Keep the Electoral College: Our view
A national popular vote would bring its own set of problems.
With Hillary Clinton more than 300,000 votes ahead of President-elect Donald Trump in the popular vote count as of Thursday, calls have already begun to ditch the Electoral College system enshrined in the Constitution for choosing presidents.
If Clinton’s lead holds, she would be the second contender in modern times — joining fellow Democrat Al Gore in 2000 — to win the popular vote but lose the White House by failing to amass the 270 electoral votes needed to capture it.
Filmmaker and progressive activist Michael Moore colorfully summed up Democratic feelings about Trump's victory: "The only reason he's president is because of an arcane, insane 18th century idea called the Electoral College."
But those clamoring to dump the system cobbled together by the nation’s Founders — which gives each state as many electoral votes as it has members of Congress — should be careful what they wish for. Adopting a national popular vote would trade one set of problems for another.
Electoral College opponents argue that the system pushes candidates to ignore states that Republicans or Democrats consider sure things and focus on a dozen battleground states during the campaigns. But Tuesday's election showed that the Electoral College map is more fluid than many people believed. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, considered reliably Democratic, swung Republican.
If the national popular vote were the ultimate decider, candidates would gravitate toward the voter-rich big cities and their suburbs and ignore everyone else. If candidates felt obliged to blanket the entire country with visits and advertising, it would set off a scramble for even more campaign money, leaving candidates more beholden to special interests.
A popular vote contest involving multiple candidates could produce a winner with, say, only 35% of the vote, provoking an outcry to create a runoff process involving the top two vote-getters. And if the U.S. popular vote were so close that a nationwide recount were needed, the process could turn into a nightmare dwarfing the Florida fiasco of 2000.
For those seeking change, there are two avenues: Amend the Constitution, which is extraordinarily difficult, or do an end run around the Constitution, which a group called National Popular Vote has been trying. The group seeks to pass state laws mandating that the states' electoral votes be cast for whoever wins the U.S. popular vote. Ten states and Washington, D.C., representing 165 electoral votes, have signed on, and it has been most popular in states with Democrat-controlled legislatures. The compact would take effect when it's ratified by states representing at least 270 electoral votes.
This scheme sounds clever, but dig down and you find problems. Imagine for a moment what would happen when New Yorkers, reliably Democratic in presidential elections, learned that their legislature was casting all its electoral votes for a Republican candidate because he or she won the popular vote. Uproar is too modest a word.
The current system is far from ideal, and one idea worth considering is to shift away from winner-take-all in each state to a proportional allocation of electors based on statewide vote totals. But any change to a system that has generally served the nation well for more than two centuries should be both bipartisan and carefully considered.
Democrats are the wounded party now, but going into this election they thought they had a "blue firewall" of states that gave them a big Electoral College advantage. The way to win is to run better campaigns and better candidates under the existing rules, not try to change the rules after a painful loss.
USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.