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

by Jesse Wegman

At 4:43 a.m. on November 9, 2016, Micheal Baca, a 24-year-old Democratic presidential elector from Colorado, sent an urgent text message to a friend. “I have a plan,” Baca wrote. In retrospect, it was completely insane, but these were insane times. A few hours earlier, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, had stunned the world by pulling out what may be the most improbable election victory in American history. Trump was losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, by more than two million votes, a margin that continued to grow as late returns rolled in. But he’d won where it counted, in the Electoral College. Or he had appeared to. Baca, a former marine who was earning a living in Denver that fall as a driver for Uber and Lyft, had no political experience. He knew one thing, though: You might think you’re voting for the president when you cast a ballot, but you’re not. You’re voting for Micheal Baca, or his Republican counterpart. Technically, the presidency wouldn’t be decided until the 538 electors voted, as they were scheduled to do on December 19 in state capitals around the country. The scheme came together quickly in Baca’s mind, and he started testing it out. In a text to a fellow Democratic elector in Washington, Bret Chiafalo, he wrote, “We can avoid Trump. But will need 37 Republicans to defect. Call me crazy but this needs to work.” “It’s a Hail Mary dude,” Chiafalo wrote back. “But it’s all we got.” In regular years, the el...

December 24, 2020. Page 4.