Two words: Electoral College.
Democracy is, at its core, about fair, equal representation — one person, one vote. But if you’re a voter in the United States, there’s a really good chance your vote doesn’t count the way you think it does. Why? Well, American democracy operates on a whole collection of cherished ideas and practices, but our system also includes some dusty old artifacts from its founding two centuries ago. Take the Electoral College, America’s system for picking the president. It’s complicated, outdated, unrepresentative — in a word, undemocratic. In 2016, Donald Trump won the White House by earning a majority of electoral votes, even though almost three million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t the first time a president won by losing or the second or even the fourth. And this year, who knows? I’ve spent the past few years obsessively analyzing the Electoral College, trying to understand the concerns of the founding fathers, doing the math from different elections. I wrote a whole book on the subject. What I learned is it doesn’t have to be this way. And the reasons people think we need to keep the Electoral College the way it is, they’re all wrong. Myth No.1, that Democrats will win a popular vote every time. A lot of people don’t even want to talk about changing the Electoral College because of this idea. Republicans especially worry about tipping the balance away from their party. And sure, the last two times the Electoral College has awarded the White House to the popular-vote loser, it’s been to the Republican — Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000. But don’t forget, Bush won the popular vote four years later by three million votes. In fact, let’s tally up all the votes cast for president between 1932 and 2008. That’s almost 1.5 billion votes. Sometimes one party does better for a few election cycles. But in the end, Republicans and Democrats are virtually tied. The point is, even accounting for demographic changes, neither party has a built-in advantage under a popular-vote system. Myth No.2: The founders wanted it this way. And because they created it, it’s a sacred work of constitutional genius. That’s not true either.
