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

by Jesse Wegman

“One person, one vote”—four words that sound like common sense today. But when the Supreme Court first put them to paper, on March 18, 1963, in a decision on an election law case out of Georgia, they triggered a political earthquake. In a series of rulings over the next two years, the Court’s expansion of this principle forced lawmakers across the country to redraw legislative district lines, redistributing political power to reflect where people actually lived. It thrust the nation into what two political scientists called “the greatest peace-time change in representation in the history of the United States, perhaps in the history of democracy.”4 And while it wasn’t obvious at first, those four words would change forever the way we talk about electing our president. Why were these rulings necessary in the first place? By the early 1960s the nation was at the tail end of a massive population shift in which millions of Americans, many of them black, migrated from farms and rural areas to rapidly growing cities. But this shift was not being reflected in Congress or state governments, because the people who decided where the district lines were drawn—most often rural lawmakers—refused to cede their power by redrawing the districts. The result was entrenched minority rule: small numbers of rural voters had the same representation as much larger numbers of urban voters, and often more.

December 26, 2020. Page 130.