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But the 17th Amendment established direct election of senators in 1913, and the population gap between the largest and smallest states has increased enormously since the Constitution was written. The current Democratic minority in the Senate was elected with more votes than the Republican majority, and by 2040, according to population projections, about 70 percent of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of the senators.
Nearly a century ago, Carroll H. Wooddy published a scholarly article examining the probability of “unrepresentative votes” in the Senate, referring to votes in which senators on the winning side represented fewer Americans than senators on the winning side. loser. He concluded that these votes occurred infrequently, largely because “there has not been a continuous alliance of sparsely populated states against more densely populated areas.”
Today, of course, population density is highly correlated with partisanship, and the composition of the Senate is not representative of the population not only in party, but in race, gender, age, and other characteristics.
Supporters of the Electoral College argue that it protects the least populated states, ensuring that their interests are not overridden by those of, say, New York and California. At the same time, opponents point out that the system means that candidates only pay attention to a small number of states and that it devalues the votes of people from either party living in one state dominated by the other. Republicans in Illinois don’t affect the presidential election, and neither do Democrats in Tennessee.
It remains to be seen whether the 2020 election will fuel the efforts to eliminate or bypass the Electoral College, which have always been a long shot despite the fact that the majority of Americans (61 percent in a Gallup poll published in September); 58 percent in a March Pew Research Center poll believe it should be abolished.
John Koza, president of National Popular Vote Inc., said his group, which has been lobbying state legislatures for years to sign a pact in which states commit to awarding their constituents to the winner of the national popular vote, he planned to lobby heavily next year in states like Arizona, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The pact has already been signed by states, mainly blue, for a total of 196 electoral votes, but it will not go into effect unless that number reaches 270.
Dr. Koza, a computer scientist who taught at Stanford University, argues that the Electoral College should be abolished not because it systematically benefits one party over the other, but because it increases the likelihood that election results will be questioned even when preference general of the Americans It is clear, precisely what is happening now.
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