going to be an option for many people. they should not be discouraged. if you have a mail ballot, get it in person. i'm going to vote on election day at my polling place in my local area. continue. fortier washington jl host: is withallan lichtman us. he is here to talk about the electoral college on washington journal. it is our love-hate relationship with the electoral college. article two, section one of the constitution, where are we in 2020 terms of your concerns and what folks should look for? guest: we are the world's longest continuing running democracy. and that is a great thing. that establishes really strong

political institutions and a commitment to the traditions of democracy. but on the other hand, it saddled us with some obsolete 18th-century institutions. foremost among them is the electoral college. back when they set up the electoral college, the gap populous andeast most populous state, you had a 5-1 ratio. today it is well over 60-1. the electoral college is biased against the most populous states and biased in favor of the smaller states because no state, no matter what its population, gets less than three electoral college votes because votes are determined by the number of congressional representatives plus the two senators.

so the small states have just one member of congress, but they also have two senators. that is three electoral college votes. it distorts our political system. now, why the electoral college? why did the framers set this up? like anything else, there are multiple reasons. the framers loved the common people, but they did not love them all that much. they believed that the populace could be swayed by unscrupulous demagogues. the prevailing wisdom of the time was first of all we should amit the vote to people with stay in society. that meant men and property owners and taxpayers. the framers also wanted to put as a buffet between the people and the presidential vote, this group of wise men known as the

electors, members of the so-called low door college, that so-called electoral college. in the original constitution and in any of its amendments, there is no right to vote. people think they have a right to vote, they don't. it is not in the original constitution and all subsequent age arets on race, sex, all phrased negatively in terms of what the states absolutely cannot do. and the only directly elected national representative under the original constitution until the early 20th century were members of the u.s. house of representatives. the president was selected by electors and the u.s. senators were selected by the state legislature. the other thing of course is

that the electoral college is intimately tied to slavery. would not leave the popular vote to the president because then the slaves will count for zero. and of course, the free states did not want the slaves to count for anything. so there was this notorious 3/5 compromise that the purposes of congressional representation and the electoral college, slaves would count as 3/5. even though they were treated as property in the slave states, slaves would expand the congressional representation and the electoral college votes of the slave states. course until the 13th amendment to the u.s. constitution abolished slavery. host: we will remind our viewers and listeners, just underpinning

our conversation about the electoral college. established in article two section one, there are 538 electors in the u.s.. isajority of 270 vote required to elect the president. a state of our survey is allotment of electors is equal to the total number of members in its congressional delegation. d.c, threend senate, electors. the award their electoral votes using a winner take all system and maine and alaska split theirs. how far back in history does it go that the candidates really focus on those states with the largest number of electors? thet: it goes back to earliest political contest in the united states. there was really no contest in the first two presidential

elections because george washington was elected. 1796 and onward, there would be a concentration on the larger states with the most electoral college votes. in those days on the swing states, there was a real contest. there is no requirement in the constitution that electors be selected by popular vote within the states. most electorsays, were selected by the state legislatures. and so politicking in the low door college is very different. --was designed to sway politicking in the electoral college is very different. after washington, it was considered unseemly for candidates to promote their own advancement. host: it is called the electoral

college, but is that phrase actually used in the constitution? they talk about electoral in the allocation of electors. it is misleading. it is not a college. it does not actually have all these folks get together. s submitthe state their slate of electors. the slate of electors vote and then there's votes -- those votes are counted in december. those who are so-called rogue electors and do not go in accordance with the vote in their states, that was unresolved until very recently when the supreme court upheld the legality of faithful electoral laws in the states. host: the supreme court did rule

this summer. there is an article note over the summer that says that the faithless electors are rare and inconsequential. of more than 23,000 votes cast in 1804, fewer than 100 can be considered faithless. they will become even more rare regardless of the court's decision or any state attempt to tighten laws binding them to the vote of the electorate. each political party has two undertake a deeper vetting to ensure its electors support the nominee. why did the court take up this case? guest: because there were challenges to the faithful electoral clause in the states and the court had never in its history rule on whether or not electors can follow their own conscious regardless of what is going on in the states. propositiony because i am not sure the

