A State-Level Policy Change That Would Revitalize the Electoral College

The academic literature is rife with analyses of the US Electoral College’s flaws, but proposals to improve the system often rely upon old ideas. For example, the idea of replacing the Electoral College with a nationwide vote originated in 1816, and the derivative concept underlying the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact dates to 1976. Similarly, numerous methods for retaining the College but modifying the manner in which individual states select electors were proposed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the only one that gained significant traction – the congressional-district system currently used by Maine and Nebraska – was initially described in the 1950s by Senator Karl Mundt and Representative Frederick Coudert. This article describes the County-Elector Plan, a new approach that maintains the Electoral College but allocates a state’s electoral votes to each county’s plurality winner, in an amount proportional to the county’s voter turnout. A candidate’s statewide electoral vote total is then the rounded sum of the electoral votes the candidate receives in each county. The County-Elector Plan would seismically transform presidential elections by shifting an election’s focus from a handful of battleground states to hundreds of battleground counties spread across both current battleground and spectator states. Retrospective application of the plan to the 2016 Trump-Clinton contest shows that each candidate would have received electoral votes from 41 states, and that Clinton would have won the election by 26 electoral votes. The County-Elector Plan could be implemented on a state-by-state basis, without requiring a constitutional amendment. The plan is gerrymandering-resistant and provides all voters in a state with equal voting power.