members. including tillery's alleged are fernandez, deborah ross, frank marvin, cameron burda, bill hagerty and roger marshall. watch interviews with new members of congress at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. online at c-span.org, or listen on the c-span radio app. >> presidential historians, authors, and campaign advisors talk about the past present, and , future of presidential elections. at a virtual event hosted by the university of pennsylvania law journal and the national constitution center. >> friends,e team have convened america's greatest >> all right friends, we have convened america's greatest scholars of the presidency for the future of presidential elections. put your questions ina

box and i will introduce them as we are talking and respond and keep this as direct as possible. let's begin with the first panel . the origins of theoretical perspectives of the electoral college, our scholars are a professor of law and philosophy at university of pennsylvania and the author of many pathbreaking articles on the founding, including james wilson and his role at the constitutional convention. his forthcoming book is. "style of american law" the lawrence rockefeller professor of sociology at the woodrow wilson school at princeton is one of america's leading experts on comparative constitutional law, as well as one of the most dynamic guests on the "we the people" potted

cast -- podcast. and jack is another friend of the constitution center, and is a co-professor of history and american studies at the university of pennsylvania. he is a professor emeritus at stanford university and is the author of many books including "politics and the making of the constitution." kim, bill and jack, it is an honor to have you here. him, i'm going to ask you to set the stage on the origins of theoretical perspective at the electoral college. kim: thank you. princeton has renamed the woodrow wilson school and now we are the princeton school. obviously, this is waiting for a donor. anyway, lovely to be here. the thing is striking about the

u.s., it is not the only country in the world that has elections. it is the only country that has something like the electoral college. so i am not what you talk about that so much, because i want to say that every time the u.s. runs an election, it has international election observers that check out our election procedures and they assessed us according to international standards. none of these reports mentioned the electoral college except to say that is how we do things. these international reports focus on a lot of understand -- a lot of other standards i want -- lot of other standards i want to focus on just so we realize american elections don't end up at the top of the pack internationally. international observers talk about how we have a partisan election machinery. very few democracies in good standing turnover elections to people elected on partisan tickets.

that came up this year when we wondered whether the michigan court of elections was going to certify the results, because the results could have split 2-2, republican and democrat. so suddenly, we see this is a very rickety structure. it is an accident waiting to happen. this machinery is also underfunded, so very often we got election technology that districts use that is way outdated and is hackable. there are still eight states with no paper trail for checking or doing any kind of audit or recount. weirdly in the u.s., we have no system of automatically registering people to vote. in most micro sees, if you are a resident in good standing, you are automatically entitled to vote. at here, we put all kinds of hurdles in front of people to be able to register. the worst thing about our elections to foreign observers is that we run national elections for both presidential

and the u.s. congress, according to 50 different rules and 50 different states, with some federal structure, but that federal structure is not detailed. some states you have mail-in voting or early voting or some states you need a 30-day residency or a 60-day residency we have a national election run by the states. that can be a virtue, decentralized, harder to hack, but it can be a vice because the right to vote is not equally realized across the country. we have talked about voter disenfranchisement, so we have all kinds of ways once people struggle to get registered to vote, of having them not vote, either by showing voter id or doing urges voter rolls by the way come all this has been upheld by the supreme court. we are also unusual in having our elections funded by private

donors and particularly private donors who are not very transparent. we have an opaque and almost unregulated campaign-finance system. we also have a blurring of state and party which we saw a locked in this election. many states have rules limiting what incumbents can do to use their office for reelection. this year, those rules went out the window, if we ever had them. and finally, we have a system in america of federal elections both for the presidency and the congress that are highly disproportionate. we have a system in which, if there is a 50/50 split, you don't get day 50/50 split. we have of these winner take all district. so the congress -- winner take all districts. so the congress is likely to be way out of whack where public opinion is. that is true in the house,

complicated by gerrymandering, but also true in the senate consider the senate. the six senators from california, texas and new york represent the same number of people as 62 senators from the smallest 31 states. so there is all kinds of ways in which our constitutional system enables minority rule and is highly disproportionate. all those things get commented on by election observers when they observe us. and the electoral college, weird though it is, is way down the list of things we can do to improve our standing in international perspective. jeffrey: thank you for that fascinating putting of our system into international perspective. it is very interesting to learn about the ways we differ from international norms, and as you point out, the electoral college is not the most dramatic. our symposium convener,

