The 1800 presidential election was a showdown for the ages—the Ali vs. Frazier, Magic vs. Bird, Evert vs. Navratilova of its time. It was John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, mano a mano, Founding Father on Founding Father. Even better: It was a rematch, a vanilla “Thrilla in Manila,” which meant everyone knew it would be close.
If an election with candidates this high profile were held today, voters would turn out in record numbers. But back then, no citizens had the power to decide presidential elections, except for the 138 (white, male) Americans chosen as delegates to the Electoral College. (That’s it—138! There are dog catcher races with more voters than that!)
Now, it’s worth clarifying that tens of thousands of Americans cast ballots anyway—but because of how our constitution was written, their votes didn’t dictate whom the Electoral College ultimately supported.
Our founders rejected the idea of a popular vote for several reasons. For one, as I mentioned in the first chapter, they despised direct democracy, believing it would lead to elections decided by “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs.” They were also afraid citizens wouldn’t be able to learn enough about candidates to make an educated decision, since accurate information was much harder to come by back then than it is today—Fox News and Facebook notwithstanding. But the Electoral College was created for another reason, a reason we have chosen not to teach for centuries, but one that took preeminence over all others at the time:
Our founders wanted to protect the interests of slave states.
Well, not all our founders. James Wilson, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Pennsylvania, introduced the idea of holding a national election for the presidency, with the goal of ensuring the commander in chief’s power comes from “the people at large.” But another Founding Father, James Madison, immediately put Wilson in his place, explaining that his proposal would never fly with the slave states—because under such a system, they “could have no influence in the election.” After all, a massive number of their residents—a third of their population—were being held in the condition of slavery, and thus were considered property, not people, let alone citizens. This meant that if elections were decided by popular vote, slave states would be outnumbered by free states every time.
Instead of embracing this outcome—and punishing these states for stripping hundreds of thousands of human beings of their humanity—our founders decided to protect them. That’s how we ended up with the Great Compromise, and how, a few months later, as the Constitutional Convention was coming to a close, we ended up with the Electoral College, Madison’s answer to Wilson’s proposal.
Here’s how it worked: Every state would nominate exactly as many delegates as they had representatives in the House and the Senate to the Electoral College, a body that would then meet once every four years to elect the next president. This meant that all the concessions big states made to small states in order to get them on board with the composition of Congress would apply to the presidency as well—allowing slaveholders to count everyone they held in bondage as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation in the Electoral College.
This, once again, provided slave states with disproportionate control over how our elections were decided—and in turn, as Yale Law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.”
Thomas Jefferson was no exception: In 1800, after all the ballots were counted, the slave owner had defeated John Adams, the abolitionist, by a vote of 73–65, a victory he could credit to delegates the slave states had earned through the three-fifths compromise.
And we should take a moment to process the significance of the fact that our framers ratified a constitution on such inane, fallacious grounds: At our founding, the U.S. Constitution permitted slave owners to oppress, maim, and murder human beings, separate them from their families and mutilate them for disobedience, and then vote on their behalf on Election Day, in support of candidates like Jefferson, who not only wanted to keep them in servitude but was a slave owner himself. It’s a system as asinine as it was evil, as illogical as it was immoral.
And the election of 1800 was not the last time the Electoral College would serve the interests of states that supported slavery. Remember the election of 1876, which led Rutherford B. Hayes to pull America’s soldiers out of the South—marking the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow? Well, President Hayes only made that concession because the results of the popular vote in key swing states were unclear, and he needed to make a deal with the former Confederate states in exchange for the support of their electors. They demanded he leave the South alone. And he acquiesced.
This led to almost a century of laws that stripped Black Americans of their rights and lynchings that stripped them of their lives. And yet while we have reformed the Electoral College in the years since—so delegates are now supposed to support whichever candidate wins more votes in their state (or, in the case of Maine and Nebraska, district), instead of having full discretion to back whomever they want—we have failed to get rid of it.
Indeed, but for the Electoral College, two of our last four presidents, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, would have lost the elections that made them commander in chief, both having received fewer votes than their opponents. That’s in no small part because even today, a century and a half after the abolition of slavery and half a century after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, white voters, particularly conservative white voters, remain overrepresented in Congress—and, therefore, the Electoral College—and so, candidates who pander to them are at an advantage.
But let’s be real: The Electoral College would be an idiotic, injudicious, risible institution even if it weren’t racist.
We elect senators by popular vote. We elect representatives by popular vote. We elect governors by popular vote. Hell, we even elect class presidents by popular vote. Because that’s how democracy works: You tally up the ballots—and whichever candidate’s box is checked on more of them is the victor.
