People Trying To End The Electoral College: Hillary Clinton Should Be President, Not Donald Trump, Critics Claim

Members of the Electoral College will meet Dec. 19 in their respective states to officially choose President-elect Donald Trump as the next chief of state, sending their votes to state and federal officials before a formal electoral vote count in Congress on Jan. 6.

But some, like Justin Nelson, founder and president of Electoral College reform organization One Nation One Vote, are wondering why the U.S. uses the system in the first place. “The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they knew that the current version of the Electoral College is one where not only does it not deliberate, but it rubber-stamps the loser in a popular vote election,” Nelson told U.S. News & World Report. “It’s vital for democracy that the candidate with the most votes win.”

The motivation behind the Electoral College is generally tied to founding father James Madison’s fear of political factions and his worry, as described in his late-18th-century Federalist papers, that citizens’ freedoms might be poisoned by “the tyranny of their own passions.”

Nearly 230 years later, Trump is this year's presidential victor, with 306 electoral votes to opponent Hillary Clinton’s 232—despite his losing the popular vote by 2.85 million. A similar phenomenon occurred 16 years ago, when candidate Al Gore beat President George W. Bush by 500,000 votes in the popular tally, but narrowly lost the in the Electoral College—where 270 are needed to win—with 266 to Bush’s 271.

“This is the second time it’s happened in 16 years,” said Mark Weston, a political reporter and author of “The Runner-Up Presidency: Elections That Defied America’s Popular Will (And How Our Democracy Remains In Danger).” “This time, we need to plan in advance.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has also been an outspoken advocate for the termination of the Electoral College, calling the disparity between the two a “profound problem.”

“We’ve never seen such a disconnect between the popular vote and the Electoral College vote in the history of this entire country,” de Blasio said in a Nov. 29 press conference. “This is absolutely unprecedented, and I think it creates a huge question for our democracy. How is the president-elect going to proceed knowing that he had 2.3 million more people vote for his opponent?”

In a Nov. 16 New York Times op-ed, Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale University law professor and author, argued that the fact that state governors don’t rely on electoral vote systems in their elections served as enough evidence that the entire country could survive without one. In 2001, he suggested that presidential candidates agree long before November to rely solely on the popular vote, and, in his more recent column, pointed to this method as a possible option four years from now.

“Keep your eye on 2020,” Amar wrote.