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America in and of itself was a perfect dream implemented by imperfect men.

But the foresight of the founding fathers

was to understand their innate imperfection

and to create a system that was empowered

with the mechanics for change.

I have a dream

that one day on the red hills of Georgia

sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners,

will they be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream.

The Electoral College is one of the things

that it gives the framework for you to have the power

to stand up for your rights and your liberties.

You’ve had it for so long people don’t know what it truly means.

The actual structure that we have that has allowed us to get here

is not the thing that we should want to take down.

A lots happened over the years.

And while this nation has been tested by war

and it’s been tested by recession

and all matter of challenges I stand before you again tonight

after almost two terms as your president to tell you

I am more optimistic about the future of America

than eve before.

America was designed to protect individual rights

and getting rid of the Electoral College

is the simplest way to make sure that we fall short of our potential.

People have gotten stuck on the word democracy but we are a democratic republic

designed to cool the passions of society.

That is what the constitution was designed to do and by extension,

that is what the Electoral College is designed to safeguard.

That’s also why this experiment we call America has been so effective for so long.

I remember when I first studied American politics

and constitutionalism the idea of Electoral College

is always kind of an outlier

if for no other reason it’s not a college.

I mean you don’t actually go there to study.

It doesn’t actually exist in the same way.

Well what is this thing?

It’s an odd bird in the sense of it’s not an obvious thing.

Having said that it’s a quite brilliant creation

on the part of the founders.

After the American Revolution

and before the constitution you have this period of time

where we had a different constitution called the Articles of Confederation

and this was a really, really simple government.

It’s basically just a congress with nothing else.

And that meant that the states really just did their own thing.

The revolution was fought on behalf of self-government in colonial capitals.

So if you were from Connecticut you were fighting the revolution

in order to be taxed not from Westminster but from Hartford.

And why was Hartford preferable?

Well because that’s the people that you were electing.

And does that mean that you wanted a government

that had input from people who lived in Georgia?

No. It did not mean that.

In fact you probably had no conception of people who lived in Georgia.

You almost certainly had no contact with people

from outside your own region, probably your own state.

You likely never met anybody who had been there.

You’d never talked to anyone from there.

You didn’t even know what they sounded like.

We often think that the United States

started as a powerful nation. It didn’t.

It started as 13 feeble states barely knit together by a continental agreement.

And all around these states was the British Empire.

And then to the west across the Mississippi River the Spanish Empire.

The European states had not gone away.

They were fully as threatening and present

as they had been at any other time.

And here were these 13 states

making themselves weaker and weaker day by day

with the way they argued with each other.

And then people realized there’s essentially no way

that those states can vindicate the rights of people

who live there unless their leagued together.

So this doesn’t mean that you think

that if you’re in New Jersey that you want New Yorkers

to be involved in anything to do with the government you have.

But you need to league with them in fighting this war.

But that poses a problem

because a lot of the rhetoric of the revolution

is about home rule and not having excessive government,

not having government that’s not accountable to you

and your neighbors.

Why would you be fighting a revolution

against distant unaccountable authority

and then trying to create a new distant unaccountable authority.

The founders saw that the democracy that was going on

within the states was not doing a good job

in some cases of protecting individual rights.

So when they got together to create the constitution

this was one of the things they knew they had to do

although at the beginning they didn’t know quite

how they were going to do it.

But they knew they had to create a government

that the power comes from the people

but also a government they couldn’t oppress the people.

And that was what set them down this road

of writing the American constitution.

In order to create a government that would work, the founders

of the constitutional convention realized

that you had to create a federal government

that was going to be able to exercise

in an effective way, three basic functions of government.

One is legislating.

One is putting that legislation into effect.

And the other is judging the laws that are passed by the legislative branch

and carried out by the executive branch and that’s the judiciary.

The concerns of the founders were premised upon a certain view of human nature.

They thought that people were ultimately corrupt or corruptible

and therefore the incentives that operated

within a given system would shape their behavior.

And so we have this Rube Goldberg device essentially

that is set up to make it difficult for laws to be enacted willy nilly.

The founders knew based on human history

that the same government that has the power to imprison you

or even take your life or take someone else’s life

should not be able to make decisions quickly.

Because through history often minorities

were disadvantaged at the hands of government.

At the time the founding fathers were drafting the constitution

they had one principle thought in mind. And that is

preserving the liberties of the American people.

They were living at a time when there was a lot of tyranny

and to their observation it came from the fact

that the same person or group

could both make a law and enforce the law.

So the ability to make and enforce the law allows for self-dealing.

There’s a concern with one’s own interests.

This goes back to human nature as the founder’s understood it.

If people have the opportunity to exercise power in their favor

it will be a temptation to do so,

one that may be too difficult to resist.

So you create an institution that will prevent this

or at least reduce the ability to self deal.

So in order to make sure in the new constitution

that no person or group could do both of those things,

make the law and enforce the law,

they decided to place the lawmaking in one category

and the enforcement of the law in another category.

Separation of powers had not been the norm in history.

So it was a doctrine that was made popular by Montesquieu

and others about the time of the revolution, a bit before.

And it was the recognition that if you wanted to control power

you couldn’t let one person sit in every capacity

and as they always say absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So we divide the power up.

But there is a misperception out there

that the founders were elitists who didn’t trust the people

and the reality is they didn’t trust anybody.

They knew that left to his own devices the president

sometimes will abuse his power. Left to their own devices

the congress sometimes will abuse its power.

Same with the judiciary.

The national government versus the state government,

the elected officials versus the people who are voting for them,

everybody is subject to this problem of human nature.

And the founders set up a system of absolutely nobody is trusted.

Everybody is given a little bit of power

to check the others to create accountability.

And the founders hoped that in this way

they would protect liberty

from the imperfections of human nature.

Liberty when you examine what the founders thought about it

meant fundamentally that the citizens of a republic

could conduct their business,

go their way and live their lives

for the most part unmolested by the power

and the intervention of the federal government.

So what do you do?

You take liberty and you protect it from its chief enemy.

Because the chief threat to liberty is power.

