How to end the Electoral College

How to end the Electoral College
Help from above, motivation from the middle, movement from below
​by ​Zachary Thacher

It’s an exciting time in America for the 81.3 million people who voted for the Biden/Harris ticket, and I suspect some amount of Trump voters are also relieved, especially after the Capitol insurrection and mounting Covid death toll.

The recent election has been the worst presidential elections of our lives— racists and conspiracists, and whatever category Giuliani falls into, almost foundered our democracy. But remember, four years ago was God-awful too, when Hillary Clinton won and lost. No American alive that evening will look at needle dials the same way again.

I know that you know why this keeps happening. We saw it with George W. Bush in 2000. The Electoral College, to put it reductively which is perfect for my level of constitutional comprehension, was hastily devised to placate southern slave states. It has always been awful and has only grown more terrifying. In the past six presidential elections, it’s failed half the time. A democracy should bat 1000.

Jesse Wegman, a journalist at the New York Times, recently wrote a book about this: Let the People Pick the President. He delves into the constitutional history, the many, many times the government has tried to fix or abolish the college, and he suggests smart ways why counting every vote for President will make for more free and more fair campaigns.

For example, imagine, no more “battleground” states so candidates from every party have to run inclusive, compelling campaigns to bring wide swaths of Americans together. Imagine, liberals in Texas and conservatives in Los Angeles having each of their votes count in states that normally run against them. Not only would it feel good, but making every vote count will encourage more voting. It’s a great and convincing book.

Jesse is a lawyer and journalist — he can research, distill and compel with aplomb, so much so that even I can understand him. At the end of the day, it’s a very simple concept. We enjoy popular votes for state-wide offices like our governors and senators; let’s do the same for the president, across the whole country.

Let’s say you barely managed to keep your sanity during Trump’s corrupt and authoritarian, racist regime that ended with the actual American carnage of over 400,000 Covid deaths, many of them avoidable by not politicizing common sense masking up and social isolation.

Let’s say you remember George W. Bush’s corrupt and, at best, horrifically incompetent regime: with mass death in New Orleans after the Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attacks that he may have been able to prevent had he not been asleep at the switch, and two needless wars he definitely could have prevented — and which we have lost at the great cost to our soldiers.

Why two needless wars, not just one? Remember that in Afghanistan, we could have bombed the hell out Al Qaeda, flushed them out with special forces and assassinated their leadership in Pakistan, which Obama of course eventually did. No endless war needed. The Afghanistan War is heart​breaking, the Iraq War is just bonkers and incomprehensible. But hey, we all get to laugh at “neocons” for the rest of our lives.

For the record, training camp bombings and targeted killings was Biden’s strategy instead of surge in Afghanistan, which Obama proceeded with, to no avail.

Take Hurricane Katrina, terrorism, Afghanistan, the Iraq War — now add the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. That’s Bush’s legacy. That’s the Republican legacy. I haven’t even gotten to the recent Republican party’s literal, well-funded and sustained attempt to destroy our democracy with violence and perfidy.

Two incompetent and malign Republican administrations have been brought to you by the Electoral College, where losers win, and winners lose. It’s less of a remnant of slavery than a continuing legacy of brutality.

Let’s end it.

If we don’t, Biden/Harris may become a footnote in our trajectory to dictatorship, which we very nearly avoided in November. How nearly? By a scant 44,000 votes.

In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College by 77,000 votes. In 2020, Biden won the same amount of electoral votes by about half, with 44,000 votes in Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona. If that doesn’t make you deeply, profoundly anxious about a Democratic win in 2024, then imagine how the planners of the January 6th insurrection will manifest violence four years from now? Especially when they seek and receive institutional cover from the most senior leaders, corporate donors and media players in the Republican party?

The Electoral College is no longer a political threat to democracy, it’s now an existential threat. Literally. Your existence is in danger.

Maybe it won’t be so bad in 2024. Maybe Congress will regulate the social media hegemons into oblivion. Maybe large corporations will join IBM and stop making political donations — I don’t want my brands having anything to do with politics, I just want them to make great products and services. Maybe advertisers and monopolist cable companies will flee and unbundle cable news channels that pervert American minds with conspiracy and lies. Maybe then, with our current constitutional institutions unreformed, the minoritarian Republican bite will turn to a bark and eventually, a whimper.

Or… this is more likely: the Democrats win the popular vote again, a few thousand people vote the other way in a midwestern state because they believe in a conspiracy theory backed by corporate donations, and blood will flow in the streets again, but more so. Much more.

Here’s the good news. We can forestall all of this by abolishing the Electoral College. A lot has been written about how hard passing an amendment is, but not enough has been written about how to force the issue with a planned, authentic, sustained national campaign. Don’t look to textbooks, or to Congress, or to that multi-name non-profit I can never get right: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Um, not great branding people. Can we call it the NaPoViCo? Nope, that doesn’t work either.

What I’m saying is, we do need Congress to pass an amendment that consigns the Electoral College to our slave state past, we do need PopVoters (getting better?) to pressures states to award their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, but as we’ve been seeing, that’s not nearly enough.

To expand democracy, to enable every American of age to cast a vote for president that is counted equally — I know Republicans have a hard time with that last adverb, but bear with me — we need a political movement with help from above, motivation in the middle, and a movement from below.

