Marshall Center Lecture Series

On September 11^th, the Jepson School hosted the Marshall Center Lecture Series. Joshua B. Kaplan was the speaker and his talk was titled “Be Careful What You Wish For: Exploring the Consequences of Electoral College Reform”. Joshua is an associate professional specialist and director of undergraduate studies in the department of political science at the University of Notre Dame. He got his undergraduate degree at the University of California: Santa Cruz and his graduate degree from the University of Chicago. Joshua first started his talk by explaining that its purpose is not to debate the pros and cons of the electoral college but to explore the consequences of the electoral college reforms that have been proposed, which is more complicated than it sounds. I believe that this talk is relevant especially in today’s political climate and after the last election where the electoral college results and popular vote results were different.

Joshua gave a brief overview on how the electoral college works before going through the four possible reform proposals: the automatic plan, direct elect, the proportional plans, and the national popular vote plan. If the automatic plan was enacted it would keep the electoral votes but eliminates the electors which would eliminate the problem of the faithless elector. One of the consequences he brought up was that it would require a constitutional amendment. Through direct elect it would eliminate the possibility that the winner of the popular vote would lose the electoral vote, increasing the chance that no candidate would get a majority, resulting in party strategy changes. This reform would be the biggest difference to our current system. The proportional plans make the electoral vote more closely reflect the popular vote but can introduce distortions of its own. The national popular vote plan would focus on an interstate compact that would only go into effect when the states agree of a total of 270 electoral votes. The one issue with this is that it might violate the Voting Rights Act if it diminishes the power of minority votes. My question after hearing this talk is would it be safer to stay with the system we have now or change to one of the reform proposals?