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Amy Fried is a retired political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
I grew up with the Electoral College and so did you. We saw the maps by analysts before elections, as vote totals were coming in, and afterwards. If you were a bit of a political geek like me, you might have played around with possible scenarios.
For a chunk of my life, the Electoral College seemed like a quaint curiosity. Sure, it was possible that the candidate who got the most votes lost, but that hadn’t occurred for a long time.
Then, in the five presidential contests from 2000 through 2016, it happened twice, 40 percent of the time. This raised serious questions about the representativeness of the president and vice president, our only elected nationwide offices.
Now Maine could pass LD 1578 and join the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact. Under this plan, after sufficient states join the compact to provide a winning majority in the electoral college, those states’ electoral votes would go to the national popular vote winner. Right now the jurisdictions that have passed this policy have 76 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president.
I must admit, I’ve been ambivalent about this plan. However, when I really thought about the arguments against it, I realized that they were very weak.
One, the claim that a national popular vote compact would be unconstitutional is simply wrong. According to Article II of the U.S. Constitution, each state decides how to select presidential electors and states have used many methods. The most common system today in which all of a state’s electors goes to its electoral vote winner, doesn’t exist in Maine or Nebraska.
In the early republic, presidential electors were mostly picked by state legislators. In the 1824 election, many states allocated at least some electors by district; no candidate won a majority and the House of Representatives picked the president. After 1824 most states adopted winner-take-all electoral systems based on the state’s voters’ choice for president.
Two, the claim that this system brings small states more attention from candidates misunderstands how presidential campaigns operate, by focusing on a few swing states. These aren’t small. Six of the seven closest states in 2020 were the fifth, eighth, ninth, 10th, 14th and 20th largest — Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.
Third, the argument that a popular vote system means big states will determine the winner overlooks the power they have now in the Electoral College. It also underestimates the potential power of voters in large states, like California Republicans, who aren’t from the party that wins all the state’s electoral votes. Now Republican voters in deep blue states and Democratic voters in deep red ones have a limited reason to vote in presidential races. But, if winning the presidency depends on the national popular vote, campaigns would appeal to and mobilize those voters.
Fourth, probably because Republicans won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote in 2000 and 2016, some see a system change as benefitting Democrats. However, a Democrat could win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. That would have happened if about 1 percent of Ohio’s 2004 voters had chosen differently, making John Kerry the Electoral College winner over George W. Bush while losing the popular vote. It could occur this year if, say, Biden still won New York and California but with greatly reduced margins and carried some swing states quite narrowly, and Trump won really big in Florida, Texas and other states Republicans tend to carry.
Interestingly, Republicans used to support changing the electoral system. Their 1960 party platform called for “a change in the Electoral College system to give each voter a fair voice in presidential elections” and in 1968 it said “We propose to reform the Electoral College system.”
While the Republican Party officially changed its mind about reforming the Electoral College in 2012, a Pew Poll found that support among Republicans for moving to the popular vote has been increasing since then. In 2023, 47 percent of Republicans backed making this change. Among all Americans, only 33 percent support maintaining our current Electoral College system while 65 percent want the popular vote to decide who is president.
In thinking about whether Maine should join the national popular vote compact, I’ve realized that my resistance to change was grounded in mere familiarity with the current system. There’s no constitutional reason for preventing states from aligning their electoral votes with the nationwide popular vote. By using the popular vote to elect the president, every voter’s choice can really matter.
