Ian: Protect your vote with this one weird trick

Last month, Kamala Harris landed on the right answer to a question about the best way to run our elections; unfortunately (predictably?), she arrived there for an entirely insufficient reason.

Speaking in front of the National Urban League Conference on July 31, Harris said the country needed to “revisit the Electoral College,” which is not exactly an original idea - stung by EC losses in 2000 and 2016, Democrats have been grumbling about this for a long time.

Harris said this as part of a broader call for Democrats to respond more aggressively to what she characterized as Republican cheating. There are certainly legitimate conversations to be had about gerrymandering, voter suppression, mail-in voting, voter ID, and the increasingly creative ways Republicans are finding to make sure the other team doesn’t (or can’t) show up on Election Day.

But “Republicans cheat” is not the best reason to abolish the Electoral College. It is not even a necessary reason.

The Electoral College should be abolished because it hurts everyone.

It makes millions of individual voters politically irrelevant. It forces campaigns to dump attention on a small collection of competitive states while treating most of the country as expendable. Why are we still tolerating this?

It should be abolished even if the cheating, voter suppression and gerrymandering stopped today.

This isn't about preventing one candidate from winning. It's about making the candidate that receives the most votes the winner.

Enough with this red states and blue states nonsense

The maps we see on cable teevee have programmed us to imagine America as a collection of enormous red and blue blocks. Texas is Republican. California is Democratic. Louisiana is Republican. New York is Democratic. Appalachia is red. New England is blue.

It’s a stupid way of looking at things.

States do not possess political opinions. People do, and the voting patterns inside those states and regions are way more complicated and interesting than the big maps suggest.

This actually really pisses me off, because it means tens of millions of people are not actually meaningfully participating in these presidential elections. Just because a state reliably delivers more votes to one party over the other doesn’t mean everyone in that state is voting the same way. It’s insane to me how much we don’t talk about this.

Did you know that in 2024 Kamala Harris got more votes in Texas than she did in New York?

It’s true - Harris got 4,835,250 votes in ruby-red Texas and 4,619,195 votes in deep-blue New York. New York gave all 28 of its electoral votes to Harris. Texas delivered her none, despite more people voting for her there.

That’s insane, right? Any fair-minded person who’s arguing in good faith in favor of a fair election system would look at that and think it’s bonkers that a bloc of 4.8 million votes does literally nothing to help you win the White House.

Don't get it twisted - understand it works the other way too. Donald Trump received a whopping 6,081,697 votes in California - but nobody cares and we never talk about it. California’s Republican population is so enormous that Trump received more votes there than all candidates combined received in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin or Massachusetts!

Trump received more than 31 times as many votes in deep-blue California as he received in ruby-red Wyoming. His 192,633 Wyoming voters produced three electoral votes. His 6.1 million California voters produced zero. They evaporated. That is insane.

Let’s keep going! How about in Appalachia? That’s Trump country, right? Going by the federal government’s definition, Appalachia is 423 counties spanning 13 states. It’s a huge and politically complicated region that the political media joyfully flattens into an enormous red blob - but it just ain't so.

Harris received more votes in Trump-loving Appalachia than she did in all of latte-sipping Massachusetts. More than twice the number of votes, as a matter of fact. 4,353,255 Appalachians voted for Kamala while only 2,126,418 Massachusetts voters did.

In deep-blue New York, 3,578,899 voters turned out for Trump - that is more than the total number of presidential voters in swingy Wisconsin. New York nevertheless gave Trump zero electoral votes, while Wisconsin gave him ten.

It gets even more bizarre - even New York City, our national shorthand for elite coastal liberalism - contained 838,838 Trump voters in 2024. That is 127,619 more Trump voters in one supposedly impenetrable Democratic city than in Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota combined.

Nobody cares about New York City’s 838,838 Trump voters. They were represented by zero electoral votes. Their votes didn’t mean anything in that election. The system is making them irrelevant and I think that’s ridiculous and unfair and it pisses me off.

Nobody looking at those numbers can reasonably claim that the Electoral College protects Republican voters! It just protects a few Republican voters in a few states. And it does the same for Democrats.

The Electoral College does not make small states matter

If I’ve heard it once I have heard it a million times - the standard defense of the Electoral College is that eliminating it would cause candidates to ignore smaller states and campaign only in giant cities. Which, fine, we can theorize about that - but this argument requires us to ignore that candidates are already ignoring most states at an unbelievable scale.

Presidential campaigns do not spend October thrashing around Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, North Dakota and South Dakota. Those states are considered safely Republican or safely Democratic, so their voters receive the same warm attention I give to CVS coupons for Maybelline mascara - none.