bail, you are probably america's leading scholar of james wilson, the forgotten founder who not only conceived of the central idea of we the people of the united states as a whole have sovereign our, but also the unusual compromise of the electoral college. tell us about the electoral college and role of james wells -- games wilson -- james wilson. bill: the single most interesting feature of the electoral college is that it doesn't exist. i will explain in a second. that is actually related to wilson. as you say, he is either blamed or credited or given responsibility for devising the electoral college. that is actually a mistake.

let me in very broad brush terms walk through the principal steps at the constitutional convention that may explain what i think was going on. at the beginning of the convention, june 1, wilson reposes direct popular elections. nobody wants to take him up on that. next day, he says, why don't we have a system of electors? and when i first started writing about wilson, i thought wilson was the divisor -- deviser of the electoral college. actually, what he wanted was a system of indirect popular elections. he wanted to bypass the states. he wanted to divide the united states into district, have each district select an elector, and then the electors would elect the president. if you think about it, that

avoids the big state-small state controversies. it also avoids the slavery issue. so his proposal really does not look like the final thing that gets ultimately called the electoral college. wilson, neither of his proposals went anyplace. the convention was stuck with the virginia plan. the virginia plan was, that congress elected president. they kicked things around, they have a long period in the middle of july when they are trying all kinds of schemes, everything you can think of, operably things you can't think of and at one point wilson, in exasperation, says, why don't we do this by lottery? that didn't get any place either. they went back to the virginia plan. and then come something interesting happens in september, where the documentation is not terrific,

but a somewhat obscure committee known as the committee on postponed parts comes back to the convention and they say, we've got this idea, we are going to use electors. and ever but he seems quite confused. we talked about that, we rejected it and they said no, it is a compound system. we are going to have a system of presidential electors not to take the decision out of the hands of congress, because congress and that is to take the decision out of congress because -- system of presidential electors, and that is to take the decision out of the hands of congress because congress forms cabals. here is the interesting point. the electors were to be chosen by state legislatures. there is nothing in the constitution about popular election at all. there is a possibility maybe

state legislatures, out of the goodness of their hearts, they say why don't we have a popular election, but it is not required. the first number of elections, quite overwhelmingly they tilted toward let the state legislatures appoint electors wrigley. -- appoint electors directly. so why have electors at all? the reason given everyone seemed to have accepted was that this was to prevent cabals from forming. and the odd part of this ramshackle institution is that, we are going to make the electors vote on the same day in different states predict can't come together, they can't deliberate in a group that wasn't an afterthought -- in a group. that wasn't an afterthought, that was the point. if there is no collegial body you can call the electoral

college, they were deliberately trying to prevent anything like such a deliberative body from forming because they are worried about cabals. there is a complex intellectual history about how terminology of the electoral college comes into play, it doesn't really get firmly settled until the 20th century. earlier, they talked about electoral colleges, various ways to speak about the presidential election, but that is a long way of saying kim is right, and also saying you can't blame james wilson. jeffrey: wonderful conclusion. you can't blame james wilson is a fine motto, and you can't credit him so much with the emphasis on popular sovereignty. interesting about the framers' concern about cabals and how

they connected their fear of cabals to their fear of factions. jack, you are america's leading scholar of james madison. i would love to know how madison differed from wilson in his views about the electoral college. he supported the virginia plan, which would have had election by the legislature. at one point, he seemed to support a national popular vote, but tell us about james madison and the election of the presidents. jack: the starting point to start about -- the starting point about madison is that his view on the executive branch of the government was probably the least developed aspect of his constitutional theory going into the convention. it took madison a good decade into the late 1790's to come to grips with the political potential of the presidency, and to preconceive what american politics should be like -- and to re-conceived what

american politics should be like and how powerful the presidency could become. when we talk about the electoral college, it is important to cut the framers some slack. it is important to recognize there was no precedent available for the kind of institution they were committed to creating, a national, lowercase r republican executive, and the dominant models of power were either practical or ministerial. the government had been developing in principle since the early 18th century. it is worth noting that the convention was a process of tedious and reiterated discussions where the framers moved around and around before

