Stacey Abrams did not try to beautify one of the real reasons behind the electoral college. There was nothing benevolent about it as many would have you believe. She pretty much agrees with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many other activists that this constitutional aberration that discriminates must go.
Stacy Abrams gets it
Chris Hayes points out that there are calls to do away with the Electoral College. After all, the last two Republican presidents were given the presidency by a minority of votes. That is not a Democracy.
Hayes referenced a prescient video by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she rode in a desolate rural area.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Electoral College
The Hill reported it as follows.
“Very efficient way to choose leadership of the country. I mean I can’t think of any other way, can you?” Ocasio-Cortez says, before going on to cite a report from New York Magazine that argues the defenses of the system that determines the winner of presidential elections are flawed.
The freshman lawmaker said the Electoral College is a “scam” that has a “racial injustice breakdown” undermining the votes of people of color.“Due to severe racial disparities in certain states, the Electoral College effectively weighs white voters over voters of color, as apposed to a ‘one person, one vote’ system where all our votes are counted equally,” she says, before pushing back against the argument that eliminating the Electoral College would give big states too much power.
“Could you image if we had this kind democracy-altering ‘fairness’ provision for literally any other group?” she asks. “If we weighed, for example, black and indigenous voters more because of unfairness?”
Ocasio-Cortez later asserts that plenty of Republicans live in Democratic-leaning states, saying that their votes would count equally in a popular vote.
“Facts are facts America,” Ocasio-Cortez concludes. “The Electoral College has to go.”
Stacey Abrams response to Chris Hayes was clear.
“The Electoral College was not designed to make certain that people in small states weren’t subject to the tyranny of urban areas,” Abrams said. “That was not the conversation at the time. It’s because those in power did not believe that working people had the intellectual capacity to directly elect the leader of the free world. We’ve long passed that time and it’s time for direct election and popular vote.”
There is the National Popular Vote initiative that when ratified by enough states whose total electoral votes best the 270 requirements to elect a president, will make a constitutional remedy moot. States that form part of this coalition will assign all their votes to the winner of the popular vote whether their candidate won their state or not.