Majority of Americans support abolishing Electoral College system in favour of popular vote

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

More than half of voters in the US believe the Electoral College should be abolished in favour of an election system that awards the presidency to a candidate who receives the popular vote.

Fifty-one percent of respondents in a recent Hill-HarrisX poll taken six weeks before Election Day agreed that a popular vote count should replace the current system, which relies on ballot results in each state to determine the electors who will pledge their vote to a candidate.

In a separate Gallup poll, 61 per cent of respondents supported the popular vote system, moving six percentage points up from 2019 and 12 points up from 2016.

Support for a move to a popular vote election is more acute among Democratic voters.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/majority-americans-support-abolishing-electoral-233951201.html

[coti]

1. Yup. This Constitution has outlived its usefulness.

Time for a major revamp.

[lagomorph777]

2. Yeah but it's scary as hell. Opportunity for terrible mischief if Reptilicans can touch it.

[RKP5637]

3. Certainly some adjustments need to be made for this century! n/t

[brush]

7. Yep, the EC has to go, and Senate needs major changes because Moscow Mitch...

is more powerful than trump with his ability to withhold House bills from getting voted on.

[tandem5]

4. Absent of a constitutional amendment, which at the moment, seems...

near impossible, the only way to circumvent the EC is for individual states to seat electors based on the national popular vote, but that opens up a whole new can of worms: I can easily see a conservative Supreme Court using some bogus equal protection argument to nix that or they could embrace and bolster the current plot being hatched by Trump which is to take the constitution literally and have the states seat electors however they wish regardless of state results. This would quickly devolve into another red-state blue state dichotomy where all the red states make their election ceremonial and then appoint electors for the Republican candidate while all the blue states would cast electors based on the national popular vote winner. This is just like the issues surrounding expanding the Supreme Court or applying term limits -- there are all sorts of unforeseen side effects that have to be considered.

[Orangepeel]

5. Unfortunately, their votes don't count for as much

People who live in the states with the largest populations can't abolish the electoral college for the same reason that the electoral college sucks. The vote of, say, a resident of California doesn't count as much as the vote of a resident of Wyoming.

[jmowreader]

6. Easier solution

Amending the Constitution requires the consent of three-fourths of the state legislatures, which means you'd have to get the permission of the states you're about to make irrelevant to do it.

It would be a hell of a lot easier to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, the law that fixes the size of the House at 435 members, and apportion House members based on what I call their "Wyoming Multiple" - which works as follows:

Say Wyoming has 500,000 residents, Utah has 2.9 million and Ohio has 11.9 million.

Wyoming gets one representative. (If enough people move to Wyoming to put it past Vermont, during reapportionment after the Census is taken they will use Vermont's population as the baseline.)

Utah/Wyoming = 5.8. They receive 5 representatives. (They currently have 4.)

Ohio/Wyoming = 23.8. They receive 23 representatives. (They currently have 16.)