When my parents married in the mid-1950s, they bought a beautiful refrigerator: white, sleek, with a tiny freezer barely able to hold a few ice trays. Four decades later, the fridge was still running in our kitchen; noisy, inefficient, but still cooling.
“Mom, why don’t you get a new refrigerator?” I’d beg. “Every neighbor has a newer model.”
“This fridge has run for 40 years and it never failed me,” she’d say. “How do I know that the new models will do as well?”
It was hard to argue with that.
The Electoral College is the old fridge in the kitchen of American democracy. It has worked for more than 200 years, but every presidential system in the world now enjoys a newer electoral procedure. The problems of the Electoral College are visible, but the alternatives are uncertain. If we are not ready to replace it, we should fix it. But in order to do so, we need to understand what pieces are malfunctioning.
Every four years, Americans trust their fate to this 18th-century machine. The constitutional convention could not agree on the procedure to elect the president, but in the summer of 1787, everyone had a good guess of who the nation’s first president would be. The convention reached a last-minute compromise: Each state would choose a number of electors equivalent to its congressional delegation, they would convene locally to vote for president and vice president, and they would disband afterward. With a few upgrades introduced by the 12th (1804) and 23rd (1961) constitutional amendments, this model still runs today.
This procedure has problems. First, it is possible for one candidate to carry the popular vote and still lose the Electoral College. On five occasions (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016), the winning candidate was not the people’s favorite. Those episodes represent just 10 percent of presidential elections over the past 200 years, and it is tempting to dismiss them as a small failure rate. But “mismatched” outcomes happen in contexts of great polarization, when the legitimacy of the election is most relevant.
Second, Electoral College politics encourage candidates and the mass media to ignore vast parts of the country, concentrating their attention on a few “swing” states. Over 90 percent of all general-election campaign events by presidential candidates take place in only 12 states. Most of the country is strategically ignored.
Our neighbors have long since replaced their old fridges. Latin American countries, which emulated the American constitution in the 19th century, have dispensed with the Electoral College to adopt, in most cases, a system of runoff elections. If no presidential candidate obtains a majority, the top two candidates face off in a second round. Argentina was the last country in the region to drop its Electoral College — three decades ago. In the rest of the world, electoral colleges are used to elect ceremonial heads of state in parliamentary republics like Germany or India, where the “president” is not the chief executive.
Americans, too, deserve an electoral system that reflects the popular vote fairly and encourages candidates to engage the whole country. But can they get an upgrade? Some critics demand that the Electoral College be replaced with a modern runoff system, but this would require a cumbersome constitutional amendment. In 1969, a few weeks after Apollo 11 reached the moon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment to this effect, but it was killed by the Senate in 1970.
Since 2006, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement to award state electors to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. This solution avoids a constitutional amendment, but the compact will go into effect only when signatories represent a majority (270) of the 538 electors, an unlikely scenario because swing states and red states have no incentive to join.
Most critics call into question what supporters consider an important virtue of the Electoral College: The system overrepresents small states and underrepresents large ones. An elector from Wyoming represents around 90,000 voters, while one from California represents about 300,000 voters. This bias, technically called “malapportionment,” violates the principle of one person, one vote, but it also protects small states against the dominance of large ones.
The main problem with the Electoral College, however, is “disproportionality.” Political scientists use this term to describe systems that inflate the advantage of the largest party. Except for Maine and Nebraska, which choose electors in their congressional districts, the remaining 48 states and D.C. employ a winner-take-all system in which the highest vote-getter captures all electors. It is hard to overstate the unfairness of this procedure. In 2020, 5.3 million Democrats wasted their votes in Texas, and 6 million Republicans wasted theirs in California.
While malapportionment creates a bias against large states, disproportionality creates a more dramatic advantage for the largest party in each state. Americans treat this injustice as a natural fact of life, but nothing in the Constitution requires states to adopt a winner-take-all system. Moreover, the technology to solve this problem — proportional representation — has existed since the mid-19th century.
Most European and Latin American democracies elect representatives using proportional representation. Technical details vary from country to country, but the principle is simple: If Republicans obtain 40 percent of the vote in Illinois, they should obtain, roughly, 40 percent of the electors representing the state. If Democrats win, as they did in 2020, 48 percent of the vote in Florida, they should take 14 of Florida’s 30 electors.
Under proportional presentation, every vote — and every state — would count. Opponents may worry that proportional representation will encourage three-way races, splitting state electors among multiple candidates. Although this is possible in some states, third parties would likely negotiate their support for one of the major candidates in the Electoral College vote. My colleague Scott Mainwaring has noted that proportional representation encourages compromise and can help American democracy overcome its current challenges.
It is time to adopt proportional representation to the Electoral College. This solution does not require a constitutional amendment, and it does not have the stark partisan implications of other proposals. Blue and red states would need to adopt proportional representation in pairs, to balance out the national effects of the reform. But this compromise would be a historical opportunity to curb the intransigence that dominates American politics today.
It is time to upgrade the 18th-century machine before its engine runs out of legitimacy. Better to fix the existing system now than to replace it in the future.
Despite its problems, the Electoral College has worked more than two centuries. How do we know that the new models will do as well?
Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is professor of political science and global affairs and director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.