate is acceptable to most American viewpoints, not merely Team Red or Team Blue.
2. Rossbach, selecting the President in a system like the US, where the President is basically an elected 18th Century monarch must be through an indirect system to assure consensus on selection, insulation from public pressure and, ultimately, a circuit breaker on possible demagoguery. Which leads me back to my first point.
this plan could easily bring about a third party as urban populations became more catered to by the candidates; the electorate would become more racially polarized paving the way for a populist candidate
California has fifty-five votes in the Electoral College. What else do you need to know?
The founders intent was also that the Constitution could be amended through the appropriate procedures. The amendment process–as approved by the founders–certainly gives credence to a position that they didn’t consider their words written in stone for future generations.
I offer no position on the topic of whether such an amendment dispensing with the electoral college is good or bad. I only take issue with the premise that their views have become fetishised, a position I think they would have found abhorrent.
I personally think the Electoral College is inherently unfair because it gives a greater voice to those who live in smaller states. If you do the math you will see just how much of a distortion it creates. For instance, compare the voting power of someone living in California versus someone living in Hawaii. The Hawaiians have a much greater say proportionate to their actual population. I think they have three times the voting power that the Californians have. What makes things even worse is that the American people are NOT voting for the President. They are voting for electors to represent them, though those electors are under no legal obligation to vote as the people did. The worst punishment is a fine of a few thousand dollars. This would be a serious problem if not for the fact that electronic voting machines are so easily hacked as to make all of this a moot point.
Mr. Patrick is correct in his assessment. Proponents of the NPV argue that if all the States did that, then it would work, but if only a handful decided to use that process, those States would lose their electoral power. I don’t agree, but that is the argument.
From a Founders’ perspective, the Electoral College was the best solution to a) a distrust of mass democracy and b) the desire to keep the States in the loop.
I discuss this issue and more in my forthcoming _The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution_(Regnery History, 2012).
People vote – counties don’t. Why should we punish the normal mainstream Americans who chose to live in major metro areas, while artificially inflating the voices of depopulated hinterlands? The Electoral College is affirmative action for cows.
“In popular discourse and in the press it is often asserted or assumed that the main reason that the Framers adopted the electoral college was that they feared that if “the people” were allowed to elect the president that they might be swayed by demagogues. It is the contention of this article that such a distrust of democracy was not the primary motivating factor in the creation of the electoral college as a device for selecting the president. After a survey of some political science textbooks that say or imply that the electoral college was adopted because of the fear of democracy, we examine the deliberation of the Framers over the summer of 1787 to make the case that the main motivation for adoption of the electoral college was the need to remove selection from the legislature and at the same time to ensure that the less populous and slave-holding states could preserve the advantage they won through the Connecticut compromise. ~The Electoral College and the Framers’ Distrust of Democracy James P. Pfiffner and Jason Hartke School of Public Policy George Mason University”
“Demagogy (/ˈdɛməɡɒdʒi/[1]) or demagoguery (/ˈdɛməɡɒɡəri/[2]) (Ancient Greek: δημαγωγία, from δῆμος dēmos “people” and ἄγειν agein “to lead”) is a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations of the public~Wikipedia.
IMO the framers feared many of todays politicians that parasite peoples emotions and it seems to me those same demagogues exist, sadly, in the electoral college today.
Such a simplification of the system would radicalize our politics, undermine the rule of law, lengthen the political process, render small states irrelevant, and enthrone urban areas as undisputed kingmakers.
Radicalize our politics? It’s hard to see how our politics could be more radicalized than it is now. That’s more the fault of the primary process (which emphasizes the effect of hardcore base voters) than the method by which general Presidential elections are carried out.
Undermine the rule of law? How so? The Constitution affords each and every state discretion in how it awards its electors. As long as the proper, legal procedure is followed in each state legislature, I fail to see how this proposal undermines the rule of law.
Lengthen the political process? Again, this is not the fault of the method by which the election is carried out but its timing. The reasons we have Presidential campaigns getting underway two (or more) years in advance are twofold.
First, the date of the Presidential election is set in Constitutional stone. Anyone can easily predict when each Presidential election will be years, decades, even centuries in advance. This affords a natural advantage to candidates who plan and organize early. Countries that don’t have our long election cycles are generally the ones that have a way of making election dates more (for lack of a better word) “random,” like Canada or the UK.
Second, the long campaign is again a result of our system of primaries, another feature of the federalism Gregg praises. Viable candidates must have their candidacies filed well in advance of the first caucuses (as Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have discovered) which themselves start taking place almost a year in advance of the general election. That means funding and organizing needs to be taking place months in advance of that.
It’s difficult to see how changing the nature of the federal election changes that.
Render small states irrelevant? I’d argue that small states already have disproportionate influence over the federal government, particularly the legislative branch. The Senate in particular wildly favors small, rural states at the expense of more urban areas. Indeed, our 24th largest city, Washington, has no representation in that body at all.
Enthrone urban areas as undisputed kingmakers? Again, I point to the primary process as the counter to this objection. Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire are unquestionably rural. Florida and Nevada are dominated by urban populations, but only one metropolitan area in the top 25 (Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach) actually votes in an early primary. With this kind of influence over the selection of candidates, it’s hard to see how urban populations would become “undisputed kingmakers.” Indeed, one can make the argument that these largely rural states again already have outsize influence.
Matt
Notice all the adopters so far are Democratic states. Are we really to believe that they are going to put their votes to a Republican if he wins the popular vote, in defiance of the voters of that state?
In the states that have passed this, it’s a matter of state law. It can’t be rescinded (at least not quickly) if the national popular vote works out in such a way that the state legislature doesn’t like.
I agree, however, that this proposal is more likely to favor Democrats, who tend to be more prevalent in urban areas. On the other hand, we only have one election in recent history (in 2000) where this would have made a difference. And while it would have changed the outcome completely, at the very least we wouldn’t have had to go through the spectacle of the courts trying to sort out who the President was.
One could argue that that fiasco did far, far more to undercut the integrity of our political institutions and perhaps even the rule of law than this proposal ever would.