Analysis: Is it time to get rid of the Electoral College?

Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin is the latest to scrutinize the Electoral College system, calling it “vulnerable.” In today’s episode of “The Point,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza walks through past presidential elections where the results of the electoral vote conflicted with the popular vote.
#CNN #Cillizza #electoralcollege

62 comments

    1. @Premier CC Guy MMXVI 🇺🇦 and the US part will be no more. No where does it say the Empire of America will last forever.

    2. Seems that each state should just forward the vote counts for the 2 candidates to D.C. Whoever gets the most votes wins the Presidential race. The smaller states still get their 2 Senators to represent them, as well as their Representatives. The way it is now if I am 1 of 10 people in a state, it would have 3 votes toward electing the president. Seems that would be incentive to try and buy our votes. Hmmm.

    1. @Rich ita supposed to follow the popular vote. One American, one vote. If you don’t get that basic concept, you’re not American.

    2. @i softcxttoncandy it’s supposed to be? who made you the almighty decision maker 🤣🤣🤣🤣 here’s a reality check… THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE EXISTS. NOW GET OVER IT AND STOP 😭😭😭

    1. @Dee Ess it’s not rigged and i guess you’re not bright enough to understand that the majority of people can be fooled easily, thus creating an imbalance and unfavorable power shift towards a system that wouldn’t ever favor the opposing party. can you even try to make sense of that?

    2. @Outto lunch i agree with you. simple logic or something a bit more complex yet ingenious is completely incomprehensible unfortunately for many nowadays.

    1. Yes, also see the states that grow your food separate from the US and make their own country. Just with Cali and NY democrats would always win. That is not fair since big cities tend to go blue. The moment the electoral college is gone, the moment there will be either a civil war to reinstate it, or a civil war to separate red states from blue states. Blue states have tech and services companies, red states have food, produce, and mines. We need each other, better to not play with things that work.

    2. @Rafael Arturo Mateo Núñez Food is grown in blue states. New Jersey’s motto is “The Garden State”. Why is it called that? Food is grown in purple state like PA.

    3. @Yvonne Plant they barely make food lmfao. Every state grows something but yea the majority of the nations food comes from red states.

  1. Get rid of the electoral college and lobbying. If special interests want to present something to congress they can present it in a special session or committee. It is undemocratic to have lobbyists all over Washington operating behind closed doors.

    1. It would have a huge impact if:
      1) All PAID LOBBYISTs are banned. In other words, you can be the CEO, or the head of a business department, but your fulltime job should be something OTHER THAN LOBBYING.
      2) Implement campaign financing for all Federally elected position. No more donations, No more PACS. Each verified candidate gets the same amount of money, and federally mandated “air times” on the national networks. That’s it. No more money.
      3) Outlaw with stiff sentences, served in Federal prison, with no time off for good behavior, for any Congressional Member caught doing insider trading, and every elected official must either transfer their investments to bonds, or have a double blind trust for their entire tenure.
      4) Term Limits: no more than 12 years, by 3 terms in the House or 2 terms in the Senate, or 1 term in each (10 years.). That’s it. Finally,
      5) Ranked choice voting. We could have more parties if we had ranked choice voting. Then, absolutely get rid of the Electoral College. The days of the people in low population states, vastly rural states not having a voice are over. We are in the technological age and with it, everyone can seek news, make their voices heard (phone and email to Representatives), and so on. It’s antiquated and ripe for overthrowing the will of the People.

  2. The only person that should be the commander and chief is the person the majority of people actually voted for. Not based on a system that was created based on slaves being 3/5 of a human.

    1. Dr. Philip J. VanFossen of Purdue University explains that the original purpose of the electors was not to reflect the will of the citizens, but rather to “serve as a check on a public who might be easily misled.” let that sink in y’all

    2. “Supporters of the College have provided many counterarguments to the charges that it defended slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the president who helped abolish slavery, won a College majority in 1860 despite winning 39.8% of citizen’s votes.[85] This, however, was a clear plurality of a popular vote divided among four main candidates. ” it seems like the electoral college worked out very well here wouldn’t you agree? imagine if the candidate with the popular vote won presidency… think we’d be living in a whole different world now.

    3. I couldn’t have said it better myself! Every other elected official has to win by popular vote. Why not the most important elected office in the country?

  3. Remember my parents explain Electoral College and how it would probably be changed ‘soon’. This was right after Ike beat Adlai. The first time.

  4. The electoral college outlived its usefulness in 1865. By the time Richmond fell, the Union armies had peppered the landscape with so many telegraph poles that indirection in elections was no longer necessary.

  5. The problem is the conditions that cause us to want to change the Electoral College also make it impossible to do it.

    1. @Robert Shonk I remember in a civics class the teacher saying that the Electoral College could put a president in office that wasn’t in line with the popular vote but other than in the 19th century it hadn’t happened so there was no need to change the system. OK now what? It seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

    1. never. it was always needed to prevent the balance of power shifting towards one side thus preventing a permanent imbalance. the founding fathers saw this and electoral college was thus implemented which was genius. that’s why we see some states changing from red to blue and vice versa. it’s not a perfect system but still great nevertheless.

    2. @Dave Waldon People who are educated enough to understand solar panels won’t “solar panels won’t suck up all the energy from the sun”. 🤢🤮

  6. The original concept of the Electoral College was to be a buffer between the often ignorant and easily swayed public, and unprincipled demagogues trying to manipulate them. The Electoral College was supposed to be chosen from among a state’s trusted and prominent citizens, then meet as a committee to select the best candidate available. The public’s vote wasn’t even for a particular candidate. Just for the committee members who would do the actual choosing. The Constitution is quite clear about this, as are the Federalist Papers. If followed correctly, such a system would certainly have prevented the election of Trump. The Electors would have taken one look at him and said, ” no way, this guy is totally insane”. They might even have rejected Ms. Clinton too.

