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When a sports team scores more points than its opponent, it wins.

And when a political candidate garners more votes than an opponent, they win — except if the election is for the presidency of the United States.

It’s called the Electoral College, it was last amended in 1887, and it’s a terribly undemocratic way to choose the most powerful leader in the free world. That should instead be by popular vote, as is the case for U.S. and state senators and representatives, governors, mayors, legislators and on down the line.

Because of the Electoral College, however, the winner of the national popular vote has lost the election five times in the nation’s history. Two of the elections were in this century: in 2000 with George W. Bush versus Al Gore, and in 2016 with Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton.

Should Trump run again in 2024, as seems likely, it is equally probable that he will protest the results if he loses again. After all, he still hasn’t conceded losing last time — by 7 million votes, no less — to Joe Biden.

And Trump’s hardcore supporters are aggressively embracing election denialism even as they downplay the Jan. 6 insurrection that was intended to illegally deliver the election to Trump.

Happily, both the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to update the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, which — as PolitiFact — “supporters of then-President Donald Trump exploited for its murkiness” in the efforts to overturn the 2020 race.

In July of senators brought forth the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 to clarify aspects of the 1887 law, widely described as .

And a Democrat and Republican on the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 introduced the Presidential Election Reform Act.

The by Louis Jacobson says there is a lot of overlap in the bills, although both sides would have to agree on a final version.

“The bills have the same goals: to prevent a repeat of what Trump and his allies did on Jan. 6, when they exploited uncertainties in the law,” Jacobson writes. “But the specifics on how that would be achieved varies in some cases.”

The legislation aims to do the following:

• Make clear that the vice president’s role in counting votes “is ceremonial.”
• Require that “alternative electors” must follow proper procedures.
• Clarify that states must certify their electoral votes.
• Increase the number of lawmakers needed to challenge a state’s electoral votes.

It’s a noble effort by Congress, a step toward guarding against what happened on Jan. 6. But here’s a better idea: Let’s get rid of the Electoral College altogether.

Winner Not Take All

The Electoral College was established in of the U.S. Constitution, although the words “electoral college” are not actually used. Each state has as many “electors” as it has House representatives — something determined by U.S. Census numbers — plus the two senators that every state has. The District of Columbia has three electors.

When voters vote in a presidential election, then, they are not actually voting for a president and VP but rather the slate of electors, usually selected by the candidate’s political party, who are then expected to cast their ballots for the winning ticket. There are 538 total electors and a majority of 270 is needed to elect a president.

Here is where the unfairness of the Electoral College — which is a process, not an actual physical place — is made manifest:

• Most states have a winner-take-all system, even if an election is close. If one candidate defeats another 50.1% to 49.9%, for example, the winner gets all the electoral votes — including all 55 in California, the largest state. Only Nebraska and Maine allow for proportional representation.
• Though it is a national election, most presidential contests in the modern era focus on , especially Arizona (with 11 electoral votes), Florida (29), Georgia (16), Michigan (16), Ohio (18), Pennsylvania (20) and Wisconsin (10). That’s where the candidates spend most of their time and money trying to sway voters.
• Small states like Iowa (6) and New Hampshire (4) have outsize influence because they traditionally hold the first presidential caucus and primary. That is changing, with more diverse states such as North Carolina (15) and Nevada (6) now also the sites of early contests. But voters in the second- and fourth-largest states, Texas (38) and New York (29), are effectively marginalized.
• Electors sometimes vote in opposition to the candidate favored by a majority of a state’s voters. It happened as recently as the 2016 election, when — including David Mulinix of Hawaii, who voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders rather than Hillary Clinton — defected.
• “Third parties have not fared well in the Electoral College system,” according to . “Although Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote nationwide in 1992, he did not win any electoral votes since he was not particularly strong in any one state. In 2016, Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, qualified for the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia but also failed to win any electoral votes.”

No Trust In Voters

Supporters of the Electoral College it is the system the founders wanted, that the Constitution should rarely be amended, and that large states should not have “undue influence.”

But that was a very long time ago in a very different nation.

Darrell West of the Brookings Institution delegates had “an anti-majoritarian concern in mind. At a time when many people were not well-educated, they wanted a body of wise men (women lacked the franchise) who would deliberate over leading contenders and choose the best man for the presidency. They explicitly rejected a popular vote for president because they did not trust voters to make a wise choice.”

A constitutional amendment is needed to jettison the Electoral College. That calls for an amendment to be proposed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratified by three-fourths of all states.

Yes, that’s a high bar. But according to , more than 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College.

“There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject,” according to its website.

That should come as no surprise.