The idea that you could win the support of fewer Americans than your opponent and still end up president of the United States is patently preposterous. And we shouldn’t treat this system like it has legitimacy just because it’s been around for a long time.
The American people understand this, which is why 61 percent of them support abolishing the Electoral College.
So what are we waiting for?
Well, as I’m sure you can guess by now, the problem is that one of the two major parties in American politics is just fine with things staying the way they are—and its representatives have enough power in state legislatures (that they gerrymandered!) to block amendments to the U.S. Constitution from going into effect.
(An amendment to abolish the Electoral College came close to passing in the late 1960s, but ultimately fell short due to—you guessed it—a filibuster.)
There’s another solution, though. It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). And you wouldn’t need to amend the Constitution to implement it. In fact, states across the country have already begun signing up to do exactly that.
Under the NPVIC, instead of Electoral College delegates supporting whichever candidate receives the most votes in their state (the current system), delegates would be compelled to support whichever candidate receives the most votes across the country. This way, the Electoral College could never again overrule the will of the people, because its outcome would be a direct reflection of the national popular vote.
And you wouldn’t need every state to sign on—all you would need is some combination of states with a combined total of 270 electoral delegates to agree to the NPVIC in order for it to render the Electoral College obsolete. Already, fifteen states and the District of Columbia have signed up to be a part of the compact. Together, they hold 195 electoral votes—so we are more than 70 percent of the way there. And figuring out how to get that final 30 percent on board should be a priority for people who believe in democracy everywhere.
Because while this compact may sound technical, it has the power to be transformational. Just imagine how much different our country would look today if we’d had this system in place before the election in 2000—and Al Gore, not George W. Bush, had become president. There is no such thing as certainty when it comes to counterfactuals—but can you imagine how much better our past couple of decades would have been and how much brighter our future would look if we had elected a candidate who ran on reducing emissions before Greta Thunberg was even born? How many disasters, how many fires, how many floods could we have prevented? How many lives could we have saved? And I haven’t even touched on foreign policy, which wasn’t exactly George W. Bush’s strong suit. (Can you spell Iraq War?)
It’s dizzying to think about. And there’s not much use in doing so. Because all counterfactuals are, ultimately, fiction. But while we can’t change our history, we can learn from it. And that’s why all of us, as citizens, need to make our own compact to support the NPVIC.
This will not only make our politicians better representatives of the people. It will also make our elections themselves better.
Under the current system, presidential candidates are incentivized to spend all their time in a few swing states—since their residents are the voters who decide the Electoral College. But with the NPVIC in place, they would have to campaign everywhere, for every vote, no matter how red or blue a state might be. Suddenly, Republicans would be compelled to spend their time in New York City and San Francisco. And Democrats would barnstorm towns across the south, listening to and learning from voters they have long written off.
In this way, the NPVIC would usher in a fundamental transformation in how candidates campaign; and even more important, it would change how presidents govern. They would no longer feel tempted to provide more favorable treatment to some states over others—after all, voters from all states would have the chance to hold them accountable.
And there’s one more benefit of the NPVIC, one that has more relevance with every passing day: It would make it much harder for a losing presidential candidate to try to steal an election.
Every step of President Donald Trump’s coup attempt—from his intimidation of state legislatures to the pressure campaign he launched on Mike Pence to his incitement of an insurrection at the Capitol—was predicated on the idea that he could change the result of the election by flipping the outcome in a few swing states. And he was right: It would have been much easier for him to “find” 44,000 votes across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, the states that decided the election, than it would have been to close the seven-million-vote gap he faced in the nationwide tally.
In other words: Only because of the Electoral College—because we don’t simply count up all the votes across the country and declare a winner—did President Trump’s putsch even stand a chance. And as I explained in chapter 6, in states around the country, Republicans have spent the years since the 2020 election trying to establish new ways to subvert our democracy by seizing control of election certification and consequently putting themselves in charge of who gets sent to the Electoral College.
This is a crisis, and—first things first—we need to be fighting, state by state, to make sure election administration remains in the hands of independent actors rather than partisan state legislatures. That way, Republicans can’t direct a slate of electors to substitute its judgment for the will of the people.
But the truth is, as long as presidential elections are decided by individual states through the Electoral College, they will never be truly coup-proof. Which is why we need to eliminate it entirely, or remove its power with the NPVIC.
Ordinarily, this is the point in a chapter when I would present counterarguments, but on this issue, there really aren’t any—at least not any valid ones.
The Electoral College has got to go.
Not just because of its bigoted past.
But because getting rid of it will help put us on a path to a truly democratic and representative future.