A Peculiar Way to Pick a President

[0] From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro.

[1] This is a daily today.

[2] In two of the past five presidential elections, the Electoral College has awarded the White House to the loser of the popular vote, raising questions about the legitimacy of how America picks its leader.

[3] Editorial board member Jesse Wegman on the origins of that system and just how close America came to dismantling it.

[4] It's Thursday, October 22nd.

[5] Jesse, I think by now everyone understands that President Trump won the White House four years ago by losing the popular vote and winning the electoral college vote.

[6] But can you remind us of the specific math involved in that split?

[7] Sure.

[8] I mean, what's amazing about it is he didn't just lose the popular vote.

[9] he lost it by a huge number.

[10] Nearly three million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump in 2016.

[11] And yet, because of 77 ,000 votes in just three states in the Upper Midwest, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Donald Trump wins the entire presidency.

[12] The math there is very hard to wrap your head around.

[13] 77 ,000 somehow outweighing three million.

[14] It's smaller than the size of a college football stadium.

[15] and it decided the election for the entire country.

[16] Which is a legitimately strange way to conduct a nationwide presidential election.

[17] And I think the question everyone has and what we want to talk to you about is how we developed such a peculiar system in the United States for picking a president, one that allows for the popular vote, the majority's will, to be ignored or outvoted by a minority of voters.

[18] And it turns out you are an expert in this area.

[19] pretty much the expert in this area.

[20] So tell us that story.

[21] Right.

[22] So in 1787, the framers who come to Philadelphia to design our new constitution had no idea how to pick the leader of a self -governing republic.

[23] No one had done it before, certainly not on this scale.

[24] And they argued about it almost from the first day to the last day of the constitutional convention, four months over the summer of 1787, their concern was that most people wouldn't know national political candidates.

[25] They knew the people in their local communities because that's where they lived.

[26] That's where they spent all their time.

[27] They didn't travel.

[28] They didn't have national media.

[29] So they wouldn't know political candidates on the national level.

[30] So that leads to this intermediary body of what they called electors.

[31] Jesse, who are these electors?

[32] And what is their precise role in picking the president?

[33] Well, the idea that the framers had was that they would be this body of elite, well -educated men, you know, people who had been mayors or judges or war generals, and that they would come together and they would deliberate and decide for themselves who was the fittest person to be the president of the United States.

[34] And so to some degree, it might just be based on their preferences.

[35] Right.

[36] Well, you know, it's interesting.

[37] Constitution is actually silent on this matter.

[38] What the Constitution does provide for is how many electors each state gets.

[39] And it's a simple mathematical calculus.

[40] A state gets the number of electors as it has members of Congress and its two senators.

[41] So you just add those two numbers together and that's the number of state gets.

[42] Beyond that, the Constitution left everything up to the states.

[43] The state legislatures could decide for themselves how to choose these electors, how to award them to the candidates.

[44] It was all up to them.

[45] They didn't have to give the voters of their state any say at all in choosing the president.

[46] So in the end, voters themselves have no constitutional right to play any role at all in the selection of the president.

[47] Right.

[48] So from the start, this is envisioned as a pretty elite and removed group of people who have been entrusted by the framers to make this decision on behalf of voters who are basically cut out of this process.

[49] That's the electoral college at its birth.

[50] Exactly.

[51] You know, the founders themselves were elite white men.

[52] And so it was natural for them to think that they were the best to decide.

[53] Many of them were slaveholders.

[54] And I think that, you know, reminds us of one of the most egregious examples of how the electoral college was not representative of the people.

[55] Remember, you know, one of the key compromises that the Constitution was the three -fifths clause.

[56] And that was the clause that allowed the slave -holding states to count their slaves as three -fifths of a white person for the purposes of representation in Congress.

[57] That transfers over into the Electoral College.

[58] And that extra power is hugely important.

[59] It gives the slave -holding states an extra 12 or more electors in the Electoral College.

[60] And again, seems to highlight just how disconnected the Electoral College is from any modern understanding of democracy.

[61] and letting the people pick the president.

[62] Exactly.

[63] So, Jesse, how do we get from this version of the Electoral College so divorced from voters to something closer to what we have today in which voters do play a meaningful role in how the electoral college works?

[64] Well, in the early years, states were experimenting with all sorts of different methods of using the Electoral College, but within a few decades, they had very quickly shifted to letting the people of their state, the eligible voters.

[65] voters anyway, vote for the electors, and then awarding those electors in a manner called winner -take -all.

[66] And it was in place largely by the early 1820s.

[67] So explain winner -take -all as a concept.

[68] Sure.

