Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million in 2016, but Trump squeaked by a win with 45,000 votes spread across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, or 0.03% of total votes cast, in 2016.

In 2020,  Joe Biden won the popular vote by nearly 8 million but Trump, who ignores the 81 million votes against him, thought he could get Georgia’s secretary of state to “find me 11,780 votes, one more than I need” and did something similar in Michigan and Arizona because he knew that he only needed one more vote than Biden to win those three states’ electoral votes. In fact, had some 55,000 votes in those three states gone the other way, Trump would have won.

This is what made Trump’s strategy to overturn the 2020 election all too easy. 

Now think about this: Biden could win 100 percent of California’s, New York’s and Illinois’s votes, he could win 10 even 20 million more votes than Trump (or whoever the Republican is), but if he loses four states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona) by just one vote apiece, hwwould lose the presidency in 2024.

An elector in Wyoming represents around 150,000 voters, whereas a California elector represents the votes of some 500,000 residents. That makes a Wyoming voter three times more powerful than a Californian voter. 

That doesn’t seem to comport with the ideal of “democracy” and “one-person, one-vote.”

Moreover, the realization that the presidential election is decided in the swing states has been shown to depress turnout by up to 16% in non-battleground ground states., according to Abolish the Electoral College, a grassroots organization dedicated to advancing voting rights. 

Extremist reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia justified the Bush v. Gore decision, which halted the state-mandated Florida recount and anointed George W. Bush president despite Al Gore getting more votes nationally, and as it turns out, in Florida as well, saying that the Constitution doesn’t specifically guarantee “one-person, one-vote.”

Except that what the Constitution does say is that “the person having the greatest number of votes shall be the president,” so it would seem that is the fundamental kernel of actual democracy (which must have figured in the Moore v. Harper decision rejecting state legislatures’ power to choose the winning candidate), which should be the objective today, 232 years after the adoption of the Constitution, with all the societal changes that have taken place.

The Founding Fathers (all white male men who owned property) established the Electoral College as a compromise between electing the president by a vote in Congress vs. president by popular vote of qualified citizens (white men who owned property). 

The smaller states refused to agree because the biggest states would overrule the smallest. But as it is now, the smallest states have out-sized power, which is how the Republicans won in 2000 and 2016 and was the whole strategy behind Trump’s 2020 attempted coup.

The anti-democratic impact of the Electoral College is compounded by the fact that all but two states have a “winner-take-all” system, awarding all of the state’s electoral votes to the candidate who wins the majority of votes. This makes it incredibly easy to literally rig the system – you don’t need to flip a score of votes, only a little Russian disinformation targeted in a few key districts or a sympathetic election official who would flip one extra vote to take the entire state. This system effectively disenfranchises every voter in the group with less than the plurality, invalidating their vote altogether.

“These dynamics drive voter apathy, undermine public confidence in the democratic process and weaken the perceived legitimacy of the elected president,” Charlotte Hill writes at the Democracy Docket. “They also degrade democracy by fomenting minority rule.”

This tyranny of the minority proliferates throughout the system – in the way the Senate is formulated (Wyoming has equal number of senators to California) and its filibuster rules requiring 60 votes to move legislation, and in gerrymandering congressional seats where it is so easy to pack and crack districts to disenfranchise certain voters.

Another solution would be to get rid of the “winner take all” electoral votes so that the votes were apportioned based on the share of votes won in the state, as Maine and Nebraska already do. But this is only feasible if there is a federal law requiring all states to apportion the electoral college votes.

Another reform would be to do what other countries do: require the winning candidate to get more than 50 percent of votes (there is nothing in the Constitution that would prevent this). (Trump got 46.1% while Clinton got 48.2% of the 2016 votes; in 2020, Biden got 51.3% to Trump’s 46.9% of total votes, 53.4%. to 44.5% in non-battlegrounds ,but 48.4% vs. 50.1% in battlegrounds, according to the Cook Political Report (https://www.cookpolitical.com/2020-national-popular-vote-tracker).

The Constitution has been amended 27 times, but It is unlikely to get a constitutional amendment ending the Electoral College.

So the best, most expeditious way to actually, for the first time in America’s grand experiment to get a government by the people and have a truly democratically elected president, is to nullify the Electoral College.

A movement has been underway, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would make the Electoral College irrelevant without a Constitutional amendment abolishing it. States that join the Compact commit to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote instead of who wins the state.

The Compact would go into effect when enough states have joined with collective Electoral Votes exceeding 270. So far 16 states, including New York, plus DC have signed on, with Minnesota the latest to officially join. That yields 205 of the 270 electoral votes needed to  nullify the Electoral College. Meanwhile, Nevada, Maine, Michigan and Alaska have taken meaningful steps toward joining the Compact. 

“A system that was created nearly 240 years ago with a compromise to ensure power remained in the hands of wealthy landowners to placate an inherently evil system of slavery,” writes Abolish the Electoral College at its website (https://abolishtheelectoralcollegepac.org/). “We believe that this obviously flawed system of choosing our president and vice president is long overdue for reform. Every person’s vote should count, not just those in a select few states. Reform of the Electoral College starts with the basic principle that every citizen in the United States has a right to have their voice heard and that their vote not only matters, but is not diminished because of a legacy of injustice that continues to this day.”