The case for abolishing the Electoral College

Diane Rehm: On My Mind

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🗓️ 22 August 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Kamala Harris currently leads Donald Trump in national polls by more than 3 percentage points according to the website 538. But if there’s one thing that recent elections have taught us, it is that a victory in the popular vote does not guarantee a spot in the oval office.

This is, of course, thanks to the Electoral College.

In two of the last six elections, more Americans punched their ballots for the eventual losers than the men who went on to claim the presidency.

And the same could happen again this year.

“My opinion is that it is a fundamentally unfair system because of the way it erases so many millions of Americans’ votes,” says Jesse Wegman, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times.

In 2020 Wegman joined Diane to talk about his book, “Let the People Pick the President,” and made his case for abolishing the Electoral College. With the 2024 election less than 75 days away, we revisit their conversation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Diane Ream is on vacation.
0:02.0	Today, we bring you a conversation from her archives
0:05.2	about the history and future of the Electoral College.
0:09.5	It was originally recorded on Election Day 2020.
0:13.2	Diane and her guests both join the conversation via Zoom.
0:17.0	Hi, it's Diane. On my mind, how Americans choose their president. Today marks the last day of voting in an election that both sides have called one of the most important
0:36.8	in American history. Much remains unknown about what the coming days and weeks will bring, but the polls seem to indicate
0:47.2	that Joe Biden could receive more votes than Donald Trump, Whether those votes translate into a Biden presidency is another question,
0:58.0	one that will only be answered by what happens in the Electoral College.
1:04.6	Jesse Wakeman is a member of the editorial board
1:08.6	at the New York Times,
1:10.4	and author of the book,
1:12.4	Let the People Pick the President.
1:15.0	He joined me to talk about why the founder settled on the electoral college system
1:21.0	and why he believes this way of selecting the president should be
1:26.4	amended. He joined me Tuesday morning.
1:32.0	Does he take me back to my 10th grade high school government class and tell me why the
1:41.8	electoral college actually exists.
1:45.0	Sure, well, the framers of the Constitution had a lot of trouble trying to figure
1:51.0	out how to elect the president of a self-governing
1:54.2	republic. They had never done it before. No one had done it on this scale. And, you
1:59.7	know, they had a lot of concerns. One of them was making sure that the president was independent. So that meant not choosing him by Congress, which would have made him beholden to Congress. But then the question was, well, how are you going to do it?
	...

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