Well, what do you do then? You take power and you divide it.

You make the different parts and aspects of political power

in effect quarrel with each other

and expend their energy balancing each other.

Because when they do that

then they’re not going to be a threat to the liberties of the people.

So this was the central problem of the constitutional convention.

How do we empower government and yet curb its excesses of power?

What was finally arrived at after long months of debate

was the idea of the single president

who would have all the responsibility

of the executive authority in his hands

but would also be limited in certain important ways

by powers that were distributed to the legislative branch

and to the judicial branch.

Yesterday, December 7, 1941

a date which will live in infamy

United States of America

was suddenly and deliberately attacked

by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

What does the president do?

The president is there to act now.

He doesn’t make the law.

In the congress a slow process is very good.

With an executive a slow process can often be very bad.

In a crisis you may not have time.

We need executives who can execute

and execute effectively and quickly.

The president is not supposed to have very much power

over how government works.

The president's supposed to make government work.

The president is supposed to be in charge

The president is supposed to be in charge of actually getting things done but not deciding what gets done

of actually getting things done but not deciding what gets done

or what policies are going to be carried out.

That’s supposed to be congress. As congress has done less

and less the executive has had to do more and more.

And it’s shifted our political attention to the White House

and it’s why we have these big fights over presidential elections.

One of the big problems of the constitutional convention

was deciding how will we select an executive.

And they talked about all kinds of things.

Should it be a multi person executive?

You serve three people like a triumvirate

or something like that? Should it be one person?

And how is that person going to be chosen?

Some folks thought that it should be the people should vote

and the executive should be relying on the popular vote.

But representatives primarily from smaller states were concerned.

They said well, the bigger states have more population

and they’ll just rule everything.

They went back and forth small states

versus large the whole summer.

And finally at the end of the summer behind closed doors

in a subcommittee that had been dispatched

to wrap up some remaining items that’s where the idea

for the Electoral College was generated.

And all that we really know about it

is that one of the delegates later wrote Mr. Madison

took out the pen and paper and he sketched out an idea.

And that’s what we know. They came back

and they presented this Electoral College idea

to the full convention. And they tweaked a few things

but they largely accepted the idea

that Madison and the other subcommittee meetings had presented.

And that’s how we got our Electoral College.

To create a separate independent executive

who was independent of the congress,

had his own or her own authority under the constitution,

it was necessary to develop a system of election.

What would be the best way to do that?

They thought prominent people would be elected

by the population in general and those prominent people

would then elect the president.

The prominent people became known as electors.

A presidential elector is actually a real person.

They’re elected at the state level.

The electors never meet all together nationally.

They just meet in their own states.

And in December all they do

is vote for president and vice president.

Then they go home, never to be heard from again.

And in January we legally know who really is elected president

and vice president

and a few weeks later they’re sworn in.

The states began to realize

that if the state allocated all its electors

to one person the state would have much more to say

about who became president.

And so almost all the states then began to require

the person who gets the majority of the popular vote in the state

would be chosen by the electors casting

all of the votes of that state.

The whole Electoral College process is a democratic process.

It’s one person, one vote. Right?

All the democratic principles apply just at the state level.

So in a presidential election year the state republicans,

the state democrats, maybe the state libertarians,

maybe the state green party, they will have a convention

and they will nominate people to be their presidential electors.

If their party wins that state’s presidential election

then their nominees for presidential elector

become that state’s presidential electors

and get to cast those electoral votes for their party’s nominee.

Mr. President the certificate of the electoral vote

of the state of California

seems to be regular in form and authentic.

And it appears therefrom that Hilary Clinton

of the state of New York received 55 votes for president

and Tim Cain of the Commonwealth of Virginia

received 55 votes for vice president.

We don’t expect our electors to use their own discretion.

In fact we call those faithless electors

and they’re pretty rare.

So we do expect our electors – and they pledge indeed to vote

for the person who won overall in the state.

So the idea that your vote doesn’t count

in the Electoral College is strange.

Your vote does count.

It contributes to whoever wins your state.

But really you wouldn’t want it any other way.

If you’re a California voter, you want the candidate

who is most popular in California to get the maximum advantage.

Similarly if you live in Wyoming,

similarly if you live in North Dakota.

So we have democracy today

but we have 51 democratic elections, not just one.

And so they decentralized those votes to recognize

that states are different.

You can think of the World Series the same way.

It’s not who gets the most runs in seven games.

It’s who wins the most games. And the Electoral College

it’s who wins in effect the most states,

not just who gets the most votes in total across the nation.

And those are very different systems.

But no one says the World Series is undemocratic

because my team got 24 runs in the series

and your team got 12 but they won more games.

It's just each game becomes its individualized contest.

The Electoral College idea reflected the compromises

that had already been made

in the composition of the legislature.

So of course in our congress we have a senate

with one state one vote representation

which makes the small states happy.

That is what they were used to before we had a constitution at all.

It also has a house with one person one vote representation

which of course satisfied the big states

because their larger populations would be reflected.

The Electoral College reflects the same compromise

and the reason it reflects that compromise is

because you have the same number of electors

as you have members of congress.

So there is an element of one state one vote

in the Electoral College

but there’s also an element of one person one vote.

California still has many more electors than a state

like Wyoming or Rhode Island.

This system solved a lot of their philosophical problems

of a democracy within a republic.

It also played the role of kind of breaking up regional factions

which is something they were extremely concerned about

especially at the time of the founding.

And it made the presidency representative

of all of the popular aspects within the federal government.

Such that the presidency today is the one office,

in this case the office is an individual

that actually represents all of the American people

as opposed to a particular state or a congressional district.

So after all this it’s quite ironic

that the Electoral College

is being attacked as being anti-democratic

when indeed the creation of Electoral College

made executive leadership

possible within a democratic republic.

And without that I think the system

really wouldn’t have worked

and actually many of the regional divides

we all know about in American history

would have probably broken down a long time ago.

We have to understand that the Electoral College

fundamentally is about federalism

which means it’s about the basics of our constitutional system

because the constitution creates a federal union.

