House Democrats on Tuesday kept up their complaints about the Electoral College, a month after Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2 million votes, but lost to President-elect Trump, who won the Electoral College 306-232.
In a forum held Tuesday afternoon, Democratic lawmakers complained about the anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College and that it cost Clinton the White House. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., led the forum and said the Electoral College undermines many voters in the United States.
“Under our current system, the votes of millions of people in non-swing states are effectively lost when their candidate loses their state because all of that state’s electoral votes will go to the other candidate,” Conyers said.
Many of the lawmakers in attendance pointed out the Electoral College was created in order to help smaller, southern states during the creation of the Constitution. Conyers explained if states voted based on direct democracy, they would have been overshadowed by the more populous northern states because slaves would not have been allowed to vote.
But, the Electoral College allowed slaves to be taken into the equation.
“Slave states opposed direct elections for the president because in a direct election system the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves could not vote,” Conyers said. “But, the Electoral College instead let each southern state count its slaves, although with a two-fifths discount … in computing its share of the count.”
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said it’s crazy that the United States is the world’s first modern democratic republic but at the same time doesn’t directly elect its top executive. He said the rest of the world’s democracies use direct elections and it’s time for the U.S. to follow suit.
“It’s considered elementary in every other democratic country in the world,” he said. “Only here is it considered novel.”
Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said many constituents he’s spoken to regarding the Electoral College, usually online, tell him that it’s needed to protect voters from the “tyranny of the majority.”
Cohen said he identified a number of hypocrisies in this line of argument. For one, many of those people who told him the Electoral College is necessary voted for Trump, who ran as a populist purporting to espouse the views of the majority.
He said there are systems set up for minority protections in the government, particularly the Senate and the court system.
“Most of these folks that respond to me … they are not for most of those Supreme Court decisions that protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority,” he said.
