Why Do We Nonetheless Have the Electoral School?

A New Statesman E-book of the Yr

With each presidential election, Individuals puzzle over the peculiar mechanism of the Electoral School. The creator of the Pulitzer finalist The Proper to Vote explains the enduring downside of this controversial establishment.

Each 4 years, thousands and thousands of Individuals marvel why they select their presidents by the Electoral School, an arcane establishment that allows the loser of the favored vote to turn out to be president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Most Individuals have lengthy most popular a nationwide in style vote, and Congress has tried on many events to change or scuttle the Electoral School. A number of of those efforts―one as not too long ago as 1970―got here very near successful approval. But this controversial system stays.

Alexander Keyssar explains its persistence. After tracing the Electoral School’s tangled origins on the Constitutional Conference, he explores the efforts from 1800 to 2020 to abolish or considerably reform it, displaying why every has failed. Causes embody the complexity of the electoral system’s design, the tendency of political events to raise partisan benefit above democratic values, the issue of passing constitutional amendments, and, importantly, the South’s extended backing of the Electoral School, grounded in its need to protect white supremacy within the area. The generally voiced rationalization that small states have blocked reform for concern of dropping affect proves to have been true solely often.

Keyssar examines why reform of the Electoral School has obtained so little consideration from Congress for the final forty years, and considers alternate options to congressional motion such because the Nationwide In style Vote Interstate Compact and state efforts to get rid of winner-take-all. In analyzing the explanations for previous failures whereas displaying how shut the nation has come to abolishing the establishment, Why Do We Nonetheless Have the Electoral School? provides encouragement to these hoping to supply change within the twenty-first century.