framers intended the electors could be -- to be battling. the philosophy was we want these wise people to make decisions which would imply independent judgment. host: allan lichtman is with us. we are talking about the electoral college. we welcome your comments. democrats, (202) 748-8000. republicans, (202) 748-8001. independents and others, (202) 748-8002. from the gallup organization, their september poll, 61% of americans support abolishing the american -- abolishing the electoral college. is that number what it is every four years? guest: that is a pretty high number. and it is understandable because i developed a prediction system called the keys to the white house to forecast the outcomes

of presidential elections in 1981. and at that time, you had to go all the way back to 1888, grover cleveland and benjamin harrison to find a disparity between the popular vote and the electoral college. 2000cropped up again in when al gore won the popular vote by half a million but george w. bush won the electoral floridaby 537 votes in giving him 25 electoral votes. 2016 when up again in donald trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, a whopping loss, but he got through the electoral college with victories in pennsylvania, michigan and wisconsin. two out of the last four elections, the five elections we have had the electoral college

and the popular vote diverge. there is a real reason for that. and that is to change political demography of the nation. candidate,democratic 5 million to 6 million extra votes in new york and california. they count for essentially nothing in the electoral college. democrats could win those states by 537 votes and still get all of the electoral college votes. there is no comparable republican state. so there is kind of a build in dynamic to create divergences between the popular vote and the electoral college vote that did not exist prior to 2000 and we are now a country in which we no longer have governing by the consent of the governed so it is not surprising that a substantial majority of the american people seeing what is happening should be in favor of eliminating the electoral

college and i'm in favor of that myself. host: host: you mentioned your prediction. want to make sure we ask about you that before we wrap up, but let's get to our conversation on the electoral college. our guest, professor allan lichtman. first up is from north carolina, tim on our democrats line. caller: yes, good morning. i would like make several comments. i've been waiting since 7:00 this morning to get on. host: glad you got in. go ahead. caller: i do agree that the electoral college probably should be abolished. i think for this abolition, we also get rid of a lot of lawsuits. and it gives me great pause to have all these conservatives on the supreme court. another comment that i've been saying up since 7:00 this morning was, i don't think i went to church this morning after hearing all those

sermons, and i am also a pole worker. i've been working early voting. but i mailed in my ballot. and anybody who thinks that there's fraught in the polling place should go to their board of elections, sign up to take the training and work at the poles. i want to take any comment from you. host: thanks, tim. professor lichtman? guest: yeah, he's pointed out a very big issue that's been the case throughout american history, and that is restrictions on the vote, which are often going all the way back to the early republic justified by voter fraud. as we know in the 19th century, in the antebellum period, women couldn't vote, and in all but five states, with just a fraction of the free black population, non-white people could not vote, and this was justified by claiming these people would have their votes bought, they're not

intelligent, they're not independent. throughout that history we've had voter restrictions with voter fraud justifying it. of course, we have the same thing even after the passage of the 15th amendment and the 19th amendment on women's vote. we had the jim crow era in the south, where various devices ke literacy tests and pole taxes disenfranchise people. today there's still mechanisms of disenfranchment, things like felon voting restrictions, voter i.d., voter purges, and, unfortunately, we are seeing in this election an unprecedented effort, at least isn't passage of the voting rights act of 1965, to limit the vote of the rising democratic base of minorities and young people through encouraging intimidators to flood the

polls. we just had yesterday a group of trump supporters blocking a democratic bus from getting to a democratic rally. we've had trump supporters filming people at the polls. as the caller indicated, republicans have filed lawsuits all over the country to make it harder to vote and harder to count legitimate votes. the mail has been slowed down by the mega, the republican mega donor, louis dejoy 2349 post office, and, of course, donald trump has baselessly and falsely attacked mail-in voting as fraught with fraud. in fact, every study has shown that in mail-in voting or anything else, fraud is vanishly small. you're as likely to be hit by lightning as someone to commit voter fraud, and that includes steads by the national republic, the lawyers association, and the conservative heritage

