Two Republican-led states are demonstrating how the Electoral College can be gamed, in more ways than most voters realize (and even in the middle of a campaign season), in order for state lawmakers to boost their preferred presidential candidate — in this case, Donald Trump.
The Electoral College is set up so that it benefits states with smaller populations over larger ones, due to every state being guaranteed at least three Electoral College votes. This happens because electors are doled out based on how many congressional representatives a state has — every state in the U.S. gets two electors for their senators, plus one for every member of the House.
House districts across the country are determined by state populations, but no matter how many people live in any given state, they receive at least one House representative. That means a state like Wyoming, which has a population of around 580,000, receives three Electoral College votes (two for its senators and one for its lone House member), amounting to about one elector per 193,000 residents. California, meanwhile, has two senators and 52 representatives, giving the state 54 electors. With a population of around 38.9 million, that amounts to around one elector per 720,000 residents — meaning Wyoming’s voters have around 3.7 times more voting power than California’s.
This system is how Republican presidents, including Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000, have been able to win the Electoral College (and thus the White House) without attaining the popular vote.
But the fragility of the Electoral College is now becoming evident in other ways, especially since states are able to decide for themselves how they want to distribute their votes among electors. Every state in the country does so through an election, with almost all of them awarding every electoral vote they have to whoever wins the statewide contest. However, two states — Nebraska and Maine — allow each congressional district to decide where they want their electoral vote to go, with the remaining two votes going to whoever wins the state overall.
Nebraska may soon change that rule. Republicans met at the governor’s mansion this week to discuss the idea of switching to the winner-takes-all model employed by nearly every other state. Though Republicans claim the move is motivated by a desire to conform with the rest of the nation, the changes appear to be under consideration for partisan reasons — to benefit Trump in the race for president.
The state’s second congressional district is home to Omaha, the largest city and a Democratic epicenter in the state. Under the current model, it’s very likely that that district’s electoral vote will go to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The change to the winner-take-all method would essentially remove one Electoral College vote from her total.
The Constitution requires a presidential candidate to attain a majority of Electoral College votes — in the modern era of elections, that means 270 electors. There’s an extremely small, though by no means non-existent, chance that Harris will win the presidency with that exact number. If that happens, Trump will likely get 268 electors backing him — however, if Nebraska changes to the winner-take-all model, the two will instead be tied, with 269 electors apiece.
Per the Constitution, the House of Representatives would then decide who becomes president, with each House delegation receiving one vote. Right now, Republicans have majority control of the House delegations, and it’s highly probable that will remain the case after the election, which would mean, under that unlikely (but still possible) scenario, Harris could lose the election due to Nebraska’s possible decision to change its electoral vote allocation rules.
A second state has potentially thrown the Electoral College out of whack by changing its rules earlier this year. In August, Georgia state election officials passed new regulations allowing local officials the ability to dispute election outcomes, giving them undefined powers to challenge results through what they dubbed a “reasonable inquiry.”
The new rule doesn’t specify how long such an inquiry can last, which means it could stretch on indefinitely, beyond the deadline to submit the state’s 16 Electoral College votes.
If Harris happens to win Georgia, and she and Trump split the other swing states that are available, the delay (or delays) from local officials could mean Georgia’s electors won’t be submitted at all — again, creating a situation where neither candidate gets the majority in the Electoral College, producing the same outcome as the Nebraska scenario, where the decision on who should become president would head to state House delegations to decide.
The Nebraska and Georgia examples showcase how easy it could be for political parties to manipulate the Electoral College, this year or in the future, in order to help one candidate over the other. Other states could follow suit, deciding to change the rules even within the time frame in which early voting is permitted, as will likely be the case in Nebraska should Republicans indeed change how the state allocates its electors.
A popular vote for president would ensure that these types of changes won’t affect the outcome of the election overall. It would also allow presidents to be selected based on the democratic preferences of the people, rather than a system that was established as a compromise by lawmakers who created the Constitution more than two centuries ago — many of whom were concerned with keeping the institution of slavery intact for as long as possible.
Many arguments against changing to a popular vote system fall apart upon closer inspection. Some critics believe, for example, that candidates will focus on a small number of highly populated states under a popular vote model, thereby shrinking the map of constituents they might try to court during election season.
But the Electoral College system has already shrunk the map, as only seven states are being courted by both Harris and Trump, with the rest being ignored because they’re considered “safe states” for the candidates.
Indeed, if a candidate wanted to win the popular vote — presuming such a system would also include ranked choice voting to ensure a majority of voters approve of whoever is ultimately selected — it would require them to court voters from the nine most populous states to reach that majority threshold. That also presumes that a candidate could convince 100 percent of voters from those states to back them. Given the political divide in the U.S., candidates would likely require support from voters in additional states to reach a majority.
Polling indicates that a majority of voters do not support keeping the Electoral College in place. For example, a Pew Research Center poll from 2023 found that 65 percent of voters were against the Electoral College, favoring a move toward a popular vote model instead. Only 33 percent of voters — the lowest in Pew’s history of polling on the issue — wanted to keep the Electoral College system.
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