The New York Times Editorial Board on Monday called for an end to the Electoral College. The New York Times joins a growing coalition that is calling to get rid of the Electoral College since Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
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NY Times calls for end to Electoral College
From the New York Times piece:
“…for the second time in 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote has won the presidency. Unlike 2000, it wasn’t even close. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of the electorate. That’s a wider margin than 10 winning candidates enjoyed and the biggest deficit for an incoming president since the 19th century.
Yes, Mr. Trump won under the rules, but the rules should change so that a presidential election reflects the will of Americans and promotes a more participatory democracy.”
The New York Times criticism doesn’t end at just the imbalance between the popular vote and electoral college, it goes on to reference the awful connection the Electoral College has to America’s slave days when a popular vote would have disadvantaged the southern states.
The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.
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To give you a sense of how much the Electoral College distorts the overall national vote to benefit of smaller, less populated states look to the example of Wyoming. In Wyoming a person’s vote counts 3.6 times as much as a voter in California. Which begs the obvious question – why should people of Wyoming or another smaller state have a bigger say in who our president is than the people of other states?
The truth is that the Electoral College does a terrible job of representing the will of the American people. As the New York Times says, “Almost 138 million Americans went to the polls this year, but Mr. Trump secured his Electoral College victory thanks to fewer than 80,000 votes across three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
The New York Times also just reminded us that Donald Trump himself called for an end to the Electoral College in 2012. That was of course before he won the Electoral College and now he considers it brilliant.