Federalism fundamentally means that states

which have their own sovereignty as states agree

to act for common purposes

in creating an overarching umbrella federal government

that will help them do as a collective

what is difficult or impossible for them to do as individuals.

For instance states are perfectly competent

to design their own educational systems,

build their bridges and designate their state capitals.

They are much, much less competent

to conduct foreign policy, create armies and build navies.

Far better for a federal government

to be responsible for. That is exactly the balance

that the federal constitution creates.

State governments are independent sovereigns.

The federal government cannot tell them what to do.

That’s an important way of keeping a check

on the power the federal or in this case central government.

The federal system we have I think

runs exactly the way the funders designed and envisioned it to.

It’s often been said that the states laboratories

of democracy again is very much the case.

Wyoming in 1892 they let women vote long

before anyone else wanted women to vote.

Other states soon followed

and this has happened in other ways as well.

Whether it’s abolishing slavery

or enacting certain civil rights measures.

And if the federal government were left to be in charge

we would basically be waiting for 50 sets of representatives

and senators to all simultaneously come

to the same revolutionary way of thinking

and to enact some of these measures.

Whereas when you can rely on a smaller subset one state

or one region or a group of states

to have these new ideas

it’s easier to get the ball rolling.

Our states preexist the constitution.

They were colonies and then they were sovereign states

and they remain sovereign states.

And the Electoral College is what pulls them together

in order to elect a chief executive

that is over all of them protecting

and making sure that the smaller members of the federation,

of the federal union are not simply overwhelmed and ignored

by the popular vote nationwide.

It’s that federalism which the Electoral College

is the premier example of in our constitutional system.

If we begin to tamper with the Electoral College what we’re

really starting to do is to dismantle the federal system.

And when that happens then we’re kissing goodbye

to all the possibilities that federalism has represented.

Greater democracy,

greater participation and greater liberty.

One other historical benefit we can see of federalism

lies in the fact that eventually

after the constitutional convention

one by one northern states take action

in their own legislatures to abolish slavery.

If there hadn’t been federalism,

if the states hadn’t had the option and the authority

to make that kind of decision for themselves

you would never have had the development of a free north.

And a free north which in time to come

would be able to stand up against the aggressions

of what became known as the slave power.

We would not have had the leverage necessary

towards the final abolition of slavery

without those individual federalized distinctions

and decisions made by individual state legislators.

We also as we sort of grow up in this country

and we vote in all sorts of lesser elections

the principle of majority rule

seems to prevail in virtually every other election.

I don’t understand why at this point in time

we continue to adhere

to a system that again undermines in my view

the principle of political equality

and simply doesn’t follow the straightforward logic

of majority rule.

The trouble with the word democracy is it means

lots of different things to lots of different people.

When the founders talked about democracy

they thought of a bunch of people getting together and voting on stuff.

When people talk about it today they often use it

for what the founders would have talked about as a republic.

So when the founders were creating our country

they had several examples to look back to in the past,

places where the public ruled.

And those places were primarily in antiquated Greece.

And there the public ruled directly

by making decisions collectively.

And of course that was impossible

in an extended republic like ours

to bring all of the American citizens together

even at that early stage.

So they understood that we needed

a republican form of government.

And what they meant by that was a representative form

of governing where the will of the people

is translated through elected officers.

They wanted the public will to be refined

and enlarged through our representatives.

But they not only thought a democracy would be impossible

in this extended republic but also wise.

I mean ultimately you have to decide do you value democracy

or do you value individual rights?

And so it’s always majority rule, minority right.

If everything is simply 51 percent

then that gives me an interest to just get my 51 percent,

make it as less diverse as possible

so that I can actually govern

and ignore you 49 percent of everybody else.

The notion that the country is ruled by the majority

is a fiction.

The biggest problem that the framers had to deal with

was the difficulty that basically we don’t all get along

in the sense that we have different interests.

Once people have liberty they will tend to fragment

and that’s the problem.

The question is what do you do about it?

And there are two ways to deal with it.

One, you try to get rid of them which they do

in tyrannical countries, despotic countries.

Or you adopt the solution that our framers adopted

and that was you divide and conquer.

What you make sure if that you have many factions,

not just a majority faction and a minority faction.

When you say 50 percent plus 1 you’re referring

to one big faction versus everybody else.

But in this country we have many, many factions.

We try to multiply the factions.

And the more we get the less powerful any one is.

These are all very carefully crafted checks and balances

that establish the idea that the majority generally

should get its way in a number of areas

but we are going to have mechanisms that from time

to time are going to frustrate the majority.

And we see that in Supreme Court rulings from time to time.

We see that when the senate is able to block legislation.

Occasionally we see it in the election of the president.

The majority generally gets its way in our federal republic

but not always.

The constitution does not establish a democracy.

The constitution is about establishing self-government

in a way that protects individual rights

which oftentimes is directly at odds with democracy.

If what the majority of the people want in some particular moment

is to interfere with the rights of a minority.

Well, the constitution was set up to have varying degrees

of the democratic process show up in different places

most obviously the election of the house.

But also you see this in the delegation of power

to state legislatures all through the constitution

where the state legislatures can decide

how to elect the electors,

how to run an election, how to manage their own affairs.

So the founders have a lot of democracy

if you will in the election of the house.

And they have little bits of democracy elsewhere

that is also balanced with minority rights

and that’s what makes the constitution

such a brilliant document.

Abraham Lincoln had to deal in 1858

with an opponent in the form of Stephen A Douglas.

Stephen A Douglas was a firm believer in democracy.

He was so firm of believer that he believed

that every citizen in every territory

in every state to cast a majority vote

for whether they wanted to have slavery or not slavery.

He didn’t inquire into the morality of slavery.

He simply said that if a majority of the people

in a given territory

or a given state wanted to have slavery then they could have it

if that majority voted in favor of it,

no further questions asked.

For him democracy was an end in itself.

That’s all you needed to ask. What did the majority want?

In modern democracies we sometimes talk

a little carelessly in the tones of Stephen A Douglas

that what matters is whether a 51 percent majority

has endorsed something.

