Thread by @foxjust

OMG, look what might happen if we get rid of the Electoral College

That's from Judith Best's "The Case Against Direct Election of the President" (1975)

I did like this from Alexander Bickel's "Reform and Continuity" (1971), tho

And definitely no complaints about this @NRO poem

Kind of amazing how close the U.S. came to replacing the Electoral College with direct election in 1969-70. Passed the House 388-70, was endorsed by President Nixon, Birch Bayh's people got 62 vote commitments in the Senate, but couldn't get to the 67 they needed

The strongest opposition in Congress in those days was from conservative Southerners who liked how the Electoral College gave regional fringe candidates the chance to deny the major-party candidates the majority and throw the race into the House

And now I've got a column on what people argued about the last time they argued about the Electoral College bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Back in 1969 and 1970, Representatives and Senators from small states argued that the Electoral College caused candidates to ignore them (!)

That's from Longley and Braun's "The Politics of Electoral College Reform" (1972) which credits @ProfBanzhaf's 1968 "One Man, 3.312 Votes: A Mathematical Analysis of the Electoral College" for helping persuade small-staters that the EC wasn't their friend digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewconten…

Also contributing to that view was the fact that the electoral map of those years was dominated by large battleground states. The 5 states with the most electoral votes (NY, CA, PA, IL, OH) were all in play in 1968 uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/nation…

In the 2016 election, by contrast, the vote was close in only one of the five most-populous states (Florida). So candidates paid attention to other, somewhat smaller battleground states.

Still, overall, the winner-take-all nature of how almost all states award electoral votes cancels out most or all of the advantage that small states are given in how electoral votes are apportioned.