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Winner-take-all electoral vote makes losers of everyone

The most significant flaw in our Presidential elections is not the Electoral College, but the states (all but Nebraska and Maine) that use a winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes. In Florida alone, more than 4.9 million votes - the majority of those cast - were unrepresented in the final tally. Nationally, that number is more than 62 million.

 

This can be fixed. Contact your state legislators today.

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Winner-take-all — which is no part of our actual constitution — is a state created rule for allocating electoral college votes that not only violates the principle of one-person-one-vote, but also fundamentally distorts the process of electing our President. In every election, presidential candidates focus exclusively on the interests of the battleground states. (In 2016, 99% of spending was in those 14 battleground states.) Yet those states do not represent America. There is no good reason — historically or democratically — for allowing that distortion to continue.

Some people say this is just what the Framers gave us. The electoral college, they say, was meant to benefit small states. That may not be equal, but that was their plan.

But the “battleground states” — such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin — are not “small states.” A couple are — New Hampshire, for example. But New Hampshire is on that list not because it’s small but because it is politically divided. Winner-take-all thus doesn’t advance the Framers’ objectives; it doesn’t achieve democracy’s objective. It is a bad idea whose time has gone.

You can read the incredible (and pro bono) work of the many lawyers who have put these arguments together on this web page. The firm of Boies Schiller Flexner has taken the lion’s share of the work, but Alston & Bird has done fantastic work in South Carolina. And we are grateful for the work of volunteers from Munger, Tolles & Olson and other firms as well. We are hoping for a quick decision from the district courts, so we can get to a Court of Appeals as quickly as possible.

 

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