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Three Democratic senators launched a fresh push to do away with the Electoral College system and allow U.S. presidents to be chosen through a direct national popular vote instead.
Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is also Senate majority whip, Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a constitutional amendment on Monday to abolish the Electoral College, calling it “undemocratic.”
“In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win,” Schatz said in a statement. “It’s that simple.”
The Electoral College, established in the Constitution, is the U.S. system for electing a president in which each state is awarded a certain number of electoral votes based on population and the winner is dictated by which candidate reaches or surpasses 270.
Talk of abandoning the system in favor of one in which a president is selected based solely on which candidate receives the most votes overall is nothing new but has received heightened attention in recent election cycles, particularly following 2016 when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College and thus the White House to Donald Trump.
In their press release, the senators noted that a candidate who wins the popular vote but loses the election through the Electoral College has only happened five times in history, two of those times were in the last 25 years. Both times, the candidate who lost the popular vote but won the White House was a Republican.
“In 2000, before the general election, I introduced a bipartisan resolution to amend the Constitution and abolish the Electoral College,” Durbin, who is also the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said in a statement. “I still believe today that it is time to retire this 18th century invention that disenfranchises millions of Americans.”
Until last month, when Trump won both the majority of votes overall and secured the White House through the Electoral College, a Republican candidate for president had not won the national popular vote in two decades. The last GOP candidate to do it was former President George W. Bush in 2004.
Last month, Trump received 77,266,801 votes overall to Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris’ 74,981,313, according to the Associated Press. Trump’s 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226.
The senators also argue the current system allows for just a handful of states, known as battlegrounds, to determine the outcome of an election, giving them outsized influence.
