For more than 200 years, Congress has introduced over 700 proposals to reform or end the Electoral College. The tradition of criticizing the Electoral College is nearly as old as the system itself, for reasons both familiar and surprising.

The Electoral College was devised to maintain the institution of slavery. James Madison wrote, “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score [of enslaved people].” In other words: At the time the Constitution was drafted, approximately one-third of the South’s population was enslaved and disenfranchised. A popular-vote system would therefore threaten the interests of slave owners, since the populations of the North and South were relatively equal, and more people could vote in the North. A system based on population, however, which utilized the three-fifths compromise, gave more political power to Southern states while maintaining slavery, and such a system was written into the Constitution as the Electoral College.

The Electoral College violates the core democratic principle of “one person, one vote,” which was established by the Supreme Court in a series of landmark cases in the 1960s. A state’s electoral votes are equal to its total number of congressional representatives and senators; small states are guaranteed at least three electoral votes. As a result, small states exert a disproportionately large influence on the Electoral College. Wyoming counts with three electoral votes, while California, the most populous state, has 54. Nevertheless, based on 2020 Census population data, the vote of a Wyoming resident weighs as much as the vote of 3.8 Californians in the Electoral College. In contrast, in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Supreme Court ruled that districts to elect state legislators must be equal in population because every person’s right to vote should receive equal protection. In the majority opinion, former Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “The right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system.” Why should our system for electing the president be an exception?

Although Wyoming voters exert an outsized influence on the Electoral College, they aren’t much better off. The winner-take-all system of the Electoral College incentivizes presidential candidates to court swing states, not swing voters in general. The Electoral College is the reason why a handful of states dominate the headlines during election season, and it’s the reason campaign outreach, spending, and even promises have revolved around counties with 10% of the nation’s registered voters in 2024, according to research by the Associated Press. As of Oct. 9, three-quarters of all campaign stops for the 2024 election have occurred in seven states. When Kamala Harris made a recent campaign stop in Texas — the second-most populous state in America — it was big news, but it’s entirely unsurprising that the two major parties have held a total of 63 campaign events in Pennsylvania since the March 2024 presidential nominations. At the time of this article’s publication, no presidential or vice presidential candidates from the two biggest parties have visited Missouri at all. 

Exceptions to the winner-take-all system are Nebraska and Maine, which split their electoral votes among the popular-vote winner and the winners in each of their electoral districts. Although places like Omaha have received increased attention as a result, partisan gerrymandering means that awarding electoral votes by district everywhere has the potential to distance the election outcome further from the popular vote.

The Electoral College has produced clearly undemocratic outcomes. John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump are typically cited as the four presidents who won office without winning the popular vote. Thomas Jefferson was elected after an Electoral College tie was broken by the House of Representatives, at a time when the presidential race did not rely on the public’s vote, and John Quincy Adams actually lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but the absence of an Electoral College majority meant that Adams succeeded because he was more persuasive with the politicians in the House.

Somehow, the election of 1876 is often overlooked, despite being the most extraordinary story of all. Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden won an absolute majority, not just a plurality, of the popular vote in 1876 without ever becoming president. After Election Day, Tilden secured 184 electoral votes while his opponent, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, received 165 electoral votes. 20 electoral votes were disputed. A bipartisan commission created by Congress, in which Republicans outnumbered Democrats by one, voted along party lines to give all 20 contested electoral votes to Hayes. The commission declared two days before the presidential inauguration that Hayes had won — by a paper-thin margin of one electoral vote.

The Electoral College caused problems in 1876, and still does now, but partisan political dysfunction is keeping it around. Supporting the abolishment of the Electoral College is by no means a fringe opinion. According to a 2024 poll published by the Pew Research Center, 63% of Americans favor changing the presidential election to a popular-vote system. Crucially, the Electoral College is rebuked by 80% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, representing a clear partisan skew. But the fact that four of the five presidents who won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote were Republican when elected does not make the Electoral College a partisan issue. Maine’s split electoral vote system advantaged Republican voters in 2016 and 2020. Richard Nixon (R) and Jimmy Carter (D) differed greatly on politics, and yet both of them recommended eliminating the Electoral College during their presidencies.

The poll responses collected by Pew Research have changed over time. Pew has asked Americans about the Electoral College in every election year since 2000, and the numbers paint a picture of recency bias. Since the question was first asked in 2000, Democratic support for a popular-vote presidential election has fluctuated between a low watermark of 69% in 2012 and a high of 84% in 2020. In 2012, a peak of 54% of Republicans favored eliminating the Electoral College, and this plummeted sharply to 27% in 2016. It would seem that respondents, to an extent, base their answer on whether or not their preferred candidate is being helped by the Electoral College in the most recent election. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 played no small part in poll responses from both parties. In 2012, meanwhile, Democratic and Republican opinions on the issue were not so far off. I have no way of knowing, though I certainly wonder, how disapproval of the Electoral College would poll in a year without a presidential election. Perhaps it would be higher than this year’s 63%.

Electoral College apologists may protest that our system operates as the framers of the Constitution intended, but it’s already too late to keep the Constitution of 1789 the same, and we shouldn’t want to. The same founders who drafted the Constitution also created amendments. People of color could not vote until an amendment changed that. Women could not vote until an amendment changed that. Eighteen-year-olds could not vote until an amendment changed that. Senators were selected by state legislatures until an amendment changed that. Slavery was legal until an amendment changed that. 

The Constitution has been strengthened, not desacralized, by efforts to extend the right to vote fairly, and mere status quo bias does not justify the Electoral College’s continued existence. 

Passing a Constitutional amendment may sound impossibly daunting, but in the 1990s, a single student successfully agitated for Constitutional change. The 27th Amendment was largely passed because a college student investigated the long-forgotten proposed amendment and defended it in a college paper. That student was Gregory Watson, and his paper received a C. Watson decided to prove his professor wrong and wrote letters to as many members of Congress as he could. After a decade, the amendment was ratified by state legislatures. Of course, the Electoral College is a more controversial issue than Congressional pay schedules.

Some scholars believe that a Constitutional amendment may not be the only way to change presidential elections. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement between the states that requires every state to pledge all their electors to the candidate that wins the national popular vote, regardless of the winner in each state. Maine is the latest state to join the compact, in April of 2024. So far, 17 states and the District of Columbia have signed on, totaling 209 electoral votes, just 61 electoral votes shy of the 270 necessary for the agreement to go into effect. Missouri is not currently a signatory, which could be an opportunity for WashU students to apply political pressure.

The Electoral College has created an unfair presidential electoral process for over 200 years. It’s still not too late to change it.