And that is true up to a point but there is a circle

that is drawn around a set of rights,

rights that Jefferson talks about,

rights that are articulated in the first ten amendments

to the constitution, the bill of rights.

So we recognize that even in a democratic system

there are certain

non-negotiables that majorities cannot pass on.

But we’ve been told that well,

as long as it’s democratic its’ fine.

That’s a terrible idea.

The most undemocratic part of the constitution

is the bill of rights.

The bill of rights is flatly antidemocracy

because the bill of rights says

we don’t care how big your majority is.

You can’t establish a national church.

We don’t care how big your majority is.

You can’t outlaw the press.

We don’t care how big your majority is.

You can’t turn to a private group

that wants to influence politics

and say we’re going to outlaw you meeting together.

And these things will always be in conflict.

Every American has to decide do we value democracy more

or do we value individual rights more.

Historically the answer in our constitution

is we value individual rights more than democracy.

Democracy is a great process but it’s a process.

It’s not a purpose.

Talk is again turning to the final deciders,

the members of the Electoral College.

After Hilary Clinton won the popular vote

but lost the Electoral College vote to Donald Trump

there were new calls to abolish

the constitutionally mandated system.

Before the founding most people believed that democracies

could only be executed at a very small scale

as to say a city state.

But our founders had a different notion.

They thought not only could you have a republic,

a representative form of government in this large nation

but in fact that republic would be better.

And the reason it would be better was

because if you enlarge the scope of the people

within a government

those people have to form coalitions in order to govern.

And there’s rarely going to be an instance

where 50 percent or 51 percent of the public

feel the same way across every issue.

That is to say they have the same religion,

the same vocation, the same fashion.

You’re rarely to have a group that’s that monolithic

across the entirety of this extended republic.

So what do you have to do?

Well, you have to make coalitions with people

about which you agree on a certain issue

but not perhaps on all issues.

And in that way everyone governs a bit.

Everyone has a chance to be heard on issues

that are most important, most salient to them.

Thank you. Well, it’s no secret.

I’m here today to announce

that I’m running for president of the United States.

One of the things that probably they didn’t even

fully anticipate was that the Electoral College

would force you as a presidential candidate

to have to put together a national coalition.

You couldn’t do it winning one popular state

or a sectional candidate or a special interest candidate.

You had to bring together diverse groups.

You may be unified by a certain principle.

But on other issues you may not be so much together on

and culturally you may not like each other.

But it was a system that allowed for political competition

but doing so in a way in which you try to bring people together

rather than trying to find ways of dividing

and inflaming passions.

So what the Electoral College does,

it forces everyone to make sure that they make the rounds,

not just in the middle of America,

not just to the financiers of the world in New York.

Not just tinsel town in California.

To make sure that they make the rounds

going to all of the states,

all of America to bring the unified message.

The presidential vote is not one big thing.

It’s broken into pieces.

And how you put those pieces together like a puzzle

is how the president creates a governing consensus.

The democrats are a going concern

in the most republican states, in Oklahoma, in Wyoming.

The republicans have campaign offices

in political organization in California, in Vermont.

This is part of the Electoral College driving the parties

to constantly be probing can we pull this state

or that state into our coalition.

We hear this talk every four years about expanding the map.

That’s Electoral College lingo. Right?

Expanding the map means reaching out,

winning people over, building a bigger coalition.

Expanding the map is an inherently good thing

that comes directly from the Electoral College.

Without the Electoral College the presidency

would be decided in Boston, New York, Chicago,

Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

That’s where the game would be without the Electoral College.

Instead of that you have candidates for president

going all over the country and not just going to urban cores.

Politics are local so the Electoral College

brings a national campaign to the local community.

Candidates have to be careful

about how they allocate their time and resources

because it is unproductive to spend too much time

in one part of the country or in one big city.

So over and over again throughout history

presidential candidates who have tried to overly focus

on one type of voter have failed.

The Electoral College does not reward that.

On the flip side if we had a national popular vote system

we would suddenly find that that strategy became very productive

because it’s easier to go spend a bunch of time racking up votes

among voters that already want to vote for you.

You can imagine a democrat running out to Los Angeles

or San Francisco

and promising the environmental lobby anything they want.

Because if you can get 100 percent of California voters

behind you that’s way better than getting

50.01 percent of voters behind you.

Likewise you can see republicans

running out to Houston and Dallas

and promising the oil interest anything they want.

You’re now just chasing a few ideas and policies

in the most populated areas.

Obviously in a system without the Electoral College,

you’re now going to start promising positions of power

in the bureaucracy in D.C.

to whatever locations get that president

the national popular vote majority that he needs.

So can you imagine having a system where the EPA director

is always going to go to Los Angeles County

because Los Angeles County

is always going to deliver 10 million votes.

Whoever wins that national popular vote

is going to be incentivized to distribute the winnings

if you will and the strings of power

to those few localities that have resulted in them winning.

Help make history and volunteer

because this race is going to be won on the ground

and it’s going to be won in Colorado and in lowa

and in North Carolina

and Virginia and Florida and Pennsylvania

and then we’re going to the White House.

Howard Dean took over the DNC and his big push

was a 50 state model

where he was going to focus on party

building in each of the 50 states.

Now granted democrats didn’t start competing closely

in Texas or Georgia right away but they are now.

And I think that’s attributable to Howard Dean

really recognizing in a way that other people

didn’t that a 50 state model works.

And that a party that competes across all of the 50 states

and puts more states in play wins more.

My name is Stacy Abrams and I

intend to be the next governor of Georgia.

You look at Georgia and Texas

and how close those races are becoming.

I think you can trace that back to the party

building that was done at that time.

And I think the republicans should play catch up now

and focus on building up the party apparatus in blue states.

Honestly Trump was the first candidate

that took the upper Midwest seriously.

It’s because he had better data.

The better data becomes the more clear it will be

that more states are in play

because you have a sense that "oh these people are not as won over

by the party that’s been winning that state as you might suspect."

So I think more states are going to come out like that

and I think 2016 was evidence of that.

Without the Electoral College the democratic party

would be really tempted to ignore a lot of Americans.

That would be terrible for democrats

who live in places frankly like Vermont. Right?

