League of Women Voters hosts Electoral College discussion

As Election Day approaches, the League of Women Voters of East Nassau hosted a presentation on Sept. 18 to educate voters about the Electoral College and its role in selecting presidents.

The league is a nonpartisan, grass-roots organization that works to protect and expand voting rights throughout the country. The East Nassau chapter encompasses Merrick, Bellmore and East Meadow.

According to East Nassau member Barbara Epstein, its goal is to educate communities and encourage people to register to vote.

“It’s important for people to understand what the Electoral College means and how it impacts how people vote,” Epstein said.

At last week’s meeting, legal scholar Wilfred Codrington discussed the history of the Electoral College and how it has impacted presidential elections. Codrington is a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law and a professor of constitutional law at the Benjamin N. Cardoza School of Law. His research, teaching and advocacy focuses on voting, elections and the laws of democracy.

He noted that most voters may not fully understand how the Electoral College works. “It is that system that we know and love, or at least we think we know it,” Codrington said. “And I’m guessing, to be frank, it’s not really clear that we do love it.”

The Electoral College, he explained, which selects the president, was established in the Constitution, with electors from each state fulfilling their duties six weeks after Election Day.

“Neither the 330 million people living in the United States, nor the 240 million folks of voting age, get to choose the president,” Codrington said. “Rather, it is this extremely important task falling on 538 people” — the sum total of the members of Congress, plus three for the capital, Washington, D.C. To win the Electoral College, a president needs to win at least half of those votes plus one, or 270.

The electors, he said, hold that title for one day every four years, and are chosen by the political parties, based on the outcome of the popular vote in each state.

“When we go to vote for the president on Election Day,” he said, “we’re actually voting for people to occupy the roles as presidential electors.”

In 48 states, including the capital, a winner-take-all system is used, in which the candidate who wins the popular vote gets all of that state’s electoral votes. Two states that do not use this system are Maine and Nebraska, which split their electoral votes proportionally based on the statewide popular vote and the results in each congressional district.

“It does not matter if you win by seven votes or 7 million votes,” Codrington said. “If you win more than the next candidate, you will win the state’s slates of electors.”

Most states’ voting outcomes can be predicted, but several swing states, in which both the Democratic and Republican parties have similar levels of support, determine who wins the presidency. New York, for example, has not given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1984.

“These swing states have the greatest power,” Codrington said. “They are where the presidential race is most competitive, because Democrats and Republicans in those states are nearly equal, or at least their preferences are.”

As a result, reliably “blue” or “red” states receive less attention from presidential candidates than swing states. According to Codrington, 96 percent of campaign events during the 2020 election took place in swing states accounting for 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. population. This obviously creates incentives for presidential campaigns to focus on policies of most interest in swing state voters, at the expense of the broader American public.

As the nation continues to evolve, questions about the future of the Electoral College have become more pressing.

“I think, like anything else, times change, and we need to change,” Carol Bergman, treasurer of the East Nassau LWV, said.

One of the main reasons why the Electoral College is unpopular, Codrington said, is because it’s prone to failing. Throughout its history, he says, the Electoral College produced what political scholars called “the wrong winner,” where it awarded the presidency to the popular vote loser. It happened in five presidential elections, most recently in 2016, when Donald Trump won despite the fact that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, received around 48 percent of the popular vote, to Trump’s 46 percent.

“So now we can say we know the Electoral College — I’ll leave you to decide whether we love the Electoral College,” Codrington told the attendees, “but for much of the country’s existence, Americans have not.”