[69] I mean, it means exactly what it sounds like, which is that a state gives all of its electors, 100 % of them, to whichever candidate gets the most votes in that state.

[70] And what that means is every voter in that state who voted for somebody other than that candidate is essentially erased when the electors cast their ballots.

[71] So this is more or less the system we still have to this day.

[72] Yes, that's right.

[73] So this winner take -all system, this is not something envisioned by the framers.

[74] It seems like it kind of came to us in a pretty haphazard way.

[75] Right.

[76] You know, people like to imagine that the system that we used today was handed down to us from the framers.

[77] And in fact, the framers didn't talk at all about the winner -take -all rule.

[78] It didn't come up at the convention.

[79] And when they saw it start to be adopted in the States in the early 1800s, they were horrified.

[80] James Madison, the man we think of as the father of the Constitution, tried to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of winner -take -all rule because he saw how corrosive it was to erase up to half the voters in a state.

[81] It sounds like he didn't succeed.

[82] He didn't.

[83] So Americans more or less make peace with this winner -take -all system, even though it is routinely discounting tons of votes for the losing presidential candidate.

[84] That's right.

[85] And what's also happening in this same time is that an American democracy that in the earliest years only represented a tiny percentage of people is expanding consistently.

[86] So even as you have that electoral college with the winner -take -all rule, you are all expanding American democracy at the same time.

[87] You have a civil war to end slavery and to make citizens and voters of black Americans.

[88] You have the women's suffrage movement, which results in giving the vote to half the adult population who didn't have it before.

[89] All of these things are making American democracy a truer and fuller expression of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

[90] And meanwhile, in the background, you have this electoral college system with the winner -take -all rule that is consistently eliminating millions of Americans' votes.

[91] Right, but it sounds like that inconsistency is not so present in the civic discourse.

[92] That's right.

[93] Nobody really talks about it or even understands it until the 1960s, when the civil rights movement bursts into full bloom and suddenly Americans are thinking about their democracy in an entirely new way.

[94] Few political leaders at the age of 42 have packed in so much action as has our speaker today.

[95] And then into the middle of all of this upheaval, Farmer, soldier, lawyer, legislator, comes a first -term senator from Indiana named Birch Bai.

[96] It's a privilege for me to have the opportunity to share some thoughts with you as individuals and to...

[97] Starting in 1966, Senator Bai begins an effort to abolish the electoral college by constitutional amendment.

[98] I think it's being kind to say we are hypocritical.

[99] as a nation, to proudly beat our chest and proclaim ourselves to be the world's greatest democracy and yet to tolerate, and that's what we do, tolerate a presidential election system in which the people of the country don't vote for president, never have, and never will under the present system.

[100] He sees it as the last step in that arc of democratization.

[101] There is a great danger with the president electoral college system of electing a minority or a non -plurality president.

[102] of electing a president who has fewer votes than the fellow he's running against.

[103] So he begins holding hearings, he begins talking to experts.

[104] Senator, I understand your subcommittee on constitutional amendments has recently concluded hearings on electoral college reform.

[105] By 1968, 80 % of Americans are on board.

[106] They want a national popular vote for president.

[107] I think it's fair to say that we have a better chance today to get this revision in our electoral process than we've ever had before.

[108] This includes Republicans, it includes Democrats, everybody is on board.

[109] And there's only one proposal.

[110] That's the one that I've made that's been endorsed by the Bar Association, the Chamber of Commerce, all the labor organizations.

[111] Let the people directly vote for their president the same way they vote for all other officials.

[112] Bay did something that no one in American history had done to that point, which was he tied the Electoral College's inequalities to the expanding equality of the representative democracy.

[113] And that was the moment at which, everyone saw it most clearly and thought, we need a new system.

[114] So finally, we have the election of 1968, and that was the last straw for the electoral college for most Americans.

[115] Because what happened in that election is that the race between the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, and the Republican Richard Nixon was nearly thrown into chaos by a third -party candidate named George Wallace.

[116] I draw the line in the dust and toss the garment before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

[117] He was the governor of Alabama and a staunch segregationist.

[118] Today on Face the Nation, George Wallace, former governor of Alabama.

[119] And in the late 1960s, he doesn't really have a political party anymore.

[120] He runs as a third party insurgent.

[121] Despite your own optimism about your chances, every poll, every indicator of a national opinion shows that you yourself have no hope to win to the presidency.

[122] Your critics contend, therefore, that you're deliberately adopting the role of spoiler, that is, trying to throw the election into the House of Representatives.

[123] His goal wasn't to win the presidency himself.

[124] He knew he couldn't do that.