I mean I think this is why Howard Dean

talked about a 50 state strategy because Howard Dean did not want

his democrats to be left behind by the New York democrats,

the LA democrats, the Chicago democrats.

The Electoral College in a way is more important

to the democratic party than to anybody else

because it forces them not to become so insular,

so urban centric that they ignore the rest of the country.

We’re still an extraordinarily diverse country

so it’s important for our system of selecting the president

to represent that diversity

and in fact to enforce candidates for office

to experience that diversity firsthand.

That’s exactly what our Electoral College does by

in a way forcing presidents to go out to every

and each region of the country

to fight out the election in these swing states

which we’re been fortunate in every election

to have many of them spread across the country.

It’s good for America if the democrats

have a 50 state strategy and it’s good for America

if the republicans have a 50 state strategy.

If we start ignoring people and writing off huge swaths

of the country we are destroying our country.

America is not a one size fits all.

Right? We have different values, different thoughts, different beliefs.

That’s why we have a system of government

where one political party can win in one year

and four years later it could be a different political party.

You can’t win the presidency without urban voters.

You can’t win the presidency without rural voters.

You can’t win the presidency without minorities of every stripe.

You can’t win the Electoral College without that.

If you throw that off and you just had one national vote,

all you need to do is win one more vote than the next person.

One of the keys to the Electoral College’s success

is we get competitive elections.

So Barak Obama can win the Electoral College

and Donald Trump can win the Electoral College

and George Bush could win the Electoral College

and Bill Clinton could win the Electoral College.

That’s something pretty cool about that.

Right now 8:00 PM on the east coast

Connecticut seven electoral votes for president.

Delaware the president will take three electoral votes.

The District of Columbia, Washington D.C.

and it’s three electoral votes,

his home state of Illinois a big prize, 20 electoral votes.

The president also will take Maryland

and it’s ten electoral votes,

in Massachusetts the home state of Mitt Romney,

all 11 electoral votes.

In Maine three of the four electoral votes.

Rhode Island all four electoral votes.

So you have to be more than a narrow candidate.

That’s fine in a congressional election or a state election.

But nationally in a country like this

which is a continental nation the Electoral College

ensures as much as possible

that you put together a national coalition.

Another way that the Electoral College

works in the direction of conferring legitimacy

is the way that it sustains the two party system.

We’ve had a two party system since the 1790s.

People in the constitutional convention

hadn’t envisioned a party system

but the party system did come into existence.

One major reason that it comes into existence

is the Electoral College.

Now sometimes we have had third party candidates.

There have been occasions which we have even

had a fourth party candidate, maybe even a fifth.

They tend to be very narrow single issue kind of events

and they’re often quite ephemeral

because they’re built around personalities.

The assumption I think is once you eliminate

the Electoral College

that we will continue to have two parties

and so that will mean that everyone who is a nominee

of one of the major parties

will come very close to getting a majority

if not a majority at least very close to a majority

but that’s not true. Because once you eliminate

the usefulness of the Electoral College

you go to a system where it’s just the popular vote,

you could have 12, 15, 20 parties.

To get the majority in the Electoral College

you need to concentrate people’s votes

behind a limited number of candidates.

You can’t really elect a candidate president

who only brings in about 15 or 20 percent

of the popular vote in the states.

If you have a direct popular vote

in which the person who just gets the most votes wins

and doesn’t have to have a majority,

just more than anybody else,

this will encourage candidates to stay in the race

as long as they think there’s any chance

they can be the one with the most votes.

If you’re in a multi candidate, a direct popular vote

and you’re running third with say 24 percent

and the person in second has 28

and the person in first has 30 maybe you can catch him.

Everybody stays in the race

and you end up actually not getting a clear, popular winner.

Because once you eliminate the usefulness

of the Electoral College what happens

is that everyone will get into the game.

We will have a lot of people running

for the pro-immigration party and the anti-immigration party

and the prochoice and the prolife parties.

In fact it would be entirely possible

that no one would even come close when the outcome comes.

And let’s assume that in the end the person

who is the prolife party gets 23 percent of the vote

and that happens to be the highest percentage

of anyone running.

Well, then the voters in New York and California

and Illinois and Wisconsin who voted for someone else

entirely would find that they’ve elected a president

who is prolife.

We would elect a president on the basis of someone

who comes in with 25 percent of the vote

over the candidates who came in with 24 percent and 23 percent.

Don’t you think the people that got the 24

and the 23 would make a great deal of grief

about a margin that narrow?

Don’t you think that would cut into the legitimacy

of the candidate with 25 percent?

Of course it would.

It would destabilize the entire process of governing.

The two party systems

actually helps to bind the nation together

because if you have democrats in Maine

and democrats in Minnesota and democrats in Oregon

they’re still all democrats and they communicate with each other

and they support a common set of candidates.

Republicans in Florida, republicans in Oklahoma,

republicans in Michigan may all be in those different states

but they’re all lined up behind a common platform

and common candidates.

And what this does, it tamps down divisions within a nation

and makes us realize that although we may be from Michigan

or Oklahoma or Oregon fundamentally

when we act politically we’re acting as Americans.

And that’s an important glue for our national unity.

With the Electoral College system

if you want to get elected,

you want to attract a broad spectrum of the American people.

So that keeps people who have very extreme views

out of the presidential race.

If you can win the presidential race

with just 25 percent of the vote

then the kind of extremist candidates

that we don’t want to have running the country

might be able to win the presidential election.

Without the Electoral College

there’s no longer any motivation to compromise.

The attitude becomes my 18 percent beat your 17 percent

so I really don’t care what you think.

And what you see in those situations is extremists

tend to be rewarded because they no longer have to tone down.

They no longer have to work with others.

And so extreme positions

can have a lot more influence on the process.

We have a bifurcated system.

There is a left and a right in the country.

But within the left and within the right

we also have a variety of different positions.

This big tent approach to American politics

is extremely important because it’s not just diversity.

It’s also a concern with avoiding extreme politics.

And so some scholars have called it

the dangerous factions that could develop

if appeals to extremism were allowed to be made

in terms of making a successful run for the presidency.

