Flikcr/Dimitri Rodriguez
On Monday, Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) created a series of Instagram stories to discuss the many ways that the Electoral College is “a scam” and racist to boot.
“Due to severe racial disparities in certain states, the electoral college effectively weighs white voters over voters of color, as opposed to a ‘one person, one vote’ system where all our voters are counted equally.”
There is data to back up that claim. Rural states are given at least three votes in our current system, no matter what size or population those states have.
For instance, Wyoming has a population of 577,737, and they get 3 EC votes which equals out to about 174,336 people per vote. Wyoming has roughly 176k registered Republican voters and is 91% white. In the 2016 election, all three of the state’s electoral votes went to Trump, and if each of those votes represents 174K people…it is almost like the white Republican vote in Wyoming gets counted three times.
Now, let’s look at New York which has a population of 19,491,339. They get 29 EC votes which means each vote represents about 672, 115 people. You can already see how NY voters are at a disadvantage because their votes count considerably less than the people in Wyoming. The demographics in New York are also quite different with 36% of the state being non-white.
Even if you take racism out of the equation, it is still a completely unfair system. In New York, there are 2,632,341 people registered as Republican, and 5,621,811 registered as Democrats. Yet, all of the EC votes in 2016 went to Hillary. If you assume the Republican voters didn’t vote for her, that means more than 2 million New Yorkers had votes that didn’t count.
One of the many arguments against abolishing the Electoral College is that it prevents “the tyranny of big states over small states,” but as it currently stands, barely populated states have tyranny over highly populated urban areas.
Then there are those that don’t even try to hide the racism in their arguments like Paul LePage the former governor of Maine who worries that no EC means “white people” will no longer get a say:
“What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do, white people will not have anything to say. It’s only going to be the minorities who would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida.”
LePage’s argument barely deserves a second thought because studies have shown white people are way over-represented in the Electoral College system (not just in Wyoming!), as can clearly be seen in this graph:
On the cusp of the next presidential election, other Democrats have taken a page out of AOC’s book and begun to voice a bit of opposition to the electoral college as well. Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O’Rourke have all floated the idea of abolishing or at least making changes to the Electoral College.
There was even a time when Trump thought it was a “disaster for democracy”:
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012
Although he definitely changed his tune four years later once the Electoral College gave him the White House:
The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
Before Trump, the majority of the country thought getting rid of the Electoral College was a pretty good idea, but since the 2016 election, things have shifted considerably. Now only 19% of Republicans are for changing the system while Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of it at 81%.
There have only been four times that the EC has awarded the presidency to the loser of the popular vote:
- Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876
- Benjamin Harrison in 1888
- George W. Bush in 2000
- Donald Trump 2016
All of those were Republican presidents. Could that be why Republicans aren’t interested in tossing out this outdated, racist system?
More at Business Insider, New York Magazine, and Time.