foundation that tried to find fraud and they couldn't. in fact, the lawyers association wiped out its website with its fraud study on it. host: quick look at a poll just in from the "wall street journal" and nbc news. their poll released this morning the headline, president trump trails jobed by 10 points national until final days of election. they say biden leads 52% to 42% among registered voters in their national poll, battleground states race is narrowing. to illinois, republican line. good morning. caller: first a comment on a question from a professor. i think it's despicable that the mainstream media and big tech won't allow the town story out. but to the professor, if and when the electoral college sever eliminated, i would consider that to be the greatest source of voter suppression. no one in the states would have a voice in the presidential election anymore.

could be strictly new york, illinois, and california. what do you think, professor? guest: it's a great point, and that is, i think, probably the best point being made by defenders of the electoral college. but it's just not the case. we have had incredibly close elections on the popular vote. ften 1% or less, as in 2000 or 196 owe or 1968. it was very close in 2004. and so no vote really can be overlooked. you know, right now, it's incredible that only a dozen states have an election that matters. huge states like new york and california are irrelevant and probably until this year texas has largely been irrelevant. so i do think you'll have a more inclusive system with

popular voting. host: what's changed in texas this year? just the balance of power there ? guest: that's right. texas, until this year, really has been incredibly reliably republican. hillary clinton lost it by nine points, and that was one of the closer elections in texas. but texas is changing, and the reason it's changing is the demography that's changing so radically, with the explosive growth of hispanics in texas, which -- and that's a group that hadn't participated very much previously, but as hispanic participation increases, texas is becoming a competitive state. it's already a majority minority state in population, and that's only going to increase. i don't know if the democrats can win texas this year. they might, and that's extraordinary, but texas is definitely heading to competitive status.

in a sense, that makes the electoral college even more unbalanced, because you have this, as i mentioned, this huge democratic vote in the popular vote in new york and california. that's no longer offset by texas. host: you're a professor of history. we're seeing historical numbers of early voting. what's your take on that? guest: it's absolutely amazing. we're going to get close to or ybe at 100 million early votes. that smashes any previous record. it's going to be early -- early votes are going to comprise the great majority of the total number of votes cast in 2016. in texas already the early votes are greater than the total votes cast in 2016. and, of course, you know, donald trump has said, particularly the mail-in early votes are a bad thing, because we may not know the results on election night. a, there's no legal requirement

whatsoever to know the results on election night. in 2000, we didn't know the results until the supreme court stopped the recount on december 12 with bush ahead by 537 votes. you didn't hear any republicans complaining about that, and there have been plenty of other examples where we didn't know he results on election night in 1876 in the contested election. we didn't know the results until march 2. in those days, the inauguration day was march 4, two days before inauguration. in 1916, we didn't know the results until the thursday after the election until president woodrow wilson won alifornia by a hair, 3,773 votes, and prematurely some newspapers had declared his opponent, charles evans hughes, president. neither in law or in tradition is there anything which says we need to know the results on

election night. host: is the date on which the electoral votes must be counted and announced constitutionally mandated or mandated by statute? guest: both the dates for elections and counting are mandated by statute. in fact, we didn't have a uniform election day until 1845. prior to that, elections were held on a slightly more than a one-month period up to the counting of the electoral college votes. host: let's flare paul, new york city, you're on with allan lichtman. caller: hi. how you doing? can you hear me? host: yes, we can. caller: there was a "washington ost" opinion piece saying that if we have a recount on a national basis it could be a nightmare, and that would basically be very difficult to do, and what he said the he

