Why change the current Electoral College system at all?
The Electoral College allows a President to be elected when finishing second or even third in the national popular vote. So-called “wrong winners” became president in 2000 (George W. Bush), 1888 (Benjamin Harrison), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes) and 1824 (John Quincy Adams). We have had several near wrong winners, including in 2004 when a shift of less than 60,000 votes in Ohio would have given John Kerry a national victory over George Bush despite his national popular vote deficit of three and a half million votes. Read about all of these elections here. Even when the Electoral College does not elect a losing candidate, however, it makes losers of a large and growing number of Americans in every single election. The winner-take-all unit rule governing the Electoral College in most states leads candidates to ignore the vast majority of Americans as their campaigns focus nearly all their resources on a handful of “battleground” states that, because they are too close to call, have the powe