And so one of the virtues is not only the reduction

in the number of candidates.

But what that does is it forces the candidates

to make broad brush appeals to satisfy a variety

of sometimes conflicting interests in constituencies.

Even when you have one party

which scores a complete sweep in an election,

wins the White House, wins the senate,

wins the house of representatives,

what you have afterwards

is not a single monochrome point of view.

What you have is the victory of a national coalition.

What you have to have is a party

then which starts talking within itself and saying all right.

If we’re going to govern at all

we’ve got to arrive at some averages here.

The two party system mandates

that they start shaving off the extremes

and come down to the averages. They come down to the averages

because they’re a two party system

and they’re a two party system in very large measure

because the Electoral College pushes us,

nudges us in that direction and a main stream appears.

And what you get then is a stable democracy.

Here’s what people seem not to understand.

The world that will exist in a post Electoral College America

are five billionaires and a bunch

of multi-millionaires running for president

trying to be as extreme as necessary

without alienating enough people

so that they can get a small sliver of the tranche of voters

necessary to get elected president of the United States.

That’s where one candidate

who can significantly outspend the other candidates

could really make a difference in being able to win an election

particularly because these days a very large percentage

of the American people

living in a very small number of media markets.

And that is where having a lot of money,

being able to buy media in the big,

dense urban cities could really make the difference

in changing the results of a presidential election.

I don’t think that big money ought to be able

to buy our elections.

And that’s’ true whether we’re talking about billionaires

or corporate executive

that fund pacts or big lobbyists.

Tonight we say to Michael Bloomberg

and other billionaires sorry,

you ain’t going to buy this election.

And what the Electoral College does is the last fortress

if you will to hold back individuals

that think that they can come in

and buy our republic, buy our vote.

So the billionaires of the world

certainly have the resources individually to run

that can make it much easier for a candidate

to cerate the staff and the advertising revenue

that would allow them to have greater success

on the national popular vote scale

than they go on the national scale we have now

where you have to appeal to different state constituencies.

Michael Bloomberg says he is ready to run.

But he plans to skip the first four 2020 democratic contests.

That’s a risky strategy.

If you really analyzed somebody like Mike Bloomberg

who is a billionaires, $55 billions,

he can spend $5 billion and not blink.

But he can’t buy the election

because he has to be able to win the primary

because that’s the only way he’s going to have a viable chance.

And the reason that’s the only way

he’s going to have a viable chance

is because…wait for it, the Electoral College. Right?

So when you have a scenario

where you have removed the Electoral College

now he no longer has to even engage in the primary process.

He can simply go directly to the general election

and talk about how do I get the most amount of votes

that get me to the place where I need to be.

It’s not about a majority.

It’s about finding a way to game the system

in a way that allows his voice

and his money to speak the loudest.

He spent over $500 million.

That was just on TV and radio ads alone.

You add in the digital adds. You add in the staff,

the offices, the million dollar couches.

The total is likely well over $600 million making it far

and away the most expensive self-financed campaign ever in US politics.

He spent more than twice the combined totals of Trump,

Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren and Biden.

His spending worked out to $7 million a day

since he announced that run in November

or just under $300,000.00 per hour.

If your concern is money in politics

then getting rid of the Electoral College

doesn’t diminish the impact of money in politics.

It amplifies it in ways you cannot even begin to comprehend.

The certified result in the presidential race in Florida

is as follows.

Governor George W Bush 2,912,790.

Vice President Al Gore 2,912,253.

Accordingly on behalf of the state elections

canvasing commission

and in accordance with the laws of the state of Florida

I hereby declare Governor George W Bush

the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes

for the president of the United States.

I think we all remember seeing those pictures

of the vote recount, of the hanging, dimpled,

pimpled, pregnant swinging ______

and seeing all the different cases in the counties.

But the interesting thing is as bad as that was,

as much as the entire nation was holding its breath

and waiting to see what happened,

as many law suits as there were,

that was really just about one important state.

If we had had a national popular vote system in place

rather than having a chaotic contentious recount in Florida

we would have had a contentious chaotic recount

in every state in the country.

So once you have more potential for recounts

you also have the potential for greater fraud.

And so efforts on the national popular vote to encourage fraud

would certainly be incentivized

because it would potentially be more difficult

to reveal the fraud on the national scale.

And the easiest place for fraud to be committed

is in jurisdictions are controlled by one party

because the other party isn’t there to have poll watchers,

to have poll workers,

to basically have a system where the two parties

are keeping an eagle eye on each other.

And unfortunately with a national popular vote system

it would be an incentive to commit fraud

and try to change the outcome of elections.

You would need tens of thousands of agents at each polling place.

You could say well, I live in Philadelphia.

And you could go to Wilmington, Delaware

and say I live in Wilmington, Delaware.

You couldn’t have polls close at different times.

You’d have to have them uniform as they do in Canada and Europe

because they don’t want early voting in one part

or section of the country

influencing another part of the section.

The 50 states have very different rules.

Half of them require a drivers license to vote, half don’t.

Some have mail in ballots and some don’t.

Some allow for early voting and others don’t.

Some go from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Others go from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, etcetera.

We would have all kinds of equal protection problems

because we’d have different rules.

You would have to figure out

how are we going to run that election

and I think that means you would have to have

a single national standard by which everybody voted.

Now that may sound fairly attractive.

Why not?

Until again you consider that this is a very large,

enormous country with great geographic differences

between different states, difference demographics

and so on. What makes sense for one state

doesn’t make sense for every other.

And then you would have to have much more control

by the federal government. Ah.

Control by the federal government,

eliminating the involvement of the states.

Now you would have accomplished

exactly what the framers tried to avoid.

You would put control in one place

and how are you going to stop the corruption there,

whichever party it is.

Without the Electoral College the federal government

would have to take more control over elections

which means that presidential appointees

would wind up running presidential elections. Right?

Barack Obama’s people would have been in charge

of Barack Obama’s reelection.

Donald Trump’s people would be in charge

of Donald Trump’s reelection. Right?

