Page 12
CAREERS Special Edition
O PINION
April 17, 2019
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Abolish the Electoral College, Empower the People
Candidate with
most votes
should win
r obert p. a lvarez
Senator
Elizabeth
Warren is hell-bent on
dismantling the sys-
tems that feed inequality in this
country, including the Electoral
College.
“Every vote matters,” she said
at a recent CNN town hall. That’s
why we should “get rid of the
Electoral College” and institute
“national voting.”
Americans don’t directly elect
their president — states do. In
most cases, states award all of
their “electoral votes” to the can-
didate who wins the popular vote
in those states. Whoever gets 270
electoral votes wins the election.
Because electoral votes aren’t
awarded in perfect proportion
to population, small states get
more influence over the outcome.
Which means you can win the
electoral vote even while getting
by
fewer popular votes than your op-
ponent.
Abolishing the Elec-
toral College would lev-
el the playing field. It
would ensure that peo-
ple, not parties or mech-
anisms, determine who
leads the country.
Is that so bad? If
you’re a Republican, yes.
The Electoral College helped
the two most recent Republi-
can presidents — Donald Trump
and George W. Bush — win of-
fice despite losing the popular
vote. Bush lost the popular vote
by over half a million, Trump by
nearly 3 million.
No wonder Republicans are
now up in arms about protecting
their advantage. After all, the Elec-
toral College gives disproportion-
ate power to smaller, rural states,
which tend to vote for them.
For instance, red Wyoming
gets one Electoral College vote
per 195,000 people. Blue Cali-
fornia gets just one per 712,000
people. In other words, your vote
counts nearly 4 times more if you
live in Wyoming.
“Swing states” that don’t vote
the same way each election also
wield disproportionate power,
since even a narrow winner will
get all of their electoral votes.
That’s why candidates spend so
much time at diners in small-
town Iowa and Ohio, rather than
New York or Alabama, which
vote more predictably for one
party.
Seems to me all Senator War-
ren is calling for is a country that
respects its citizens enough to let
them choose their own leader —
and to do so without some cen-
turies-old electoral mechanism
initially designed to inflate the
political influence of slaveholders.
Perhaps the most insincere
response to Warren’s proposal
was National Review editor Rich
Lowry’s.
If the Electoral College “is tan-
tamount to disenfranchisement,”
he wrote, “California could im-
mediately mitigate the problem
by splitting its electoral votes by
congressional district the way
Nebraska and Maine do… Of
course, California is loath to give
up any of its solidly Democratic
electoral votes.”
I’m sure California would
gladly split electoral votes by
congressional district the way
Nebraska and Maine do, on two
conditions.
First, the Supreme Court would
have to vanquish partisan gerry-
mandering to prevent presidential
elections from being infected with
the same dysfunction currently
befalling congressional elections.
And second, the rest of the
country would have to agree to
divide their electoral votes by the
same methodology.
But Lowry doesn’t suggest that,
because it would spell doom for
Republican second place finish-
ers. Were the roles reversed, you
can bet your bottom dollar Repub-
licans would be clamoring for an
end to this deeply flawed system.
Abolishing the Electoral Col-
lege is unlikely in the short term.
But that doesn’t mean Americans
have given up on the idea of a di-
rect popular vote.
Fourteen states and D.C. have
joined the National Popular Vote
Interstate Compact (NPVIC),
agreeing to give their Electoral
College votes to whoever wins
the national popular vote. Colo-
rado, Delaware, and New Mexico
are the latest to join the compact,
bringing their collective electoral
vote total to 189.
Similar legislation has passed
one legislative chamber in eight
more states, including Oregon,
comprising 72 Electoral College
votes, and has been unanimously
approved at the committee level
in two states, comprising 27 more.
They’ll need 270 votes to en-
sure the winner of the national
popular election wins the presi-
dency. Right now that’s more like-
ly than a constitutional amend-
ment requiring overwhelming
bipartisan support.
Still, there’s no getting around
the real solution: Abolish the Elec-
toral College so the candidate with
the most votes wins.
Robert P. Alvarez works in
communications at the Institute
for Policy Studies. Distributed by
OtherWords.org.
Minimum Wage Hike Would Help 40 Million Workers
It’s time for $15
and a union
try $7.25 federal minimum wage.
It’s a big victory for the Fight
for $15.
It’s been less than a decade
since a few hundred fast-
by n egin o wliaei
food employees walked
Last month, Mc-
off the job to demand a $15
Donald’s announced
wage and a union. Now,
a dramatic about-
they’re a global move-
face in its politi-
ment that’s fundamentally
cal priorities. After
changed the conversation
years of strikes and
on the rights of low-wage
protests from labor
workers.
activists, the burger
For the most part, federal law-
giant has decided to end its in-
volvement in lobbying campaigns makers have watched idly while
against increasing America’s pal- cities and states have boosted
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their minimum wages up to $15.
Just last month, Maryland became
the sixth state — and the third
just this year — to phase in a $15
minimum wage after lawmakers
overrode Republican Gov. Larry
Hogan’s veto.
But the idea now has more trac-
tion in Congress thanks to the re-
cently introduced Raise the Wage
Act, which would set a national
minimum pay of $15 an hour by
2024. The legislation would lift
pay for almost 40 million workers,
the Economic Policy Institute has
found.
As the push for higher wages
continues to gain steam across the
country, the movement promises
to keep fighting: Workers greeted
the new announcement from Mc-
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Donald’s with more protests.
It’s not enough to decide, they
say, that you “wish to advance, not
impede” the discussion on a liv-
able wage by simply ending your
campaign against an enormously
popular policy.
Employees are still calling on
the fast food franchise pay $15
an hour and respect their right
to unionize. That’s a pretty fair
demand, considering their CEO
made nearly $22 million in 2017
— over 3,100 times what the
typical McDonald’s employee
took home that year. They’re also
continuing their fight to make the
company take workplace harass-
ment seriously.
McDonald’s is often — and
rightfully — portrayed as a vil-
lain in the fight for fair wages and
workplace protections. But it’s
also only one player in an econ-
omy that continues to tighten its
chokehold on anyone who works
for a living.
Raising the federal minimum
wage is one necessary change we
can make to a system that throws
endless amounts of money to-
wards the rich while balking at
workers’ demands to be able to
live off their earnings.
How can we begin to imagine
the inequity baked into that sys-
tem?
Take a look at Wall Street’s bo-
nus culture to see just how warped
our economy has become. Last
year, Wall Street employees took
home $27.5 billion in bonuses
alone. That pool of money could
pay all of the United States’ full-
time minimum wage workers
more than three times over, a new
report from the Institute for Policy
Studies has found.
Those bonuses mean the av-
erage Wall Street employee add-
ed $153,700 to their base pay in
2018 — a truly mind-boggling
sum of money that’s increased by
1,000 percent since 1985. If the
minimum wage had grown at that
rate, McDonald’s workers would
be making over $33 an hour to-
day.
These staggering numbers go
a long way toward illuminating
how stark the concentration of
wealth and power has become in
this country. They also highlight
the enormity of the task of remak-
ing our economic system so that it
works for everyone, not just CEOs
and Wall Street bankers.
But, thanks to Fight for $15,
we’ve been given a clear place to
start: $15 and a union.
Negin Owliaei is a researcher
at the Institute for Policy Studies
and a co-editor of Inequality.org.
Distributed by OtherWords.org.