On Sunday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said lawmakers in Congress should begin the process of abolishing the Electoral College, describing the mechanism as a danger to the American people due to the plethora of ways it can be exploited.
In comments on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program, Raskin said that presidents should be elected by a popular vote model instead.
“We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else — whoever gets the most votes wins,” Raskin said.
Raskin noted that other countries reject the framework of the Electoral College. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that Electoral College that you have, that’s so great, we think we will adopt that too,'” he said.
Notably, the Electoral College system provides several avenues for a presidential candidate to subvert the will of the people, the Maryland Democrat explained.
“There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Raskin said.
Earlier this month, as part of the omnibus spending package, both houses of Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, legislation that would limit ways for lawmakers to seek to subvert the outcome of the Electoral College vote; the bill is largely a response to actions by Republicans in early 2021, when members of the party aligned with former President Donald Trump to challenge electors’ votes in several states that Trump lost to President Joe Biden.
“I’m for [the Electoral Count Reform Act], and that’s the very least we can do and we must do,” Raskin said. “It’s necessary, but it’s not remotely sufficient.”
Raskin, a member of the January 6 committee, added:
The Electoral College now — which has given us five popular-vote losers as president in our history, twice in this century alone — has become a danger, not just to democracy, but to the American people. It was a danger on January 6.
Although abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, Raskin is far from alone in his views. A majority of Americans support ending the Electoral College system and replacing it with a popular vote model instead.
According to polling this past summer from Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Americans back a popular vote method for picking the president, while just 35 percent say they want to keep the current system in place.
This rate of support is the highest Pew Research Center has seen on the question since at least the year 2000.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.