The Electoral College is a historical relic that could impact the result of the Trump-Harris election, and if left intact, is likely have similar impacts on future elections.  Its most positive feature is that it was designed to thwart populist demagogues from becoming president, but it no longer fulfills that function, as illustrated by Donald Trump first assuming presidential office by winning in the College after losing the popular vote and his then calling for an insurrection to employ previously obscure elements of the Electoral College process to prevent his being held accountable for his failures as our president.

 Because citizens in all but a few in-play states have good reasons to believe their votes to determine our only truly national political leader are meaningless, the College contributes to widespread public cynicism about politics.  Given its biases against third-party and independent candidates, citizens have only two realistic voting choices.  It contributes to social and political polarization where both Democrats and Republicans see each other as dangerous enemies rather than friendly adversaries whose presence ensure accountability in politics. 

This volume contains many other and more detailed arguments about the role of the College in American politics.  Here, I assume its earlier positive functions of facilitating the formation of the United States and allowing us to agree on Constitutional essentials are outweighed by its current negative impacts.

The November 5 election is particularly significant because Donald Trump has done and said many things that prompt realistic fears that he would reduce many democratic processes, institutions, and values, including the role of genuine party competition in other and future elections.  Only a decisive defeat of Trump and other MAGA candidates can reduce such risks.  While Kamala Harris may have some limitations as an alternative to Trump, all friends of American pluralist democracy should rally behind her.  But I believe she needs to make elimination of the College a cause that can sustain her current momentum.  As racial and ethnic minorities become more prominent in America, as younger citizens become voters, and as women play a larger role in our nation, they will be energized to support Harris’ candidacy if she makes clear her commitment to changing our electoral system that has privileged old, white men in the past and would likely do so in the future.

Our political system needs many reforms to ensure widespread loyalty to it, but our long-standing failure to reform the College is the most visible contributor to – and symbol of – our current malaise, distrust, and division.  The president and vice-president are our only truly national leaders, and citizens throughout the nation should play a leading and equal role in their selection.  The College has been a state-centric system that has minimized the importance of national public purposes that should be central to the belief systems and political participation of American citizens. Of course, states and other associations must continue to play roles in the lives of all Americans, but we need a system for choosing our sole national leader(s) that gives greater prominence to our common American citizenship.

As I have argued and detailed in my The Twentieth-Eighth Amendment: Beyond Abolishing the Electoral College(Gatekeeper Press, 2020), we need the best possible alternative for the College that can be provided given current understandings of how various alternatives do or would work.  The framers were wise in understanding that determining our national leader through a national popular election could be fraught with dangers, especially if such a process allowed a person to gain presidential power by appealing to a narrow base susceptible to charismatic appeals and/or serving various narrow interests. 

 The dangers of autocratic and/or minority rule and the thwarting of majority rule would not be prevented by the most widely assumed and discussed alternatives: (1) amending the Constitution to select as president the person getting the most votes in a national popular election, and (2) having sufficient state agreement to adopt the National Popular Vote by Interstate Compact (NPVIC),  a proposal for ensuring that winners of presidential elections have the most popular votes but that bypasses the need for a Constitutional amendment.  Neither of these alternatives could prevent a winner supported by far less than a majority of voters, because these “reforms” would encourage a plethora of candidates hoping to gain the presidency by attaining only a small plurality of citizen support.

As argued by David Dayen in “America is Not a Democracy” (American Prospect (Feb. 2024), we need many constitutional reforms, but we would be ill-served by having a constitutional convention to eliminate the College but that could open the door to wholesale constitutional changes that endanger the leading roles of our Constitution in American life and in generating citizen support for our national government.  Changing our method of choosing the president is just one amendment that can be envisioned and could be widely supported that would improve American democracy.  We need to make constitutional changes in an incremental, one-at-a-time manner that preserves Constitutional essentials. But the framers of the Constitution had the audacity to include in Article 5 provisions creating nearly insurmountable obstacles to amending their original but now often outdated provisions in such a manner.  Supermajorities for particular amendments in both houses of Congress and the states are required.  I now believe that a 28^th Amendment should reform Article 5 to make more possible future amendments – each subject to national deliberation and approval.  