The Electoral College pushes that power

out of Washington D.C. down into the states.

States run elections, states are in charge.

It’s distributed. No one state controls the outcome.

Instead it’s up to 51 different jurisdictions

to run that election.

There’s a mechanism for what happens

if it’s too close to call in a particular state,

not if it’s too close to call across the country.

This would create quite simply chaos.

And it would throw any election like that

and I think that it would be far more common

that you would have these sorts of elections to the courts.

The stakes are enormously high.

And so we would have litigation after such disputed elections

which could go on for months or even years.

Meanwhile the country would not have a president.

The president is essentially the foreign policy

representative of the nation.

And so if you have an ongoing problem

and other countries rely upon our decisions

in terms of making their own decisions,

so delays on who will be making policy,

the uncertainty of it would be potentially disastrous in terms

of how other nations respond to America’s presence in the world.

It would have ripple effects throughout the globe.

This would be catastrophic if we go months,

potentially years with court battles.

Who imagines today with the divisions

that we have in the United States

that either side is going to capitulate and just say ok.

You win. We’ll lay down our swords.

We’ll stop fighting?

Imagine what happens in the stock market.

Imagine what happens in the economy.

What kind of a situation are we asking for?

Well, direct popular election.

While it sounds great, while it sounds very democratic

also carries within it the seeds of many problems

that the founders rescued us from.

You know sometimes you hear people say well,

whoever wins the popular vote should win.

And if there’s more people in the cities

if they win the popular vote

then that’s just the way it is and who cares about the farmers.

There is no other segment of society

that we would just look at them

and say your needs are unimportant.

We can outvote you.

We don’t strive for simple bare majorities

and then just tell everybody else tough.

It doesn’t matter. What we are striving for

and what the constitution sets up

and what our founders wanted is justice and fairness

and protection of liberty.

Sometimes we hear a serious objection

to the Electoral College lodged on the grounds

that the Electoral College

was designed by the constitutional convention

to protect slavery.

And the reasoning runs like this.

The Electoral College is composed of representatives

from every state based on your number of members

in the house of representatives and your number of senators.

Well, isn’t that a revelation?

Because in that case that means that

for the purpose of representation southern states

could count their slaves,

slaves who otherwise were not permitted any voice

on the political process towards their representatives

and those representatives would therefore pile up

in the Electoral College

and there would be an artificial bonus

given to slaveholding states to cast votes

in favor of proslavery policies.

And thus the Electoral College is designed to operate

by the constitutional convention for the interests of slavery

and a great a-ha moment erupts at that point.

The difficulty is that it is an a-ha moment

with no air in the balloon.

In 1787 all of the states, not just the southern states,

excepting alone Massachusetts legalized slavery.

There was no bonus paid by the Electoral College

to slave owning states versus free states.

All the states enjoyed that bonus.

The largest slave holding state in the union in 1787

was Virginia.

The largest northern slave holding state New York.

The three fifths compromise is not created

for the Electoral College.

It is created for the house of representatives.

And the founders needs to figure out

how do you represent the people and the states.

Well, already built into the system

is the representation for the house,

the representation for the senate.

All they do is say that math has already been vetted.

It has already been through the compromise.

The north is agreeing with it. The south agrees with it.

The west and the east agree with it.

We agree with that. That is the great compromise.

We will build that into the presidency.

When the Electoral College is finally determined upon

as a mechanism for electing the president

the question of slavery never entered into the consideration

because it wouldn’t have had any application.

There was no Electoral College advantage

for slaveholding states

because in 1787 they were all slaveholding states.

25 years later that’s going to change as northern states one

by one move into the non-slaveholding column.

But the members of the constitutional convention

weren’t writing the constitution with a view towards saying a-ha.

25 years from now we know that there will be a bonus

for slaveholding states in the Electoral College.

Well, yes there was but it was a temporary

one already ebbing away

by the time Abraham Lincoln is elected.

Proponents of that argument have decided that

if they tarnish the institution of the Electoral College

with racism

then that automatically means it is suspect

and needs to be replaced. But it’s just ahistorical.

It’s not really accurate and it’s not really honest frankly.

Charging the Electoral College as an institution

for slavery really delegitimizes the plight

of African Americans for generations.

But it also completely ignores history.

If you look at the kinds of people

that were advancing the causes

what did people like Fredrick Douglas say?

They said that ultimately these systems actually were helping

bring about the freedom of slaves,

that there were resulting in the ability

for slaves to overcome their oppressors in the south.

Yes, nobody can argue that some of the founders had slaves.

Some of them didn’t. Slavery was very common in our world.

It was wrong but it was the United States of America

that actually created a system that ultimately

resulted in it being eradicated.

And now guess what? People that look like me

aren’t considered three fifths of a human being.

People that look like me have the ability to vote.

Black people are now fully vested members of society

in spite of the inequalities that we still face today.

When we’re talking about do you have the right to vote

the Electoral College has no bearing on that.

So for example if you think about it,

there’s about 130 million people

that voted in the last presidential election.

Of that 130 million the number is about 30 –

35 million minorities.

If you move to a system where you eliminate

the Electoral College literally the United States of America

could be won at one time by just white people.

That’s hardly a system that promotes the diversity

that exists not just among races,

not just among preferences

about what partners people want to have but also in careers

and how people want to make their living.

The Electoral College forces people to sort of

make the compromise as necessary

to not just appeal to a couple of big blocks

but to take into account these smaller blocks of voters.

I mean that’s very similar to a point

that Vernon Jordan was making in the late 1970s.

The Electoral College ensures that racial minorities

have representation by being sort of the tipping point

in a number of states and are able to influence

which direction that state’s electoral votes go.

What purpose would there be for a candidate to appeal

to the interests of African American voters

in a national popular vote African American voters amount

to only seven percent of those casting votes.

Not really all that significant

so you pay no attention to African American voters.

In the Electoral College system

you do have to pay attention to African American voters

because in a number of key swing states African American voters

are an important component of the voting public

and you had better have something important to say,

for African American voters to hear or you lose their votes.

And you lose their votes you lose that state.

You lose that swing state, you lose the Electoral College.