coming up with a proposal. so they had the committee on postponed parts, a wonderful and obscure name for a committee. as i read the debates the bill was discussing, the leading edge of them was none of the advantages different votes of the election would provide, whether a popular vote door congressional vote or a vote by electors, it was really the disadvantages. madison originally resisted the idea of a popular election. he knows if you have a popular election, there is only a single constituency. let's call it for reasons of convenience the united states. and according to the one person, one vote model, the problem with that is that you would have a big, adverse impact on the

south, for whose interests madison spoke. so madison originally opposed it. but popular elections, you can't sure voters at the local level within the state would know who the best characters were, so it would be very hard to get a decisive vote. you can solve that problem if you have a congressional election. by definition, members of congress -- today this is becoming a counterintuitive proposal but the definition of members of congress should be the best and most important part of your national political class treats or that might solve the problem you would have with a popular election. but the problem is, if you are committed to the idea of an independent executive the way wilson was, if you commit to the idea of a legislative election

and you want the president to be independent of congress, then you have to limit him to a single term. because otherwise he becomes a tool or toady or lackey of congress. we see this in the final debates on the committee of postponed parts report. it discusses how we wind up in a contingent election having votes not cast by the senate, but i the house, with each state having one vote -- but by the house, with each state having one vote. it is a complicated constitutional calculus. i think the idea of having presidential electors became the default option. it wasn't that anyone had a clear idea how it was going to work, it wasn't that anyone had

a great degree of confidence in who the electors would be. george mason says at one point, it might not even be of tertiary importance. we have no idea, and the other part that is starting to loom ominously again is how the electors working to be chosen by default by the states. we had the basic default option of winner take all, statewide popular voting, so the electors chosen in the state would go to whoever has a plurality. the key thing here is that the framers did not really work out who the electors would be, i think just running out of time, they defaulted to that option. and this is becoming a scary possibility again because we don't know what forms of manipulation may arise.

i just was reading another horror story about arizona this morning. a bill has been introduced to allow the state legislature to override a popular vote. it shows how much mischief can still arise at the state level. jeffrey: thank you for that, jack rakove. it is interesting to learn about madison's conceptions of presidential elections and the idea he is grappling with a solution and the fear people won't know the best candidates. so even if you want to popular vote, maybe congress would be better because the president would be in the thrall of congress and you would have the determinants of the electoral college as an uncertain compromise in order to grapple with getting the best candidate. one round of concluding thoughts for this panel. kim, having heard bill and jack, does any other country have

similarly unusual, historically specific efforts to avoid popular passions directly and choosing presidents because of concerns they won't choose the best resident? -- best president? and whether -- and what other aspects of our system seem out of the ordinary in an international sense? kim: one of the ways to get a chief executive is to have the parliament of congress elect him, they call it a parliamentary systems per the best majority of democracies in the world are parliamentary systems in which the president is accountable to a legislature which can see what he is doing and also that the candidates better than we are doing at the moment. but certainly in france under the 1958 constitution, there was

a public assembly of members of parliament and members of local government to elect the president. that was abandoned within 10 years in favor of a popular election. so you see the old of the constitution, the more distrust there is of people at the newer the constitutions are, the more there is direct, popular vote. what you see in the u.s. is the fact we are driving the model t constitutions while the best of the world is driving the cars of the future that levitate and so on. a lot of weird systems of our -- a lot of weird features of our system is that it was designed before things that are now commonplace. jeffrey: illuminating the constitution drafting project, we convened people and to everyone's surprise, conservatives and progressives

proposed replacing the electoral college with a national popular vote. is wilson's vision of the popular vote something else? bill: wilson himself would clearly have been on board. but something jack was saying needs to be emphasized. there was a mythology, the framers came together in philadelphia and there was this miraculous moment wghere -- dracula's moment where there was this deeply. plan to form the electoral college in deep thought, and that simply isn't true. there were stumbling throughout the summer time to figure out what they were going to do about this. they changed their minds, everybody. wilson changes his mind. madison changes his mind. they flip back and forth. they speculate and then say, the speculation is no good. they come up this final device,