electric college does do is it allows recounts to happen more effectively on a state by state basis if there was going to be one. you just have a meltdown if you had to do it nationally, which was interesting. and i suggest that maybe you address that. the second thing i have is u.s. senate. if you think that the electoral college is undemocratic, you guys sight u.s. senate is as well, new york city has a population, and this i think is important, has a population that is larger than 37 states. ok, just the city of new york. 37 states have a smaller population. and if you think about it, it seems kind of unfair to have small states that just got a couple hundred thousand or less than a million and have the same amount of send early to votes as a state of new york, much less the city of new york. and this idea of d.c., d.c.'s got a population that it is a fraction of new york city's, and the idea that they get two

senate seats, which is what apparently some people want to do, seems crazy. i can understand puerto rico, which at least has over three million people. but again, i think you really have to address the senate if you're going to be addressing the electoral college as well. host: all right, paul, we'll hear from professor lichtman. guest: quick correction. d.c. is not a state and doesn't have any u.s. senators with voting rights in the u.s. senate. it has so-called shadow senators that are purely symbolic. first, about recounts. recounts are very, very rare in presidential elections. of course, we had the famous one in 2000 in florida, but since then, we really have not had recounts of any consequence in presidential elections. secondly, even with a national popular vote, if you were to have recounts, you would have recounts state by state, not for the entire electorate. and i don't disagree with you about the senate.

the senate is another 18th century institution that i do think needs to be reformed. i don't think it's quite right that wyoming and california should both have two senators. you don't have to turn the senate into the house of representatives. i wrote a piece on this, i hill" having "the senators repeated a sliding scale, maybe with the smallest states with two and the larger states with 10. that would take into account, to a degree, differences in population, while still preserving a fundamental difference between the senate and the house. host: let's go to baltimore. this is donita, democrats line. caller: good morning. i have 2 1/2 questions. the first question is, i've often been confused over the difference between a delegate and an electorate. and also, what would it take to

abolish the electoral college, and how likely is that to happen? guest: i'm not sure i understand your first question, a delegate? a delegate to what? caller: a delegate, yeah, right, a delegate to what, exactly? guest: there are delegates to conventions, but there are no delegates who vote for president. only electors vote for president. host: on that first point, maybe you could point out how electors get chosen or elected. guest: yeah, when they actually vote, say, for donald trump or jobed, you're not voting for trump or biden, you're voting for their slate of electors, and they choose their slates of electors designed to pick party loyalists, particularly before they were the clarification of a supreme court decision, and not every state has a faithful elector to make sure that you

wouldn't have electors go rogue. now, how do you get rid of the electoral college? the most obvious way, of course, is a constitutional amendment. and that's extremely unlikely, unfortunately, because it takes a 2/3 vote of both houses of vote of the 3/4 states. and it is incredibly unlikely that senators from small states or small states when it comes to ratification would support a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college, because they have disproportionate power, which they're not going to want to give up. there is another creative way hat's being promoted to in essence, in practice, eliminate the electoral college, and that's compact to 70, which is an agreement being promoted among the states to assign

their electors, regardless of what happens in the state, to whoever wins the national popular vote. so far it's basically only blue states that have signed on to that, not surprisingly, they're well short of the 270 electoral votes to make that effective, and, of course, if it ever comes to pass, there will be constitutional challenges as to whether or not that violates the compact clause, which says certain kinds of andacts between the states need to be approved by congress. night political report, allan lichtman, their latest preview of the he electric -- electoral college ratings, their prediction is democrats have 290 electoral votes in their solid, likely, and lean categories, and would need zero from the toss-up column. otherwise republicans have 125 electoral votes, they predict, and the solid, likely and lean

categories and would need 123% electoral votes from the toss-up column, plus 22 votes from the lean democratic column. so 270 is the magic number. what happens if there's a tie? guest: there's a tie, and there has been before in 1800, there was a little bit of a difference in the electoral college system. you didn't have tickets. the vice president would be the second largest vote-getter. and you did have a tie, and in that case, it went to the u.s. house of representatives. but the constitution says, if no one gets an electoral college majority, the u.s. house decides, and that house, after long deliberation, you ow, well into february, gave the presidency to thomas jefferson. so if there is a tie, it goes to the house of representatives with each state, ironically,

