Americans deserve better than the Electoral College

[think]

Americans deserve better than the Electoral College

John Conyers Jr. 7:27 a.m. EST December 16, 2016

With the Electoral College electors scheduled to meet Monday to formally elect Donald Trump as our 45th president, it is time that we reconsider whether a political compromise approved in 1787 bears any principled or practical reason for being today.

Several serious concerns were raised at a forum I organized earlier this month about the Electoral College featuring leading experts in history, constitutional law and political science. Most obviously, we learned that the Electoral College is anti-democratic. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has so far received more than 2.8 million more popular votes than Trump — the largest divergence between the popular and electoral votes in history. This is the second time there has been a divergence between the popular vote and the Electoral College in the last five elections, and the fifth time since 1824.

We also learned that the Electoral College is rooted in slavery. At our forum, Yale law professor Akhil Amar explained, slave states opposed direct elections for President because “in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves . . . could not vote. But the Electoral College . . . instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.”

Our forum also made clear that many of the arguments in defense of the Electoral College are anachronistic. Electoral College defenders argue that it serves to check the passions of ordinary voters, pointing to Alexander Hamilton’s view in “The Federalist Papers,” that the Electoral College would help ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”


Read more:
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/12/15/americans-deserve-better-than-electoral-college/95483508/

John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Detroit, represents Michigan's 13th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.

[guillaumeb]

1. If changing this would require a Constitutional Amendment,

what reason would smaller states have to accept this change? If this change had been in place in 2000, Gore and Clinton would have been elected.

[DanTex]

2. They do, but it won't happen.

It requires a constitutional amendment, and the forces that benefit unjustly from the electoral college will block it from going away.