Elizabeth Warren wants to get rid of the Electoral College

Democratic presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) just proposed a bold plan to expand voting rights: getting rid of the Electoral College entirely.

Warren floated the idea at a Monday night CNN town hall at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, in response to a question about expanding the right to vote for formerly incarcerated people. The senator took that idea and ran with it.

“We need to make sure that every vote counts,” she told the crowd. “The way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College and everybody ... I think everybody ought to have to come and ask for your vote.”

The answer generated some of the loudest applause of the evening. Warren was in the middle of making a point that some states matter far more than others when it comes to selecting a president. Many candidates shower outsize attention on early primary states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina while often leaving voters in deeply divided states like Mississippi unvisited.

“I want to push that right here in Mississippi,” Warren said. “You know, come a general election, presidential candidates don’t come to places like Mississippi. Yeah. They also don’t come to places like California and Massachusetts, right? Because we’re not the battleground states.”

The senator from Massachusetts also said she supported a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote for all American citizens, as well as repealing laws that suppress the rights of voters.

Warren was giving voice to an idea that has grown after the 2000 and 2016 elections, when Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election due to the Electoral College. The idea will likely get a lot of opposition from Republicans, since historically the popular vote has favored Democrats.

As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained in 2016, the Electoral College system is complicated:

The presidential election is generally portrayed as a battle to win states and their accompanying electoral votes. Hillary Clinton won Vermont, so she got its three electoral votes. Donald Trump won Alaska, so he got its three electoral votes. Whoever gets to 270 or more electoral votes first — a majority of the 538 total — wins the election.

So rather simply trying to win the most actual votes in the country, a presidential campaign must try to put together a map of state victories that will amass more than 270 electoral votes. That’s the simplified version.

And as Warren complained on Monday night, that’s giving some states outsize power, not only to draw presidential candidates during the election but giving them more power to actually elect the president. Especially in the case of Clinton, who won the popular contest by 3 million votes but lost the election, that process can have the effect of disenfranchising millions of voters. (President Trump has pushed the conspiracy theory that these votes were somehow illegitimate.)

Warren is not the only 2020 candidate to do so. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg also supports a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College, he recently told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.

“It’s gotta go. We need a national popular vote,” Buttigieg said. “It would be reassuring from the perspective of believing that we’re a democracy. But I also think it would be highly encouraging of voter participation on the national level.”

Buttigieg said he has no illusions of doing away with the Electoral College immediately if he was elected.

“It wouldn’t be easy to do overnight, but it would also have the function of reminding everybody that structural reforms are an option, and encouraging us to have that level of intellectual ambition,” he said.

He has an ally in Warren. It remains to be seen whether other presidential candidates will follow.