Thread by @kcolbin

I don't agree that we should abolish the electoral college, but I do agree it needs to change. Here's why and how. (thread)

The system was originally created at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Some people thought the President should be elected by a direct vote of the people, but others thought he (always he back then) should be appointed by Congress. (2/n)

See, back in the day, we didn't have national television, or social media, or jet planes. So it was way harder to hear about candidates. With a popular vote, the candidate from the most populous state would always win, because you'd just vote for who you know. (3/n)

The electoral system was a compromise. By having each state vote for electors, and having the electors vote for President, all the states would be represented in the outcome. (4/n)

They were trying to make the system fairer (although, y'know, still keeping slaveowners sweet -- more on this in a minute). (5/n)

The number of electors allocated to each state was based on how many people were in that state. So bigger states still got a bigger say; they just couldn't be the only ones to decide the outcome. (6/n)

Two things happened almost concurrently to make this system very much not awesome. First, the Convention had already ratified the "three-fifths compromise," which said that slaves (who obvs did not have the right to vote) counted as 3/5 of a person for electoral purposes. (7/n)

This meant that states with a large slave population got a larger number of electoral votes, and the votes of people in slave states were upweighted compared to people in non-slave states (i.e., slaveowners kept sweet). (8/n)

The second thing was that, in 1789, Pennsylvania and Maryland decided that their electors should be allocated on a winner-take-all basis: that is, whoever won the popular vote would get ALL of the electors for that state, regardless of the margin of victory. (9/n)

By 1836, all states bar two were using the winner-take-all system. (10/n)

There are two major problems with this system in today's politics. First, as we saw in 2000 and 2016, it makes it possible to lose the popular vote -- sometimes by quite a lot -- and still win the election. (11/n)

Second, winner-take-all means most states are locked up for a particular party, and candidates spend almost all their efforts on the swing states: states that could go either way. (12/n)

The only states who don't use winner-take-all are Maine and Nebraska. As a result, they're largely ignored, because the difference between winning and losing in those states is negligible. (13/n)

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin shouldn't get to decide who gets to be President. It's literally the opposite of what the framers were going for. (14/n)

But if we switch to a popular vote, instead of spending all their time and money on the swing states, candidates would spend all their time in the big cities. And New York, Los Angeles and Chicago shouldn't get to decide who gets to be President either. (15/n)

The purpose of the electoral college is to serve as a dampener, so no one group has an outsized influence on the outcome. And the best way for the college to serve as a dampener is to allocate electors for each state proportionately to the popular vote in that state. (16/n)

If electors were allocated proportionately, candidates would have to campaign in all states. They would have to build consensus across urban and rural populations. (17/n)

But we have to ask ourselves what we want: a fairer system, or one that benefits our preferred candidate? (18/n)

In 2004, Colorado put Amendment 36 on the ballot: an initiative that would have switched the state from winner-take-all to proportional allocation. (19/n)

The problem was that the outcome would have been applied to that same election. So you didn't know when you were voting whether the winning presidential candidate would get all 9 of Colorado's electoral votes, or whether it would be a 5-4 split. (20/n)

That election was Bush v Kerry. Both parties thought their guy had a shot, and nobody wanted to "give away" 4 votes by switching to a proportional system. (21/n)

So people voted based on how it would impact that particular election, not on whether it was a better system. The amendment was defeated 66-34. (22/n)

If it were only Colorado joining Maine and Nebraska, it wouldn't make much of a difference. But if all states were proportionally allocated, it would. Candidates would have to campaign in every state. Every electoral vote would count, every margin of victory would matter. (23/n)

The system overall would be fairer. And isn't that what we all want? (24/24)