Reform our Electoral College system to create a fair presidential election that counts all votes equally

But this principle is violated when we elect our president. Our Electoral College system is fundamentally unrepresentative, but that flaw is only partly the product of our Constitution. Much more significant—and much more remediable—are the choices that states have made for allocating their Electoral College votes.

At its core, the problem with the current system is “winner-take-all”—the choice by 48 states (and the District of Columbia) to allocate all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state, regardless of the margin of victory. Because of winner-take-all, millions of U.S. citizens’ votes for president get discarded, simply because they are not in the majority in a particular state. For example, in the 2016 election:

• Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by just 45,000 votes in Minnesota, winning 46.4% to 44.9%. Yet she got 100% of Minnesota’s 10 Electoral College votes, while Trump got zero.
• In Michigan, Trump beat Clinton by just 10,000 votes, but he got every single one of its 16 Electoral College votes, while she got zero.

Adding up the discarded votes in all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) that assign their electoral vote by winner-take-all, there were over 52 million votes ignored in the 2016 presidential election. “One person, one vote” clearly does not look like this.

States originally adopted winner-take-all because it amplified the power of their electoral votes. But once practically every state had embraced winner-take-all, that effect was nullified, and presidential campaigns shifted their focus to the detriment of the whole country. Under winner-take-all, presidential candidates campaign exclusively in “battleground states”—states in which the popular vote margin of victory is close enough that one side has a real chance to beat the other.

1  Winner-take-all skews the political attention of the President and presidential campaigns exclusively to a handful of states. To get elected president, candidates must persuade not a majority of American voters, but a majority of voters in only 14 states. A study on the 2016 election finds that:

• Two-thirds of campaign events happened in just six battleground states—Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Michigan.
• Four battleground states—Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania—saw 71% of campaign ad spending and 57% of candidate appearances.
• The 14 battleground states saw 99% of ad spending and 95% of candidate campaign stops.

Making matters worse, battleground states are not simply smaller versions of America as a whole. Instead, they have unique characteristics that skew the entire election. For instance, voters in battleground states tend to be whiter and older than Americans generally; their industry is skewed to industry of the past. The issues that matter to younger Americans, and to people of color, are thus largely invisible in battleground campaigns. Winner-take-all thus outsources the selection of the president to a fraction of America’s voters (35% in 2016)—a fraction that does not in any sense represent the majority of America.

The fight for the presidency has become the fight to persuade this unrepresentative minority. Presidents seeking reelection are keen to keep this unrepresentative minority happy. Federal spending in battleground states is thus higher; regulations are catered to the special interests in those states.

2  Winner-take-all increases the probability of a “minority president”—a president who loses the popular vote, yet wins in the Electoral College. Two of our last three presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, have taken office after losing the popular vote. The probability of electing a “minority president” in a close election is estimated to be over 30 percent, and that probability will likely increase over time.

3  Winner-take-all renders the presidential selection system particularly vulnerable to foreign interference. By concentrating the voting power to a handful of states, winner-take-all minimizes the number of votes that must be flipped in order to change the results in an election, making our presidential elections an easy target for foreign interferences.

Read our blog post on the “tyranny of swing states” →

Meanwhile, contrary to what most people think, the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes is NOT in the Constitution. It was adopted by states in order to magnify their own voting power in the presidential election. Therefore, it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment to end winner-take-all. We believe we can end this unfair and unrepresentative practice through the following litigation and state legislation:

End gerrymandering to ensure equal political influence for voters across congressional districts

Each one of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected to represent a geographic area called a congressional district. Our Constitution provides each state at least one U.S. Representative, and the number of Representatives each state gets depends on its total population, with the goal of dividing representation among the states proportionately.

Every ten years, after the U.S. census is completed, the U.S. Census Bureau is mandated to reassign the number of Representatives to each state according to the changes in state population recorded in the census. And when the states receive their congressional seats apportionment and updated population data, each state with multiple seats is responsible for redrawing its congressional district maps, provided that each congressional district is as equal in population to all other congressional districts in a state as practicable according to the new census data.

There is no federal law that provides instructions to states about how they must draw their congressional district maps. Redistricting procedures vary widely from state to state, and it is up to the state legislature in most states to draw the new district boundaries, unless the state uses an independent redistricting commission, or a court order overrides the state legislature’s decisions. The politicians who control the state legislatures when the district maps are redrawn can, and often do, manipulate the district boundaries by choosing the voters they want in their district, so that they get the best chance to be re-elected. This practice of manipulating the electoral map to gain an unfair advantage is called gerrymandering, named after Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who enacted a redistricting law in 1812 to keep his own party in power by drawing a district map that shapes like a salamander.

Congressional district maps can be drawn to provide the map-drawing party extreme advantages over an opposing party, to the point that the opposing party could have an overwhelming majority of votes, but still only win a minority of congressional seats in their state. The advancement of mapmaking technology and data collection means district maps can be rigged with precision never before imagined. Many opaque redistricting groups funded by dark money from corporations and special interests, often disguised as independent organizations, are pouring money into sophisticated tools to redraw district maps that favor their allies or harm their enemies.

1  In 2012, Democrats won only 5 of the 18 congressional seats in Pennsylvania even though they received over 50 percent of the votes, or over 83,000 more votes than their Republican opponents.

2  In 2012, Republican won 11 of 14 contested congressional seats (or 79 percent of the seats) in Ohio even though they received only 51 percent of the votes in those races.

3  In 2012, Democrats won over 50 percent of votes in House races in four states—Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—but still won only a minority of seats in those states.

4  In Maryland, Democrats consistently won 7 out of 8 congressional seats (or 87.5 percent of the seats) since 2012, even though they received only around 60 percent of the votes during that period.

Besides electing a legislature that does not represent voters’ preferences, extreme gerrymandering makes congressional races less and less competitive. In 2016, only 37 of the 435 House races were competitive (that’s 8.5 percent of the House races). While geographic partisan sorting—i.e. voters increasingly choose to move into communities that share similar partisan ideology—plays a prominent role in reducing the competitiveness of House races, gerrymandering is also a contributing factor.

Perhaps more importantly, there’s a consensus that partisan gerrymandering contributes to polarization. When a district is not competitive—meaning that the candidate of the majority party has pretty much won the general election before the race even started—primary voters have no incentive to choose a moderate candidate in order to increase their chances of winning the general election. Combining a large number of non-competitive congressional districts with the fact that extreme ideological candidates can often win primary races because of low voter turnout and relatively low cost to run House primary campaigns, both political parties are increasingly captured by their own factions, and moderate voters’ influence have declined as a result.

Gerrymandering also allows incumbents to win more re-elections regardless of their job performance. A staggering 97 percent of incumbents won re-election in 2016, even though the congressional job approval rating was only about 19 percent during that time. While there are many factors (such as money) that give incumbents advantages over their challengers, and redistricting does not always protect incumbents; incidences of state legislatures redrawing congressional districts specifically to protect incumbents are well documented . When incumbents are protected from competition, voters cannot hold them accountable.

The current single-member district system—whereby even a very slim majority (say 50 percent + 1 vote) gets all the representation in a district—makes the redistricting process particularly vulnerable to manipulation. With so many votes in each district wasted simply because they don’t belong to the majority, district maps can be easily drawn to make sure that some voters never get any representation. And without a clear priority of redistricting goals, it’s virtually impossible to effectively police and eliminate gerrymandering under a single-member district system.

That’s why Equal Citizens endorses Fair Vote’s Fair Representation Act, which proposes House Members to be elected by “fair representation voting” methods through multi-member districts, ranked choice voting, and independent redistricting commissions.