An Outsider's Perspective
Luke Pickrell asks what people in Mexico think about the Electoral College
The election is around the corner. Meanwhile, another Pew Research poll shows that most Americans favor scrapping the Electoral College for direct elections. That’s been the case since at least 2000, when Pew first asked the question. Opinions are split along party lines, with 80 percent of Democrats wanting a change versus 46 of Republicans.
It’s not that people haven’t tried to get rid of the college. Over 700 proposals to reform or eliminate the system have been introduced in Congress since 1800. Two amendments in the 1950s passed the Senate but not the House. In response to the disparity between the college vote and the popular vote in Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee proposed an amendment to create a two-round system similar to what’s used in France. The reform had broad support and “seemed unstoppable” after steamrolling through the House, but was filibustered in the Senate. Even if the amendment had survived the Senate, it was uncertain if 38 states would ratify it. Democrats introduced amendments to abolish the college in 2005 and again in 2009, but both bills died in committee.
The latest attempt at change is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. So far, 17 states and the District of Columbia have joined the compact and agreed to eventually pledge their Electoral College points only to the winner of the national popular vote. But in No Democracy Lasts Forever, UC Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky indicates three flaws in the compact. First, all 17 states are blue, and no red states are likely to join because “Republicans rightly perceive that the Electoral College greatly increases their chances of winning the presidency, as it did in 2000 and 2016.” Second, it’s unclear if the compact is Constitutional; what’s to stop the Supreme Court from throwing it out? Third, it’s nonbinding.
Glumly, Chemerinsky concludes that “there is no easy fix for the Electoral College. It was always a deeply troubling way to choose a president, but it has gotten much worse and will continue to plague the country by choosing popular vote losers to be the chief executive.”
Meanwhile, Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as Mexico’s president on Tuesday, two weeks after the direct election of federal judges became constitutional law. Sheinbaum won the June elections by a landslide, defeating Xóchitl Gálvez not 306 to 232 (Biden v. Trump, 2020), 332 to 206 (Obama v. Romney, 2012), or 271 to 266 (Bush v. Gore, 2000), but 35,924,519 to 16,502,697. My gringo eyes struggle to read such a long number.
In Mexico, each vote counts toward electing the next president. This is not so north of the border, where, as the left-of-center Mexico City paper La Jornada continues to point out, about one percent of the voting population (or six percent of the voters across six swing states) can determine who will be the most powerful person in the world. It bears repeating, wrote David Brooks and Jim Carson last month, that November’s election is “not something that will be decided at the national level, but the final result will be determined by only about six or seven states out of 50, and by a few hundred thousand votes or less.” After the Harris-Trump debate in August, La Jornada quoted findings from Axios, a news and political analysis site, stating, “roughly 244 million Americans will be eligible to vote. But 99.5 percent of us won’t be the deciders: either we don’t vote, always vote the same way, or live in states that are virtually certain to be red or blue.”
Not many (if any) US-based outlets make these critiques.
People in Mexico often ask me who I think will win the election. I use each question as an opportunity to explain that, unlike in Mexico, the US doesn’t have direct elections. Instead, we have a convoluted contraption from the time of slaves called the Electoral College that spits out a “winner” who lost the popular vote with increasing frequency. “Really?” “Huh?” “Why?” “I don’t understand” — these are the most common responses. Maybe it’s the crowd I keep, but most people quickly follow up with some iteration of “That doesn’t sound very democratic.”