Nearly 11 years after the 2000 presidential election brought the idiosyncrasies of the United States’ Electoral College into full view, 62% of Americans say they would amend the U.S. Constitution to replace that system for electing presidents with a popular vote system. Barely a third, 35%, say they would keep the Electoral College.
Gallup’s initial measure of support for the Electoral College with this wording was conducted in the first few days after the 2000 presidential election in which the winner remained undeclared pending a recount in Florida. At that time, it was already clear that Democratic candidate Al Gore had won the national popular vote over Republican George W. Bush, but that the winner of the election would be the one who received Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes…
Republicans have grown somewhat more amenable to adopting a popular vote system over the past decade. Now, for the first time since 2000, the majority of Republicans favor it. Independents are not quite as supportive as Democrats of the popular vote system, but the majority of them have consistently favored it…
From 1967 through 1980, Gallup periodically asked Americans about replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote system using different question wording, and each time, the majority favored it. The issue was particularly relevant during this period because the popular vote in the 1968 and 1976 presidential elections was so closely divided…
And Congress’ response will be..?
Thing is that would require an election to first come down to one state. In most elections, it wouldn’t be the case. Even better is if states adopted a Nebraska/Maine style system of awarding votes to the winners of each congressional district.
The Electoral College might have made sense, back when votes were communicated across the nation on horse-back. The electorates being basically couriers. But in some rare cases, voting against what their voters wished. If they felt the majority had been confused or mislead in some way. But I doubt that’s happened in over a century. With all the electronic communications. There isn’t as much of a need for a go-between, to represent a chunk of voters in a state. And it may even tend to encourage the Gerrymandering of voter districts, to get more electoral votes for one party or another. So that the individual vote count of a state, is in conflict with what the electoral vote count declares. It’s kind of like an elaborate shell game. Pigeon holing blocks of voters, as being for one party or another. And then counting only the group score, rather than a simple majority count. However you figure it. You got to figure it’s been rigged to work to the politicians’ favor. Or they’d have gotten rid of it years ago, themselves.