If you’re a candidate for president it is impossible

to get elected president without black people voting for you.

Now you can say the republicans have won elections

but they have found ways to get black people to vote for them.

Not a lot but enough. Right?

You cannot get elected president of the United States

without support in the Latino community.

You can say well,

republicans haven’t gotten a lot of Latino support.

But guess what? They have gotten enough.

And so when you take away the Electoral College.

When you create a scenario

where people can get elected president of the United States

without a single vote cast in their name by a single minority

that is the reality that we need to be facing.

So if you’re sitting here saying that it is right

for someone to get elected

who hates minorities abjectly and concretely well,

then you should be terrified of an America

that does not have an Electoral College.

The legacy of black people in America is well documented.

We’ve had times in America where we have no rights.

We have even modern day society when many of the rights

that we should enjoy freely still seem

as if they come with strings attached.

So that is a very serious thing

that we should number one, acknowledge

and, number two, still confront in our regular lives

when it comes to again building a more perfect America.

But when you talk about

how do we get to that more perfect union.

How do we make sure that we are living Doctor King’s dream

that all people are judged by the content of their character.

You don’t do it by again getting rid of the one thing

that has empowered black people

to be able to leverage political power.

We can have arguments about are there presidents

who are hostile to the interests of certain communities.

What we’re not talking about is a scenario

where somebody who got 18 percent of the vote

ends up becoming president of the United States.

But we have never had a president in the modern era

who has campaigned to take away rights of Americans,

actually rights enshrined in the constitution.

That is a scenario that we could end up confronting in a world

where we have gotten rid of the Electoral College.

In the election of 1860 we had three separate parties,

four if you count the splinter party.

And the candidate who won that election

did not win a majority of the popular vote,

the candidate of the republican party

in that case actually won

only 39.9 percent of the popular vote.

Yet that candidate won a significant majority

in the Electoral College and so that candidate

was dually elected president of the United States.

Now you might say yes,

but it wasn’t a popular election.

Yes, that candidate wasn’t elected by all the people.

That’s right. That candidate wasn’t.

But his name was Abraham Lincoln.

There is no emancipation proclamation

without the Electoral College

because without the Electoral College

there is no Abraham Lincoln as president

of the United States of America.

And while his total percentage

was the lowest of any elected president

he was actually the most popular sort of national candidate

to the extent we had one in that election

in which the country was very divided.

Lincoln was the candidate who won in New England.

He won in the mid-Atlantic states.

He won in the Midwest. He won in the prairie.

He won in the new states on the west coast.

He was the most national candidate of the group

and we were very fortunate at that point

that the Electoral College had given us Lincoln

rather than Stephen Douglas or the candidate of the deep south,

the slaveholders, John Breckenridge.

The question for black Americans,

the questions for minority communities

should be how do we get more boxes checked.

How do we get to a point where both parties

are not accountable and responsive?

Because that is how you ultimately get to a place

where the solutions for black and brown people

all across this great land start to accelerate.

And that should happen irrespective of who is in power.

The founding ethos of the black congressional caucus

whether you’re a democrat or not

was that black people have no permanent friends

and they have no permanent enemies,

only permanent interests.

And black people of America have made permanent friends

of the democratic party,

permanent enemies of the republican party

and our permanent interests have been cast aside.

And so if you’re really,

truly focused on empowering black communities

lets not sit here

and talk about eliminating the Electoral College.

Let’s really focus on how do we as people leverage the power

that we have in mass, in numbers and by law

and part of that is through the Electoral College.

I hear Americans saying this nowadays

and there’s a lot of it going around.

They talk about a dysfunctional government

because there’s disagreement and they –

and the framers would have said yes,

that’s exactly the way we set it up.

We wanted this to be power, contradicting power.

Unless Americans can appreciate that and learn

to love the separate of powers

which means learning to love the gridlock

which the framers believed would be the main protection

of minorities, the main protection.

If a bill is about to pass that really comes down hard

on some minority, they think it’s terribly unfair,

it doesn’t take much to throw a monkey wrench

into this complex system.

So Americans should appreciate that

and they should learn to love the gridlock.

The constitution if properly understood

is just one big balancing act.

We’ve got states balanced against the national government.

We’ve got the states balanced against each other.

We’ve got each branch of government, judiciary,

executive, legislative balancing each other.

We’ve got presidential vetoes and supermajority requirements

to amend the constitution and we have the Electoral College.

And all of these different aspects of our constitution

are just a big careful balance to protect our liberty.

We’re constantly trying to make things better.

So the fact that they may not have got it right

by your likes 200 years ago

is precisely why you want to keep this system

because it allows you to make those kind of changes

that you think are needed.

So if you want control over your life,

more opportunity in your life you’ve got to go with this one

and try to perfect this one.

And not go to the demigods who have their own agenda

which is not your wellbeing.

So we have to be very careful when we try to fiddle around

with a system that has worked so well

for this country over so many years

and has in each case with a very small number of exceptions

has produced a president who got the most popular votes.

It is very likely that unless Electoral College defenders

rise up and defend the system that’s in our constitution

and make the argument about why the Electoral College

is so important we can easily lose the Electoral College.

This is close to happening

and could easily happen within the next few years.

If you change how presidential elections work,

you essentially nullify the constitutional process,

rip state lines up from presidential elections

and create this environment where huge swaths of America

could just be left behind.

The founders’ solution, the solution that over

the course of American history might,

we can say is imperfect but has been remarkably successful

and the model of the whole world

is precisely this balancing very carefully

by using checks and balances and institutional systems

and structures like the Electoral College

to have majority rule

and the rights of the individuals secured.

And that thing is what gives rise to this idea

we call liberty which is so unusual in world history

in anywhere else in the world.

And we have it precisely because of those institutions

which you oftentimes take for granted.

We can’t do that because if you lose that balance

it becomes very difficult if not impossible to recover it.

The founders knew that which is why they spent

so much time on this question

and why they saw what they were doing

as the equivalent of founding.

They were trying to solve a deeply human eternal problem

of how we govern ourselves and they created a beautiful system,

which should be preserved.

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