This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.”
By Sheila Kennedy
May 15, 2026
We never get too old to learn. A few days ago, I watched Andy Borowitz interview Heather Cox Richardson; one of the issues discussed was the Electoral College. In her discussion, Richardson explained something I’d been totally unaware of: initially, states had allocated their Electoral College votes proportionally–unlike the situation today, when every state except Maine and Nebraska have chosen to award those under “winner-take-all.”
Winner take all systems disenfranchise significant numbers of Americans. Giving all of a state’s votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote simply erases the votes of citizens who are in the state’s political minority. (In 2016, that was some 55 million people–42 percent of the country’s entire electorate.) It doesn’t matter how close the vote total is: if 49.9% vote for the losing candidate, and 50.1% for the victorious one, the victor still gets all of that state’s electoral votes.
It’s a great vote suppression method, because members of the state’s minority party know their Presidential votes won’t count, so why bother?
Winner-take-all rules also encourage campaigns to focus almost entirely on a relatively small number of closely divided battleground states, where a swing of even a few hundred votes can create presidents out of popular-vote losers like George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Such a result is contrary to the central, small-d democratic premises of political equality and majority rule.
The winner-take-all rule exists nowhere in the Constitution. It’s a pure creation of the states, which have the power to award electors as they see fit– by congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska do, or in proportion to the state’s popular vote, as was evidently originally the case.
After learning from Heather Cox Richardson that “winner take all” was not originally the way the Electoral College worked, I did some research. It turns out that, initially, states had used a variety of methods to award mostly proportional votes: several used district-by-district popular votes (which produced proportional splits). But others did award all their votes to the state’s winning candidate, and that created a problem.
If State A used a district system and split its electoral votes 60/40, but neighboring State B gave all its votes to a single candidate, State A’s majority party was effectively penalized for being fair. The result was a race-to-the-bottom incentive: any state that wanted to maximize its influence in a close national election had to adopt winner-take-all to avoid “wasting” its majority’s votes.
According to Richardson, Jefferson was pivotal in that race to the bottom. He engineered Virginia’s switch to a statewide winner-take-all system in 1800, in order to maximize his own electoral advantage. That prompted other states to follow suit–had they failed to do so, Virginia would have effectively decided Presidential elections. By the 1830s, winner-take-all systems were nearly universal.
(As one historian pointed out, there was an irony to this change. Jefferson– who genuinely feared concentrated power and championed states’ rights and popular will, was the one who prompted changes that made the Electoral College less deliberative, more party-dominated, and less proportional. The winner-take-all norm — which is increasingly disenfranchising people, producing presidents who lose the popular vote, and rendering a majority of states irrelevant to Presidential campaigns — was a result of Jefferson’s own self-interest.)
Richardson explained that she personally favors getting rid of the Electoral College entirely, but failing that, suggested a return to its original proportionality. Quite obviously, other aspects of the Electoral College that were part of the College’s original operation are long gone–including the notion that electors would be wise and eminent figures chosen by the voters to exercise independent judgment in awarding their votes. Originally there were no political parties, and the winner became President and the runner-up became Vice-President.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an effort to eliminate the anti-democratic effects of the way the current Electoral College operates. It’s an agreement among the states to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the overall popular vote, regardless of who won more votes in their state. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome–that is, when states representing 270 electoral votes have joined. As of May of this year, states that have joined have 222 electoral votes– 82% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.
If participation in the Compact stalls, it might be useful to map out what would happen if at least a few states went back to proportionally awarding their votes. At the very least, it would encourage supporters of a state’s minority party to go to the polls.
Sheila Suess Kennedy is Emerita Professor of Law and Public Policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. As an attorney, she practiced real estate, administrative and business law in Indianapolis before becoming corporation counsel for the City of Indianapolis in 1977. In 1980, she was the Republican candidate for Indiana’s then 1th Congressional District and in 1992, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. She joined the faculty of the School of Public and Environment al Affairs in 1998.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