To prevail on November 5, Harris should make initiation of such deliberations part of her campaign, and she should suggest two planks as part of the process for generating a different 28^th Amendment than the narrower one focusing on the Electoral College that I proposed four years ago.  She could propose that Article 5 be amended to authorize Congressional approval of future amendments by simple majorities in both the Senate and the House.  She should also support having citizens – rather than state legislatures – vote on and determine the fate of future amendments approved by majorities in both the House and Senate.  I would urge Harris and her team to deliberate on whether a mere majority or a lesser super-majority of citizens (say 60%) would be required to approve such amendments.

Passage of such a 28^th Amendment would increase greatly the chances of passage of my earlier proposed reform of abolishing the Electoral College and choosing our president through a process involving two national popular votes.  While I have provided more details of this proposal in my earlier book, I conclude this brief article by summarizing its basic features.

The first election would replace the current dysfunctional system of state-level primaries and would give all citizens a central role in nominating candidates to run in the final election.  While both the Democratic and the Republican Parties could endorse particular candidates whose names would appear on the ballots for the preliminary election, other parties and organizations could endorse additional candidates.  Qualified independents could also be included on the preliminary election ballot.  Of course, inclusion on this ballot would require meeting qualification criteria that would be developed by future deliberations.  These criteria should be sufficiently lax to enable a wide variety of candidates but sufficiently rigorous to make manageable what inevitably would be a lengthy preliminary ballot.  

In any event, approval balloting should be used in the preliminary election.  Voters would no longer be asked which candidate they most liked but which candidates they trusted to pursue their greatest concerns, whether these be their personal interests, identities, principles, or preferred policies, or the various interests, principles, or preferred policies of the groups and/or communities to which they belong.  Such a broad list of the concerns that voters could bring to indicating those candidates they trust or distrust is intended to highlight that voting choices should be influenced by many considerations beyond the sound bites and slogans that are so prominent today.  It is intended to prompt voters to think less narrowly about which candidate best satisfies a single concern but to consider how all candidates could further or threaten their many legitimate concerns.

The five candidates with the greatest net approval would then qualify for the general election.  They would be listed on the ballot for the general election conducted about two months after the preliminary elections, and they would participate in debates and be eligible to receive public financing of their campaigns.

Rank-order ballots should be used in the general election allowing voters to sharpen their choices.  If no candidate were ranked first by a majority of voters, current computer technologies would allow for “an instant runoff,” in which candidates receiving the least support would be eliminated and the votes of their supporters would then be transferred to their second (or lower but still acceptable) choices.  The process of transferring votes would ensure that candidates having narrow support would be eliminated and that the winner had the support of most citizens.  Using rank-order voting would maximize the legitimacy not only of the winner but also of our electoral system and of politics generally.   Every citizen would be treated as an equal. Every citizen could experience the freedom of voting in a fashion that expressed their most vital public concerns.  Every citizen could appreciate that the winner had achieved the greatest public consent and support that is possible in a nation in which citizens have multiple and diverse concerns.  Every citizen could understand that the president was highly trusted by other citizens.  It would encourage candidates and those who win the presidency to consider the concerns of all citizens.  I argue that such a process could result in American politics that strives for the public good and justice.   

If this electoral process were in place this year, Donald Trump would almost certainly have no chance to become president again.  Whether Kamala Harris would win is uncertain and perhaps even unlikely, but she would at least have the chance to present herself as the most trustworthy of those seeking the highest office in America.  By advocating such a system, her momentum is likely to build, and she and her supporters will have the best opportunity Americans have had in centuries to rid themselves of the archaic Electoral College and thereby enhance American democracy.