Democratic Lawmaker Thinks Its Time To Abolish U.S. Electoral College

A member of the January 6 committee investigating the attack on Congress by a mob of loyalists to former President Donald Trump believes that more statutes are needed to prevent future attacks — including the possible dismantling of the Electoral College, Chris Walker reported for Truthout.

Photo Insert: 2020 presidential election US electoral college certificates

On MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes”, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said that lawmakers should make changes to the criminal code in order to “account for now the possibility of presidents just taking a headlong rush at seizing the presidency.”

Statutes are already in place to prosecute persons who seek to obstruct or interfere with the peaceful transition of presidential power, Raskin noted. But additional laws may be needed to deter attempts to usurp an election result. Raskin also alluded to a need to change the presidential selection process.

“We have to look at the way that the electoral system itself is vulnerable to strategic bad faith actors like Donald Trump,” Raskin said, adding that “the Electoral College is an accident waiting to happen. We have to deal with that at some point in American history. Why not now?”

The Electoral College played a role in the Trump campaign team’s scheme to disrupt the 2020 election results. Trump sought to have his then-Vice President Mike Pence accept fake electoral votes from states he lost to President Joe Biden as legitimate, or at least as equal to real electors’ votes.

From there, Pence was supposed to send the matter to the House of Representatives, where Republicans, who had a majority of state delegations under their control, would award Trump another term in office. Pence refused to go along with the scheme, noting he didn’t have the constitutional authority to accept or reject votes.

Americans have typically been consistent in supporting an end to the Electoral College. Drops in that support have generally happened after elections in which Republicans won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, indicating that GOP voters probably changed their views based on how the system benefitted them politically.

But new polling shows that support for abolishing the Electoral College is at its highest point since the start of the century.

According to a Pew Research Center poll published in August, 63 percent of voters think it’s time to select the president with a simple popular vote. Just 35 percent think the current system should remain in place.

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