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Would-be veep wants Americans to accept a system that operates through the nullification of their vote

By Jeff Jacoby

Published Oct. 16, 2024

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At a fund-raiser in California last week, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, declared that "the Electoral College needs to go." Walz wants to scrap the two-step process laid out in the Constitution — first the states choose electors, then electors meet to choose the president and vice president — and replace it with a single national popular vote.

A spokesperson for the Harris campaign hastily told CNN that Walz's call to eliminate the Electoral College was not an official policy position. Maybe not, but Walz wasn't speaking off the cuff — he had said the exact same thing at a Seattle fund-raiser earlier in the day. And back in 2019, during her first presidential attempt, then-Senator Kamala Harris said that she too was "open to the discussion" of abolishing the Electoral College.

Americans have been grumbling about the Electoral College for a long time. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the way it functioned led as early as 1804 to adoption of the 12th Amendment, which changed the rules to require electors to vote separately for president and vice president. But hostility to the Electoral College has intensified in the past 25 years, especially among Democrats. That is understandable — the last two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both became president by winning a majority in the Electoral College, even though their Democratic rivals each drew more popular votes.

In constitutional terms, the "popular vote" isn't a thing — it has no legal significance. The Framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College in order to ensure that presidents were not elected in a single national plebiscite but via elections within each state. Thanks to the system they devised, it is not enough for presidential candidates merely to pile up votes in the few areas where they are most popular.

In order to win, they must demonstrate appeal across numerous states. Electoral votes are almost always awarded on a winner-take-all basis, which gives candidates a powerful motivation to campaign aggressively in "swing" states — they work extra hard to carry states where the public is divided, in order to win those states' electoral votes. Under a national plebiscite, by contrast, candidates would be more apt to ignore states and regions where they weren't already popular.

In 1984, Minnesota was the only state where a majority of voters supported Walter Mondale. If Tim Walz's scheme to bypass the Electoral College had been in force, Minnesota would have had to give its electoral votes to Ronald Reagan.

To express it in terms of this year's election: If not for the Electoral College, Harris and Walz would spend all their time banking votes in deep-blue California, Massachusetts, and Oregon, while Trump and JD Vance would be working to rack up the highest possible vote totals in the red heartland of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

Many Democrats, convinced that a national plebiscite would work to their advantage, have come up with a way to circumvent the Electoral College. They are promoting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which states would agree to cast their electoral votes for the candidate who wins the most popular votes nationwide, rather than the candidate who wins the most votes in their state. As drafted, the arrangement would take effect only after it has been adopted by enough states to reach 270 electoral votes, the total needed to win the White House. So far the compact has been adopted by 17 states and the District of Columbia, which together control 209 electoral votes, which is 61 short of the 270 needed for implementation.

The most recent governor to sign legislation adding a state to the compact was — can you guess? — Walz. In May 2023, he signed a bill passed by the Democratic Legislature that brought Minnesota into the plan. Barring some upheaval in American politics, the compact will never go into effect unless it wins the support of some red states.

So for now, whether to dispense with the Electoral College is little more than an interesting topic of discussion.

Some of that discussion is thoughtful, such as the debate among legal scholars over whether the proposed popular vote compact would pass constitutional muster. Mostly, however, the subject is reduced to shallow sloganeering about "democracy" and "one-person-one-vote" that ignores the nation's singular structure as a federal republic.

The Framers' Electoral College compromise — whereby Americans come together to choose a president, but do so as citizens of their respective states — reflects America's identity not as an undifferentiated mass of people but as a union of individual states with different social, political, and cultural characters. New Hampshire, New Jersey, and North Dakota are very different places. The Electoral College arrangement ensures that those differences are respected, while guaranteeing the right of all adult citizens to participate in the process.

Rarely mentioned is that the only impact of the popular vote compact in states, like Minnesota, where it has been approved would be to sometimes award their presidential electors to the Republican candidates most of their voters reject. Suppose it had been in effect in 1984, when Ronald Reagan carried every state in the union except Minnesota, where native son Walter Mondale prevailed.

By the terms of the compact, Minnesota would have been compelled to award its 10 electoral votes to Reagan, giving him a clean sweep. Four years later, when Minnesota was one of only a handful of states to support Michael Dukakis, the compact would have forced it to back George H. W. Bush in the Electoral College. Does Walz really imagine that that would have been a fairer, more democratic outcome?

Most Americans will never accept a system that operates through the nullification of their vote. Critics of the Electoral College denounce it as an affront to democracy. The existing arrangement has its drawbacks. But one thing it does not do is oblige states to cancel the result of their own elections just because a presidential candidate was more popular elsewhere.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."

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