[125] Well, let me say this, that yes, I'm in the race to spoil, but not to spoil in the sense that you were talking about.

[126] is to spoil the chances of both national parties electing the president.

[127] Well, let's try this.

[128] And that's, of course, what we are doing.

[129] What he wanted to do was to stop Nixon and Humphrey from winning an electoral college majority and thus force them to cut deals with him in exchange for his support.

[130] So we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

[131] Okay, governor, let's ask another hypothesis.

[132] It was actually a brilliant plan to weaponize the mechanism and the design of the electoral college to enhance the power of.

[133] of segregationists in the South over everybody else in the country.

[134] So Wallace's candidacy was designed to deliberately exploit the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, the quirks of the electoral college system.

[135] It feels like dating back all the way to the three -fifths compromise and the way that it gives the South a lot of sway.

[136] Exactly.

[137] So Wallace's candidacy fails in the end, but he got close enough.

[138] We came that close to viewing the spectacle, a tragic spectacle.

[139] That millions and millions of Americans were completely horrified at their system that they had for electing the president.

[140] One man with 46 electoral votes, free independent electors, able to go from first Nixon to Humphrey and back and forth, carrying the message, all right, gentlemen, what am I bid to make you president of the United States?

[141] Then you get to late 1968, early 1969, even Richard Nixon, who's now the president who won under the electoral college, is on board.

[142] with eliminating it and replacing it with a popular vote.

[143] There is an unprecedented push to abolish the Electoral College through an amendment to the Constitution.

[144] Senator Bai leads this push, but remember, to get a constitutional amendment passed, you need to get it through both houses of Congress with two -thirds support, and then you need three quarters of the states, 38 states, to ratify it.

[145] So that's a pretty heavy lift.

[146] But in late 1969, the House of Representatives, for the first time in American history passes an amendment overwhelmingly to abolish the Electoral College, replace it with a popular vote.

[147] It looks like there's support in close to enough states to ratify this.

[148] The only hurdle remaining is the Senate.

[149] And so what happens in the Senate?

[150] The amendment gets filibustered to death.

[151] Three southern segregationist senators lead the charge to essentially block any debate on the Electoral College and they end up killing it a year later in September of 1970.

[152] And why would these segregation of senators care so much about blocking this amendment?

[153] Well, remember, the country in the 1960s is going through these massive political and racial upheavals where, you know, Jim Crow is finally being killed off through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

[154] These guys who are the descendants of slaveholders themselves had gotten used to their black voters not existing.

[155] Because of winner take all, you know, there was a majority of white people in the state.

[156] They knew that they would always control their state's voice in the vote for president.

[157] And if you had a popular vote for president, they knew that those black people in their state would have just as much voice in choosing the president as they did.

[158] Hmm.

[159] So three senators from states that have long benefited heavily from the outsized power of their presence in the electoral college and who supported, it sounds like, segregation.

[160] they block the will of the majority of Americans to create a voting system in which the will of a majority of Americans would become the method for picking a president.

[161] That's right.

[162] And the best effort we've ever had in American history to abolish the electoral college, to elect the president by a popular vote, and vindicate the principles of the Declaration of Independence dies on the floor of the Senate in a filibuster in September of 1970.

[163] We've never gotten that.

[164] close again.

[165] We'll be right back.

[166] So Jesse, if there was such broad and bipartisan consensus about the need to scrap the electoral college in the 1970s, why is nothing ever done over the next five decades?

[167] Presumably, these segregationist senators leave the Senate.

[168] So how is it that that consensus you just described unravels so quickly?

[169] One answer is that the public energy for a massive large -scale electoral reform doesn't linger for long, right?

[170] There are bursts of it and then it dies out quickly.

[171] So you really have to take advantage of this as Birchby, I think, understood and tried to do.

[172] But when that effort failed, it was very hard to rekindle the spirit.

[173] The other factor here is that the electoral college lined up with the popular vote in all of the years from 1970 onward.

[174] So Americans don't really see the distortions caused by the winner -take -all rule.

[175] It looks like a system that's basically working.

[176] Then we get to 2000.

[177] From Channel 10, this is eyewitness news.

[178] Tonight, George W. Bush is preparing his move to the White House, while Al Gore says not so fast.

[179] So in 2000, remember that we knew on election night, Al Gore had won the popular vote in the country by what ended up being about half a million votes.

[180] Right.

[181] There is the possibility, of course, that we'll have that split between the popular vote and the election.

[182] But because of that winner -take -all rule in the Electoral College, Florida, which was an extremely close state, that George Walker Bush has won Florida's...