Thread by @RetroReport

1/8 How is it that the highest office in the land - the US presidency - is one where the person who gets the most votes can still lose the election? 50 years ago, Congress came close to changing that. Why did the effort fail?
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2/8 Twice in the last 20 years (2016 Trump, 2000 Bush), and 3 other times, presidents took office by winning enough electoral college votes (270 or more) but losing the popular vote. This arcane, some say undemocratic, system dates back to the nation’s founding.

3/8 In 1787, most of the men writing the new nation’s rules wanted the president chosen by Congress (men like them.) Direct election was pushed by James Madison but seen as leading to mob rule. The electoral college was the cumbersome compromise.

4/8 Scholars like Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar see more “devilish origins” - the wishes of slave-owning states. “In a direct election system, the South would have lost every time because a huge percentage of its population was slaves, and slaves couldn't vote.” vox.com/policy-and-pol…

5/8 Abolishing the electoral college would take a constitutional amendment, not easy. (Remember the ERA?) After a lopsided 1968 election (Nixon won 301 electoral votes but the popular vote by less than 1%), Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh pushed for one.

6/8 The amendment had bipartisan support in Congress and from 80% of Americans in polls. But Western and Southern senators like Strom Thurmond of SC argued it “ignores the rights of little states” and a filibuster stopped it in 1970.

7/8 Bayh kept trying, even as some Black leaders joined segregationist senators in opposition: “Take away the electoral college and the importance of being Black melts away. Blacks, instead of being crucial to victory in major states, simply become 10% of the electorate.”

8/8 Bayh’s efforts to abolish the electoral college ended in defeat in 1979.
Today some states are trying a new approach, passing laws that pledge all their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote.
nationalpopularvote.com