Upcoming Discussion On 3 Options For Electing Presidents

According to its mission statement, Take Back Our Republic (TBOR) is a non-profit educating the public on conservative solutions for political reform. We are a non-partisan organization that advocates to ensure power and influence is returned to “We The People” instead of outside special interests groups. We use a grassroots approach for messaging that resonates with every ideological spectrum, especially conservatives, to fix the broken electoral system and restore American democracy. TBOR is organizing an interesting discussion on 3 different options for electing Presidents. The discussion is slated for June 26. Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

Do you support the system that elected Donald Trump President with a 304-227 Electoral College win in 2016? Do you believe Hillary Clinton’s 4 million vote win in California that gave her a national majority despite losing the other 49 states by a combined 2 million votes have made her the President? Would you prefer dividing each State’s electors proportionally, a system that we calculate would have resulted in a 263-263 tie between Clinton and Trump in 2016 (see table below)?

On Saturday, June 26th at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, you are invited to join an event with Deliberations.US and their event partners for a discussion of how we elect the President of the United States. Advocates for each approach might include:

1. 1. ELECTORAL COLLEGE. Take Back Our Republic’s case for keeping the Electoral College as-is can be found in these posts in NewsMax and The Hill, as well as this podcast (44:15 mark). The Electoral College prevents Presidential candidates from focusing only on the wealth population centers. This is a safeguard against Hillary Clinton’s  2016 mistake of ignoring the Midwest en route to losing Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to lose the Electoral College 304-227.
   2. NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE. On the other side, The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact argues that the overall popular vote should determine the President, meaning the legislators of the 30 states whose people voted for Trump in 2016 should have passed legislation awarding all their electors to Clinton for winning the national vote.
   3. PROPORTIONAL ELECTORAL COLLEGE. The compromise offered by Harvard’s Dr. Lessig during the Equal Citizens interview with Pudner is that the Electoral College should stay in place, but with each state’s electors proportionally awarded based on the overall vote. While TBOR still believe this gives candidates too little incentive to visit the “fly over” states, we do admit the compromise fixes some of the problems with a National Popular Vote, such as states like California refusing to check Voter’s IDs (despite 70 percent of Americans supporting Voter ID requirements). When we ran the model to determine who would have won in 2016 using this model the result was very interesting – a 263 to 263 tie based on these state-by-state results:

Find the full release here. Also see related Democracy Chronicles articles like those on Voting Methods, Direct Democracy, and definitely checkout our main Voting Methods section.