casting just one vote. so wyoming in that case has exactly the same weight as does california. host: just a program note, charlie will be on this program tomorrow morning at 9:00 eastern. to chris, calling us from new jersey on the republican line. caller: good morning, thank you. i just want to make a comment that we're not known as the people's republic of america for a reason. we're the united states of america. the reason we're called that is because the states determine what happens in the for the. now, we're not electing -- if the constitution was held to us, it was originally designed, the federal government wouldn't have anywhere near the power that it has now. if you want to get rid of the electoral college, we got to go back and strip away all the other things that apparently don't belong either, all these excess powers that have been taken over by the federal

government. but at the same time, let's repeal the 17th amendment, thanks a lot. guest: i'm not sure what he's getting at, there is a supremacy clause in the constitution that federal law is the supreme law of the land, not what individual states do. and, of course, this issue of the extreme rights of states has been settled numerous times. unfortunately, of course, in the 1860's by a civil war. host: a couple of questions on twitter. does the constitution imply reasonable actions, that is in the midst of a pandemic, is it reasonable that assisted curbside voting is legal? second question is, guest: goat that first question. host: go ahead. guest: it's been legal for a long time, curbside voting. it did not arise for the first time in the midst of a pandemic. a number of states have had curbside voting for quite some time.

host: second question for you was more comment. the electoral college should be voted out for many reasons, but none more important than the explanation of the way the framers used slaves to implement it. guest: i pointed that out in my very first analysis of the electoral college, how it led to the notorious 3/5 compromise, which slaves counted as 3/5 of a person, and slaves weighing in for congressional and electoral college representation in the slave states, or they were treated as property in those states under the laws of the states. you know, that's one of the great ironies of the original constitution. so the caller is absolutely right. host: next up, democrats line in fort worth, texas. caller: hi, good morning. you actually touched, mr. lichtman, part of my question back to three callsers.

but i still don't understand about the electoral college. who exactly -- i'm from texas, so who exactly puts these position s in their to make these decisions? guest: the parties, my dear. caller: the legislatures -- guest: the slate of electors. if you don't know who they are, but the parties pick them. caller: so how is that -- do ou have like 50%, is it split? guest: i didn't hear that. is it what? host: she asked if it was split. guest: i'm not sure i get that. each party has its own slate of electors, and whichever party wins the state, its slate of electors gets to vote for president. host: all right, here's thomas in strongville, ohio, on the independent line. good morning. caller: good morning. how are you all doing?

got a question. the reason that the electoral college was the way it was is because the major populations cannot rule over -- what's good in new york is not necessarily what's good in chicago. what's good in chicago is not really good for what's in green bay or whatever, you know? and that's the premise behind the whole electoral college, in my view, you know, just because they're more populous doesn't mean that they overrule the states' rights. guest: and the president is the president of the entire country. we have plenty of deference to the states in the original constitution. the state legislatures chose he united states senators. of course, you also had the house of representatives elected state by state.

they couldn't be elected at large in the state or by districts within the states. and as i explained the electoral college was very much tied to slavery, and at the time the differentials between the states were minimal compared to the enormous differentials between the states today. host: i think if you look, allan lichtman, you read article two, section one of the constitution establishing the electors, and even sort of the average citizen sort of reading that, it's such thick language. when in the process of writing the constitution did the electoral college, this process for electing our president, when and why did that come about? guest: yeah, first came about during the debates in the constitutional convention of 1787, and it was part of broader disputes between the

slave states and the free states and the large states and the small states that led to a number of compromises within the constitution of the united states. but the electoral college system, people don't realize this, was fundamentally amended by the 12th amendment, which went into effect for the first time in the election of 1804. in the original constitution, there was no ticket system, no system of tickets of voting for president and vice president, rather, everyone, all the electors voted for the slate of candidates, and presuming they highest ority, the vote-getter would be president and the second vote-getter would be vice president, and hat led to this conundrum in 1800 when supposedly the candidates of the jeffersonian

party, jefferson and burr, tied. you know, they were supposed -- one or two electors vote only for jefferson and not burr, so jefferson would be the burr and burr would be the vice president. so the system snarled, and that led to the separate election of the president and the vice president and the formation of the current ticket system. so you both had the original constitution and then a fundamental change in that in the 12th amendment. host: and the 12th amendment to the constitution rat feud, passed by 1803, ratified by the states in june of 1804, and just looking at it, it is one of the longest amendments you will read. guest: it really is. host: question for you, though, on twitter, professor lichtman. one, if the electoral college is blished, would the coastal states determine all the presidential vote outcomes?