    1. @Krusty Madrid if the EC had remained the kind of institution it was intended to be by the founders, it might have evolved a set of guidelines; nobody over 70, no low IQs, no shady businessmen turned tv show hosts etc. It was supposed to be a selection committee for the presidentcy – instead it became a rubber stamp for the parties.

    2. @Dothacker99 you are quite right and that’s because the political parties corrupted the EC early on. The Electors were intended to be chosen by popular vote and to vote independently; instead the parties worked state-by-state to co-opt the Electoral College to serve them rather than the public. The Federalist Papers provide a window into the original intent of the EC Clause.

  7. All this controversy about the Electoral College makes me sad. Can’t we just agree it’s a really good school? [Dad Joke! 💥BOOM💥]

  8. We need constitutional conventions the founders thought we would have them every few years or at least once a decade

  9. Ummm, yes? I’ve asked for this since 2004. Around when I first began paying attention to politics. It makes no sense having a minority have more power than a majority. 🤷🏻‍♂️

    1. @Dave Waldon – Yes, two of the largest economies in the entire world. The economic and cultural engines of the country. What would you prefer, Mississippi, perhaps?

    2. You have wallstreet in New York and the tech boom of California. I’ll give you that. With the largest wealth gap and homeless population. California businesses are leaving for Texas. All it has going for is climate. But the price of living is so high.

  10. Another reason for it, that you forgot to mention, was the consideration of rural vs urban areas. Knowing what happened in the Roman Republic, they wanted give rural people an equal voice, so as not to always lose everything to the urban majority. Rome is a prime example of a city decimating lives, resources, land, and more just to keep feeding…well, a City. Just a city.

    They knew that if the people that produced all the food and resources, that are usually majority land owners, would not keep feeding the trough without the ability for potential equality in political outcomes.

    In other words, if the city folk keep just majority voting away the rights and livelihoods of those darn country bumpkins, them good ol’ folks not gonna put up with it.
    Why would they? They owe nothing to those city folk, and a “supermajority” from cities should not hold all the political power…

    Another way to put it, the farmer should have more say over his land than the banker.

    1. @Jeremy Sanders 😂 I see my comment has been deleted for some reason, but it’s ok to stereotype a group of people that may not agree with YouTube’s or CNN’s agenda.

    2. @Jeremy Sanders Disproportionate because they don’t vote democratic. With your educational prowess, perhaps you should grow your own food.

    3. A most excellent explanation sir!!! I think your explanation shows why it will ALWAYS be electoral college of some sort. A larger amount of the population living in a smaller areas do not dictate the laws that the rest of the country must follow. This allows the independence and a freedom in our country to thrive. Liberals may not like it, but IT WORKS. They are not grateful for it, but they enjoy their freedoms directly because of it.

  11. The reason for the electoral college was because communications systems were too primitive to make “1 voter=1 vote” possible, along with the original racist 3/5 rule applied to slaves, which obviously is no longer. And so, with the internet and other more ‘timely’ ways to communicate, the “1 voter=1 vote” is much more practical to implement now than in the past. There is a reason that Trump railed so hard against mail-in ballots, and it wasn’t the accuracy of the count, which has been proven in states where mail-in ballots have been universalized, like Washington.

    1. The reason for the EC was actually to get the smaller colonies to ratify the Constitution. Virginia and a couple of northern states were at the time very dominant with relatively large populations and with just these few states concurring would pretty much decide who was to be President. By adding two Electors for each state’s Senators to the number of Electors based on the number of Representatives which varied by size of the state’s population, the purpose was to add slightly more weight to the smaller states’ results. This calmed the smaller colonies’ fear of just a couple of big states running the show. This is working exactly as envisioned; each Wyoming and Delaware voter’s elector, for instance, represent much fewer voters than those of Texas or California. What was not foreseen by the founders was the rise of the two party system, the massive shift from large rural populations to the cities, the vast rise of the voters’ commitment to individual candidates rather than the idea of having a committee of Electors choose a President whether or not he was a declared candidate, and the expansion of the pool of voters to include non-whites, women and people of very low income, all of whom have different views from prosperous white men. The 3/5 compromise had a different purpose; it was to persuade the states dependent on agriculture – primarily those in the south, which had high slave populations – to ratify by promising that their voters would also have outsize influence on the selection of President. There was already some sentiment on the more industrial states (who had wage earners doing the work rather than slaves) for abolishing slavery and the agricultural states put a high priority on preserving the institution of slavery. Virginia benefitted from this compromise greatly as is evidenced by the preponderance of Virginian Presidents among the first 10 elected.

  12. We need to:
    1) Get rid of the Electoral College.
    2) Allow Washington DC to have statehood with representation by 2 Senators.
    3) Allow all US territories to vote in Presidential elections. Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, US Samoa, Marshall Islands. All these places deserve to vote and to have Congressional representatives.

  13. I’d just say one thing in response to what Congressman Raskin said: it’s not a disaster waiting to happen, the disaster has *already* happened, twice over, in fact. In fairness, Bush v Gore was a ridiculously close election, which might allow one to forgive the EC’s shortcomings, but in 2016, the winner of the electoral college *lost* the popular vote by over 3 million ballots. That’s not just a disaster, it’s an unmitigated catastrophe that has already happened, and will happen again.

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