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

by Jesse Wegman

While this is clearly true, it’s also true that the country cannot tolerate the College’s effects under the winner-take-all rule much longer. Pundits tend to dismiss the elections of 2000 and 2016 as anomalies, but what’s remarkable is not that a split between the Electoral College and the popular vote has happened twice in the past two decades, it’s that it hasn’t happened far more often. In sixteen other elections, a shift of 75,000 votes or fewer in key states—just slightly less than Trump’s total victory margin in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—would have made the popular vote loser president. Six times, a shift of fewer than 10,000 votes would have done the trick.

December 24, 2020. Page 28.