Though it's purely a gesture at this point in a Republican-led, lame duck Congress, retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer today filed legislation to abolish the Electoral College system. It's something that has been discussed in nearly every election since 2000 but has even greater traction now among Democrats given Hillary Clinton's winning of the popular vote last Tuesday as the LA Times reports, Clinton is up by 800,000 votes and counting. (New York Times opinion writer David Leonhardt believes Clinton's lead could be as much as 2 million votes once all ballots are counted.)
In a statement Boxer says, "In my lifetime, I have seen two elections where the winner of the general election did not win the popular vote. The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately. Every American should be guaranteed that their vote counts."
Meanwhile, Donald Trump who in 2012 declared the Electoral College "a disaster for a democracy" came out cheering the "genius" of the Electoral College today, and true to form claiming that he would have won the popular vote anyway by campaigning harder in blue states if it didn't exist.
The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
Boxer's ceremonial filing for a constitutional amendment would not only need approval by Congress, but would then need to be voted in by three quarters of the states within seven years, all of which seems beyond impossible. And as the LAT notes, "Boxer has co-sponsored legislation to repeal the Electoral College before, [and] none of the bills have been considered."
A Change.org petition launched last week calling for electors to cast their votes for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump on December 19, which theoretically they can still do, has garnered nearly 4.4 million signatures. Popular among email shares of this petition is a quote from Alexander Hamilton about the creation of the Electoral College to guard against "the office of president [falling] to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications."
A separate petition on MoveOn.org (ironically) is calling for the abolition of the Electoral College altogether, and that has nearly 525,000 signatures so far.
Hopes of electors going rogue and becoming "faithless electors" as only nine have done in the last 100 years are slim to none, especially given how many faithful Republicans the Electoral College can count among its ranks in states where this would matter. As Vox explained last week, not only would 37 electors have to desert Trump, they would also have to cast votes for Clinton as opposed to some other candidate. Not to mention any such event would send Congress into total chaos Politico, perhaps trying to optimistic back in March, wrote this piece about how inadequate the laws are surrounding election disputes when it comes to Congress. The only power they clearly would have would be to decide the Presidency in the event of electoral disputes in multiple states. Also, in the event that the House and Senate split over the issue, the governor of the final state in dispute becomes the tiebreaker.
So that would leave someone like Ohio Governor John Kasich or Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker got to choose the next President? Actually, if it were Kasich...
Nonetheless, there is this blog, called Flip the 37, giving the names and email addresses of all the relevant electors whom we could be contacting.