In 2024, there were 261 in-person presidential campaign events between the party conventions in the summer and Election Day in November. 94 percent of those visits happened in just seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Thirty-two states received no candidate visits at all during that period.

The Electoral College does not force candidates to care about every state, it forces them to care about seven states. As the years go by and people move around, maybe it’s eight states, maybe it’s six, whatever. Maybe Democrats regain their footing in Florida or Ohio, maybe Republicans do the same in Virginia or Colorado, and the number of swing states grows or shrinks.

But Louisiana does not matter because Republicans are expected to win it. Massachusetts does not matter because Democrats are expected to win it. Wyoming does not matter because it is small and safely Republican. Vermont does not matter because it is small and safely Democratic.

But Pennsylvania matters because of demographic accidents, and neither party knows who will win it.

That is not a system designed to protect small states from being stepped on by big states. It is a system designed to make the entire country watch six months of relentlessly focus group-tested commercials surgically aimed at a suburban voter outside Philadelphia who has somehow not formed an opinion about who the President of the United States should be.

Under a national popular vote, a Republican vote gained in California would be worth exactly as much as a Republican vote gained in Pennsylvania. A Democratic vote gained in Abilene, Texas would be worth exactly as much as a Democratic vote gained in Atlanta, Georgia.

Candidates would still campaign where they believed votes could be won efficiently. They wouldn’t visit every town or divide their attention equally among every region. They might concentrate on large media markets, fast-growing suburbs, overlooked rural communities or places where turnout could be increased on the cheap. But there would no longer be some artificial line beyond which additional votes became useless.

Winning California by three million votes instead of two million would matter. Losing Texas by 500,000 votes instead of 1.5 million would matter. Increasing turnout among Republicans in New York City would matter. Increasing Democratic support in rural Louisiana would matter.

If you have to compete in more places, you have to have better ideas and better candidates. Every campaign would have a reason to find every available vote. They would have every reason to find your vote.

Doesn't that sound like the America you want to live in?

This would not create permanent Democratic rule

This is where the argument for reform is often undermined by some of its own supporters - thanks for nothing, Kamala!

Eliminating the Electoral College would not guarantee that Republicans never win another presidential election. We don’t have to go very far back in history to see this.

Donald Trump received approximately 77.3 million votes nationwide in 2024, compared with approximately 75 million for Kamala Harris. The Electoral College gave Trump a 312–226 victory, but he also won the popular vote by roughly 2.3 million. Tossing out the Electoral College and going with a national popular-vote system would have produced exactly the same winner.

Nobody can honestly say a popular vote would produce a permanent Democratic advantage. Don’t listen to those people. Parties change, coalitions change, regions change, voters change. Republicans would have enormous incentives to pursue their millions of existing supporters in California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey, which they barely acknowledge now. Democrats would have the same incentive to work to earn votes in Texas, Florida, Ohio and the rest of the South. Those efforts would necessitate adopting platforms with broader, more mainstream appeal, instead of entrenched perspectives on the explosive, emotional, divisive issues that define most races today.

Perhaps both parties would broaden their appeal instead of designing their entire presidential strategy around the peculiar anxieties of seven states. Perhaps Republicans would adapt better. Perhaps Democrats would. Nobody knows!

But that uncertainty is not a defect - it’s a foundational part of the way we live up to the ideals we say matter the most to us.

We’re supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, and instead we’re scared of our own elections being too fair? Are you kidding me?

This is bigger than "Republican cheating"

Harris’s framing sucks because it turns this idea into another weapon in the partisan arms race instead of a way to truly make America great.

The most resonant reading of what she said last week is that “Republicans cheat, therefore Democrats should abolish the Electoral College.” That argument tells Republicans that reform is intended to neutralize them and tells Democrats that reform is only necessary for them to secure permanent power. It’s neither - it’s a neutral principle that might sometimes produce outcomes either side might dislike.

It’s a multi-system problem, really - the combination of the Electoral College and individual states’ winner-take-all state rules erases tens of millions of individual votes. It tells Americans that their presidential vote matters not only according to whom they support, but according to whether enough of their neighbors agree with them. Who wants that?!

Abolishing the Electoral College would not disenfranchise rural voters, Republicans, small-state residents or anyone else. They would continue voting and their ballots would be counted in the same national total as everyone else’s. Maybe more of them would vote more often! Nobody would be promised victory but everyone would be promised equal treatment.

That is the argument Harris should be making.

The Electoral College should not be abolished because Republicans cheat, it should be abolished because the presidency belongs to the entire country, and the entire country should elect the president together.

It’s crazy to me that any American smarter than a bag of shredded lettuce would look at a system where everyone gets one vote and every vote counts the same, and then say, “no, that’s not fair!”

We can do better than this - a lot better!