After Romney loss, some on right bash Electoral College
In the wake of Mitt Romney's loss last week, a handful of Republicans are bashing the Electoral College system and calling for an overhaul, arguing that voters would be better served by an alternate process.
Jan Brewer, the controversial governor of Arizona, argued on Friday that the election is determined by voters in a small handful of states, while voters in states like the safely conservative Arizona are ignored.
"It's pretty disappointing when you think that just a few states really determine who's been elected president," Brewer said, according to the East Valley Tribune. "And they get all the attention."
The Republican governor said the Electoral College "served its purpose" in the past, but suggested that voters would be better served if the president were elected via popular vote.
"I think the public, overwhelmingly from the people I've spoken to, they would like to know that their vote does count, and it was counted together with everybody else's vote, that they were part of that win," she said.
Brewer isn't the only Republican who has spoken out against the Electoral College since Romney's loss: Donald Trump, the reality television host and hotel magnate, released a string of Tweets following President Obama's re-election last Tuesday maligning the U.S. system.
"The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy," Trump wrote.
According to the U.S. electoral system, presidential candidates must earn at least 270 votes from the Electoral College in order to be elected president. In rare cases, such as the 2000 presidential election, presidents have won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote.
As the Washington Post points out, Republicans dominated the Electoral College in the 1970s and 1980s, earning on average larger margins of victory in presidential elections than Democrats.
But as the New York Times' Nate Silver contends, the college has in recent year come to favor Democrats.
"A large number of electorally critical states - both traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like Colorado and Nevada - have been Democratic-leaning in the past two elections. If Democrats lose the election in a blowout, they would probably lose these states as well. But in a close election, they are favored in them," Silver writes. "The Republican Party will have four years to adapt to the new reality. Republican gains among Hispanic voters could push Colorado and Nevada back toward the tipping point, for example."
