It’s a day that ends in y, so of course left-wing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling some person, place, or thing “racist.”
This time, the New York Democrat is up in arms about the Electoral College, which she has deemed a racist “scam,” with a “racial injustice breakdown.” Ocasio-Cortez said “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 votes are counted equally.”
5) The Electoral College isn’t about fairness at all; it’s about empowering some voters over others.
Every vote should be = in America, no matter who you are or where you come from. The right thing to do is establish a Popular Vote. & GOP will do everything they can to fight it.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 23, 2019
The congresswoman needs to calm down. The Electoral College is not racist just because it gives slightly greater weight to certain less-populous states. But at the same time, she’s not entirely wrong about the Electoral College’s need for reform.
No, we shouldn’t decide the presidency by a sheer popular vote — such a majoritarian system would give the federal government all-new powers and eliminate the crucial role of the states that our founders saw as so important. Still, we can’t continue indefinitely under a winner-take-all Electoral College system where many peoples’ votes don’t really count, and a handful of purple swing states get to decide the election in razor-thin margins.
Here’s the problem with the current system: If you are a Republican voter in a heavily-blue state, your vote does not count, due to the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College. In most states, a candidate who receives 51% of the vote receives 100% of the Electoral College votes. If you’re a member of the 49%, your vote becomes a footnote, and is not reflected in the final national electoral outcome.
But we can achieve a more representative electoral system without completely abandoning the Electoral College. In fact, we can do this while maintaining the built-in weighing of states’ interests.
Here’s how: States should choose to assign their Electoral College votes on a proportional basis, rather than according to a winner-take-all approach. This would mean that if a Democrat carries the state with 70% of the vote, they win most of the electors’ votes, but 30% still go to the Republican candidate, making the minority vote count too. Right now, Nebraska and Maine do something almost like this, allowing for a split in electoral votes based on who carries each congressional district. A fully proportional system is superior, though, as it allows for a more accurate reflection of the vote tally in the electoral outcome.
Proportional Electoral College voting is not simply the same thing as the popular vote. Because the number of electoral votes a state gets is determined by congressional representation, and every state gets two senators regardless of population, even a proportional Electoral College vote boosts the voice that small states have in federal elections compared to a popular vote — it just also happens to represent everyone.
So no, the Electoral College isn’t racist. It also isn’t perfect. If conservatives don’t get on board with some kind of serious reform, it will probably be replaced with a popular vote in our lifetimes. Proportional electoral voting is a good alternative to consider.
