How the Electoral College Was Nearly Abolished in 1970

History channel ^ | August 3, 2020 | Dave Roos

[SunkenCiv]

On September 18, 1969, the U.S. House... voted by an overwhelming 338 to 70 to send a constitutional amendment to the Senate that would have dismantled the Electoral College, the indirect system by which Americans elect the president and vice president...

The House vote, which came in the wake of an extraordinarily close presidential election, mirrored national sentiment about scrapping an electoral system that allowed a candidate to win the presidency even while losing the popular vote. A 1968 Gallup poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed it was time to elect the nation's highest office by direct popular vote... the Senate came five votes shy of breaking the filibuster...

Birch Bayh was a young Democractic senator from Indiana first elected to Congress in 1963... Bayh inherited what was thought of then as a "sleepy" assignment, says Wegman, chairmanship of the constitutional amendments subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

No one could have predicted what would happen next. Fifty-three days after Bayh took his post on the subcommittee, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Kennedy's shocking death raised important questions about what the Constitution says, or doesn't say, about presidential succession. Less than a month after the assassination, Bayh introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution to provide clear rules for who is in charge if the president and vice president are incapacitated or unable to do their jobs. Winning approval from the House and Senate, the 25th Amendment went into effect in 1967.

Bayh's skillful work garnering bipartisan support for the 25th Amendment caught the eye of President Lyndon Johnson, who tasked the young senator with addressing the Electoral College. Johnson didn't want to trash the system completely, just to outlaw the existence of so-called "faithless electors."

[Vigilanteman]

For Maine and Nebraska, it is actually a contest in each state plus each district. The ObaMao Campaign set up a separate campaign office in Omaha in 2008 to pick off a single Nebraska congressional district successfully even though they knew there was no chance of winning the other two congressional districts or the state.

[DuncanWaring]

For all intents and purposes, the entirety of Hillary’s popular vote margin was NYC and coastal California.

[hanamizu]

“I wouldn’t call it “selfish” for a state to not want to be entirely irrelevant...”

---

Well, strictly speaking it is selfish to want to avoid irrelevance. But I was being sarcastic when I used the word. Why would anyone think that states would willingly cede their importance in national elections and politics? It is like asking states to give up their equal voice in the Senate.

[zaxtres]

This is a bunch of BS lauded by an incompetent shill. First, the Electoral College appears in the Constitution. Second, the House and Senate can pass an Amendment (not a bill) in Congress but it would take the States to ratify it. Since the States never got a chance to vote on ratification of the Amendment, the Electoral College never even got close to being destroyed.

[Bogle]

You might very well be right although my point is much much much larger than CA. I suppose what I’m thinking is that Trump didn’t even campaign in some states or cities. Had the strategy been different and he attacked NY City like a laser for 10 months, it would have been a brand new ball game with a brand new strategy and a different popular vote. I don’t really know how many people he could have swayed in NY City or LA had he campaigned there (10 months like a laser). But the popular vote numbers aren’t static, which reflects a miscalculation that a lot of Dems are making. The bottom line is that when a person acknowledges that the numbers are dynamic and the game and the strategies would change, the only thing we know for sure is that the numbers would be far different. But I’ll admit I can’t say for sure the Dems wouldn’t win. The good thing is that we’ll never have to find out because the electoral college, in all its beauty, is here to stay!

[metesky]

IIRC, before the election of 2000, when the Rats thought that Gore's strategy would lose the popular vote but win in the EC, PIAPS wrote an op-ed in the NYT praising the EC.

Too bad, so sad.