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Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Hardcover)
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Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Hardcover)
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A New Statesman Book of the Year With every presidential election,
Americans puzzle over the peculiar mechanism of the Electoral
College. The author of the Pulitzer finalist The Right to Vote
explains the enduring problem of this controversial institution.
Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose
their presidents through the Electoral College, an arcane
institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become
president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Most Americans
have long preferred a national popular vote, and Congress has
attempted on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral
College. Several of these efforts-one as recently as 1970-came very
close to winning approval. Yet this controversial system remains.
Alexander Keyssar explains its persistence. After tracing the
Electoral College's tangled origins at the Constitutional
Convention, he explores the efforts from 1800 to 2020 to abolish or
significantly reform it, showing why each has failed. Reasons
include the complexity of the electoral system's design, the
tendency of political parties to elevate partisan advantage above
democratic values, the difficulty of passing constitutional
amendments, and, importantly, the South's prolonged backing of the
Electoral College, grounded in its desire to preserve white
supremacy in the region. The commonly voiced explanation that small
states have blocked reform for fear of losing influence proves to
have been true only occasionally. Keyssar examines why reform of
the Electoral College has received so little attention from
Congress for the last forty years, and considers alternatives to
congressional action such as the National Popular Vote Interstate
Compact and state efforts to eliminate winner-take-all. In
analyzing the reasons for past failures while showing how close the
nation has come to abolishing the institution, Why Do We Still Have
the Electoral College? offers encouragement to those hoping to
produce change in the twenty-first century.
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