Why U.S. Keeps Debating How It Elects Its President

Apr 07 2019, 4:00 AMApr 07 2019, 6:30 AMApril 07 2019, 4:00 AMApril 07 2019, 6:30 AM

(Bloomberg) -- Americans have the longest, most expensive and arguably most complex system of electing a head of state in the world. After all the debates, caucuses, primaries and conventions, the person who gets the most votes can still lose -- as happened most recently in 2016, when Republican Donald Trump won the White House. It’s a system that baffles non-Americans and some Americans as well, and it’s again spurring talk of change. Several Democratic presidential contenders including Senator Elizabeth Warren have called for letting voters pick their leader directly.

1. Don’t voters already do that?

Not exactly. Officially, the president is selected via a quirky mechanism called the Electoral College, created by the nation’s founders. When people vote for a presidential candidate, they are technically voting for a slate of "electors" who have pledged to support that candidate.

2. How does the Electoral College work?

Every state chooses as many electors as it has members of Congress -- a range of three to 55, depending on population. A few weeks after a presidential election, electors meet in their state capitals to cast their votes. This generally means rubber-stamping the result of the popular vote in their state. (Only on rare occasions does an elector break with his or her party.) Since the total number of electors is 538, the candidate who secures a simple majority, or 270 electors, wins the presidency. (If more than two candidates win electors, and nobody reaches 270, a different process kicks in. That hasn’t happened in a long time.)

3. Why does the U.S. operate this way?

The framers of the Constitution struggled over how to elect presidents. Some delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted Congress in charge of that. Others said state legislators or governors should pick. When James Wilson of Pennsylvania called for the president to be directly elected by the people, other delegates saw the proposal “as unrealistic and not worthy of consideration,” according to the National Constitution Center. Wilson went on to propose the Electoral College as a compromise. Endorsing this system in a 1788 letter, Alexander Hamilton said it guarantees that American presidents would be “characters preeminent for ability and virtue” and not merely adept at “the little arts of popularity.”

4. Who benefits from this process?

By design, the electoral system amplifies the importance of small states by guaranteeing all states -- even sparsely populated Wyoming, plus the District of Columbia -- no less than three electors each. In the early 19th century, one state after another adopted a winner-take-all approach, awarding all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the most votes there, in bids to maximize their influence. (Today, only Maine and Nebraska aren’t winner-take-all.) The upshot is that, in any given general presidential election, only about a dozen of the 50 states really matter -- the "swing" or "battleground" states that receive disproportionate attention from candidates. By contrast, some very populous states, like reliably Democratic California or Republican Texas, are all but ignored.

5. How can the leading vote-getter lose the election?

Consider what happened in 2016. Trump assembled his winning majority of 304 electoral votes in part by edging out Democrat Hillary Clinton in Florida, a traditional battleground, and in the historically Democratic-leaning states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Thanks to the winner-take-all system, Trump collected all 75 electoral votes in those four states. In all, Trump won 30 states to Clinton’s 20. But Clinton collected the most votes, scoring huge margins of victory in populous Democratic states California, New York and Illinois, where Trump had waged little resistance.

6. How often has the popular vote winner not been elected?

Before 2016, that had happened four times -- in 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000, when Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore after a weeks-long recount. After the 2000 result, as now, there was a surge of interest (generally among Democrats, who had lost) in changing the system so the popular vote is decisive. But many states, especially small ones, are unwilling to switch, citing the loss of sway.

7. How close has the U.S. come to changing the system?

In 1969, the House of Representatives adopted a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College in favor of a direct popular election. But the initiative died in the Senate. That vote came the year after a presidential election in which the third-party candidacy of segregationist George Wallace threatened to keep Republican Richard Nixon, the eventual winner, and Democrat Hubert Humphrey below the 270 needed to win. The Senate considered the amendment again in 1979, three years after Democrat Jimmy Carter’s narrow defeat of Republican Gerald Ford. The 51-48 vote was far short of the two-thirds majority needed to approve a constitutional amendment.

8. Who’s trying to change it now?

Warren is among several Democratic senators who have proposed amending the Constitution to do away with the Electoral College. A nonprofit group founded by Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig has filed lawsuits in several states seeking to divide electoral votes according the share of the popular vote, instead of as winner-take-all. Fourteen Democratic-leaning states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to pool their 189 electoral votes for the national popular-vote winner (even if the candidate didn’t win in those states). The compact would take effect once states with a cumulative 270 electoral votes have joined it. Opponents say it’s an unconstitutional end-run around the Electoral College.

9. What does Trump say?

He once called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy.” Now he says it’s “far better for the U.S.A.” because it makes candidates “go to many states to win” and prevents big cities from “running the country.”