and two, would proportional electors rather than winner take all better reflect the popular vote? guest: yeah, number one, that's similar to the question asked before that somehow the smaller states would have no voice, but given our polarization, we've had razor-thin popular vote majorities or pluralities, and no state can be ignored. plus there are huge populations outside the coastal states, texas, for example, illinois, michigan, wisconsin have very substantial populations, ohio, that could not be ignored at all. was there another part to that zpwhe host: she asked about proportional electors -- guest: yeah, i think that's a really bad idea for the

following reason. you know, this could be a whole other discussion, and that is the gerrymandering of congressional districts. congressional districts could not fairly reflect the balance of power between the parties because the party controlling the state legislature gir manneders, designs the district lines to favor it. so we've had, for example, the pennsylvania gerrymander of 2010 in the first election, democrats won a majority of the congressional vote, but republicans won the great majority of congressional seats. so if you had proportional representation in pennsylvania, according to congressional seats, it would unfairly favor one party over another. so i don't think that's a viable option. host: let's get one more call. henrieta, new york, on our republican line. caller: well, at the time i'd like to disagree with the

speaker, in that we're not a democracy. we're elected representative of independent states. for him to try change the senate to represent the population would be going against a constitution. it is the senate that treats each state equally, so each state gets two representatives. the house of representatives that has the population. that's how the constitution's written. now, when you try talk about democracies, when you have the states' rights, they're violating the constitution. host: peter, we'll get an answer from allan lichtman. guest: the answer is we have obsolete 18th century institutions that we have, in fact, modified. amending the constitution is not violating the constitution. so we've had amendments i just described at length to change how the electoral college

works. we've had amendments to change from the senators being elected by the state legislatures in the states to senators being elected by popular vote. so there is nothing inherently wrong with amending the constitution to reflect the fact that we are very different country in the 20th century, now in the 21th century, than we were in the 18th century. and this idea that we're independent states, i think i've spoken about it before, of course there were lots of powers to the states, but we are one nation, and the constitution establishes the federal law as the supreme law of the land. and i understand we elect representatives, and we are a democratic republic.

and the original intent of a democratic republic is to have the representatives reflect the will of the people. that is, remember, the cry of the american revolution was no taxation without representation. they weren't talking about representation by land masses. they were talking about representation by people. host: we're running short of time, but i want to get back to your prediction for 2020, allan lichtman. guest: in 2016, i predicted donald trump would win. based on the fact that there were enough of my 13 keys out against the party holding the white house to predict a change of election. again, in 2020, now that trump is the incumbent, i'm again predicting a change election. there are more than enough keys to predict that this election will mark the defeat of the incumbent president, donald trump, for the first time that a sitting president loses since

1992. and then jobed will become the next president of the united states -- and then joe biden will become the next president of the united states. this is a system that did predict donald trump in 2016, been right since 1984, so it is purely nonpartisan. these are predictions, not any personal endorsements. host: we'll check back with you either way. professor allan lichtman from the american university in >> everyday we are taking your calls live on the air on the news of the day. we will discuss policy issues that impact you. withmorning, we will talk supporters of president trump and joe biden. editor of a political report will join us to discuss campaign 2020. watch live at 7:00 eastern this morning. be sure to join the discussion with your phone calls, facebook

comments, messages, and tweets. senate judiciary committee chair lindsey graham is running for reelection to a fourth term in south carolina against democrat jamie harrison. next, their final televised debate. ♪ >> good