The United States is more polarised today than at any point since the 1860s. While Donald Trump has lost the White House, Congress, and, after the January 5 run-off elections in Georgia, the Senate too, Democratic majorities in those deliberative bodies will remain narrow. Partisan feeling, wherever you choose to look, is running high. How do you fix a problem like American democracy?
After Wednesday’s maudlin and humiliating scene — the occasion of which was the official counting of Electoral College votes — it seems obvious that one way would be to abolish the Electoral College. Since its founding, the United States has made its elections more democratic—there’s no reason why the elimination of the Electoral College should not be seen as an overdue and unexceptional continuation of that trend.
The barrier to a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College any time soon is simple: it requires ratification by three quarters of states, and that is a very high bar because there will always be one party that has a better chance of winning in the Electoral College than it does in the popular vote, and that party will block reform for political reasons dressed up as philosophical ones.
Even Before November, Democrats made noises about abolishing the College. Then the election happened: although Joe Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes, his margin in the Electoral College was exactly the same as Trump’s 2016 result, when Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. Even more confounding, Biden’s Electoral College win can be traced not to his huge popular vote margin, but rather to razor thin margins in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin — three states he won by a combined total of fewer than 50,000 votes. If he had lost those states, the electoral college outcome would have been tied at 269 votes each.
Right now, Republicans have a clear advantag, and therefore, reforming the Electoral College now looks as far away as it did four years ago. An unfair and archaic system is likely to endure because, while it does not naturally advantage either party, it has almost always advantaged one or the other.
That’s why, instead of focusing on abolishing the Electoral College, democrats (small “d”) should instead work to expand the House of Representatives. The size of the House of Representatives — 435 Members — has been the same since 1913. In the 108 years since, the population of the United States has more than tripled. Each Member of the House of Representatives now represents approximately 760,000 people, as compared to the 215,000 they represented in 1913. The U.S. is an outlier among major industrialised democracies for the number of constituents assigned to each representative in proportionate national legislative bodies. For comparison’s sake, the UK House of Commons has approximately one MP per 100,000 UK residents.
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