Deus Ex Machina, AKA, Change from Above
Hillary Clinton is worth how much money? For the zero products, innovations, inventions or services she provides, she and her husband have done nicely for themselves. Same for her kid. They manipulated what’s supposed to be selfless public service into private gain, much like the Obamas are now doing, which is the Trumpiest move of all. Truthfully, this predates our last leader and shows him to be the symptom of corruption with the Left at the trough right next to the Right, but you get the point. HRC is loaded beyond reason and need. And smart. And the political victim of a slave-era institution that denies equal voting in a country founded on the idea of self governance, which requires equal voting. Shouldn’t she do something about it? It’s not like she has a day job.

Hillary Clinton should fund and lead a massive push to abolish the Electoral College. She’s got the money and authenticity, she has super wealthy friends also lacking day jobs, and she has corporate pals who work their hardest to advance income inequality. She could create an organization that hires a brilliant marketing agency, makes advertisements, builds websites, solicits celebrity endorsements and ultimately, pulls the levers of the popular media machinery to create a movement for change.

Hillary Clinton knows more than I ever will about politics and campaigns at the highest levels. And she can always ask her husband for advice.

Let’s call it the “Foundation to Expand Democracy,” fund it with hundreds of millions of tax-exempt dollars donated by wealthy people swanning over each other at hotel ballroom galas and yacht parties, or however it is rich people socialize, er, avoid taxes by pretending “philanthropy” is actually a contribution to society, and not a symptom of their fundamental misanthropy. These folks at top of the pile can bring in seasoned producers from Hollywood, leaders at the cable and broadcast news networks to create programming that shows just how dangerous the Electoral College is to democracy.

To put it another way: if, as a small family, you can wage three presidential campaigns which handily win the popular vote each time, you can make one hell of a push to change the Constitution.

I know I’m picking on Hillary Clinton. Seeing her on the dais the other day and knowing she had the presidency taken from her, and that she made the decision to amass an immoral amount of wealth via what’s supposed to be public service, it just made me want to go up to her and say: “please do something about this. You can make a difference.”

It’s not just her of course. The DNC, the Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation and all the other sources of mega wealth at the top of our economical pile need to commit to this effort. Add Harvard University, the rest of the Ivy League, Stanford, the University of Chicago and more of the top tier private country club schools to the list. (Full disclosure, I went to Stanford for grad school with a 75% scholarship.)

Why throw in the elite schools?

Because they won’t survive a turn to dictatorship. Top tier higher education is meaningless when White Evangelical QAnon militias call the shots. All of academic expertise and privilege go out the door. Witness Trump politicizing mask wearing and demeaning science, to say nothing else of everything else. If Kennedy School alums want to walk the corridors of power, they better talk the talk.

I bet most of these power players are already on the same WhatsApp group anyway. They definitely vacation near each other on Martha’s Vineyard, hang out at the Aspen Institute and congratulate themselves for going to Davos. They have more money and privilege and immunity than anyone. They can do this.

From the Middle
Take the oligarchical wealth and cultural manipulation from the top leaders and institutions of our country, then layer in the thousands and thousands of nonprofits and cultural organizations and mid tier groups and religious congregations that have been fighting the good fight for years, but all the different fights, so not much happens.

I’m no expert here, but I’m sure Lincoln Center and other major arts institutions like the Getty, and the hundreds and hundreds of civil rights groups, and so many countless others: Indivisible, Justice Democrats, Greenpeace, the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, ever Bar association, the Sierra Club, synagogues, churches, temples and mosques, you name it — can work together to expand democracy by abolishing the Electoral College. They all need it. Not just because some of the names I’ve mentioned are liberal and progressive, but because dictatorship ends civic life. Poof. Gone.

Also, this middle layer of smaller organizations have the most constituents when added together, and the most specific. Communities in the southwest, Jews, LGBTQ, Black churchgoers, accessibility activists, ComicCon fans, people in whatever geography or tribe or affinity group we find ourselves, will respond to and engage with the institutions that know us best.

Imagine this middle tier or American society lending their email lists and databases and films and social media and sermons and rallies and conferences to a simple message: expand American democracy by counting every presidential vote.

Seems like a fantasy, but they have everything to lose. And remember the anti-apartheid movement in the 80s? OK you may not remember that, but it worked, Mandela was freed and elected president, and while South African activists get all of the credit, a lot of the global pressure to push for change came from the middle.

Now here’s the fun part. You and me.

Mass Movement from Below
I don’t know if I think of myself as a bottom exactly, it depends on the vibe (alert: distasteful dad joke) but in a world of capitalist stratification — with plunderers, tax avoiders and dynastic institutions at the top, then I have to be honest with where I find myself in the social heap. I’m just a guy, with some privileges to be sure, but at the end of the day, an atom under the machinery of global institutions.

The point: social change comes from you and me. We are the ones who give permission to all those above us, our acquiescence is the foundation. Sometimes we need to rise up when the edifice above is broken.

We can talk about expanding democracy to our friends and family, petition our elected officials, create memes and posts, boycott brands and companies that support insurrectionists, march in the streets, stage sickouts and strike. And we can vote and vote and vote like our friends did in Georgia, to so much consequence. Hopefully.

Many of us have been protesting and volunteering against the Trump Republican party for four years; we can keep on going. We’ve got about three years maybe, at best.

So you get it. The only way to preserve democracy is by banding together at the top, from the middle, and at the bottom. Let’s do this America.

Clock is ticking.