Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

by Jesse Wegman

This erasing of black voters’ voices in the South continued in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when white southerners began to abandon the Democratic Party. Black southerners turned away from Republicans and toward the Democrats—but thanks to state winner-take-all rules, they still had essentially no political representation. In the 1968 election, nearly 600,000 black voters in the South picked the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey—but in the Electoral College, all of those votes were converted into votes for the Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace. In the words of a 1979 Senate report, “it was as if they had never voted.”28

December 26, 2020. Page 119.