and what they are trying to do is prevent cabals. ok, try to explain that. that is why we have the electoral college, they just got blank looks. and by the way, james madison is very clear on this point in his later correspondence. in 1823, he is asked about the system of presidential elections and he says my friend, it was late in the day, we were all very tired, and the hurrying influence produced by fatigue and impatience, that is why you got that system. james madison, father of the constitution, that is his view on what happened. there was no miracle. they were doing their best. they should be given all credit for doing their best, but they

are not saying the electoral college was something that was profoundly thought through. take it up with medicine. jeffrey: thank you. jack, i'm going to ask you to take it up with madison on the final thoughts for this panel. we have seen the specter of medicine's worst nightmare. madison warned of all large assemblies, a character with passion who arrests the soul from reason, and we have seen an armed mob marching on the capitol, storming the capitol. in light of medicine's concerns about cabals, today what he favor a direct popular vote or would want some other way for filtering the passions of the peoples of the best candidates could emerge? jack: i think if you look at the first decade and a half after

the constitution went into effect, at least until the 12th amendment in 1804, the critical development was that you had to get to the first two resident that to get to the first two contested presidential elections in 1796 and 1800. whatever set of rules you apply, you get the same results, but as soon as madison reveals his desire to finally go back, a couple things happened. the two parties were already well-organized in 1796. washington delayed his farewell address as long as he could partly to favor the federalist, because of the disadvantage of his republican opponents, jefferson and madison at their team.

as soon as somebody new a presidential election would take place, two things happened. the first is that [indiscernible] would have worked in 1796. jefferson and adams were both known to the american public. i think that problem would have largely been solved. the second thing was, all the electors were tools of the party. they were not independent voices. [indiscernible] john adams tried to manipulate the federalist vote away from madison. madison announced a complicated scheme to cast a second vote for someone he favored supposedly to get it away from john adams. you can imagine the framers had that pure vision that bill was

alluding to, and the fact is they did not. a non-fascist group of citizens, to use madison's phrase. and now we are worried about the problem with electors, and issue the supreme court looked out, an interesting issue by itself. so the whole image that you have this independent distinguished body to avoid cabals, and it is even worse, that was a fear they had. so a popular election would have worked and the electors would have been essentially functionless. jeffrey: thank you. avoiding cabals is good. a friend asked what is a cabal. it is a secret political click

or faction -- political clique or faction. eight group devoted to self-interest rather than the common good. the question is, what is the common good? we now turn to panel two. i invite all of you to join me. thank you also much, a superb discussion and thank you for the light. it is my great pleasure to introduce panel two. i will do that by noting that -- i want to scroll down and make sure i have my bios right.

wonderful. i am going to jump right in and say that -- where am i. we have foley and alex kazar, and charles. you and the constitution center have such amazing discussions about whether the election of 2021 -- election of 2020 was going to be unusual from a historic perspective. you have been running such illuminating works about the historic perspective. telus about how the election of 2020 compares to the most contested elections of the past, including 1800 and 1796, and in

what ways was 2020 more extraordinary than any election? >> thank you, jeff. it is great to be back. yes, we have just lived through this amazingly searing election that culminated with the insurrection at the capitol. for that reason, we don't want to revisit that history as much as we need to and probably also don't want to think about 2024, can we just take a break? but i actually think we need to spend some time thinking about how what we just went through sets us up for the possibility of an even more difficult election in 2024, in part because of the fragmentation within the republican party that we watched over the last week or two, frankly since january 6.

and let's put current events and the future in historical perspective by starting with the early years and the 12th amendment. because as jack told us importantly, our electoral college is the 12th amendment, which was put in place after the development of two-party competition, which had emerged by 1796 and 1800. so the 12th amendment was built on the expectation that we would have two-party competition that we normally do have. but what that means is that our system has very great difficulty handling a third-party or multiparty elections. and that is what i fear may coming down the road next time, given the fragmentation of the republican party.

no guarantees for that. it is still four years away, but we have to imagine the possibility of a three-way split between trump running again as the republican nominee, maybe kamala harris running to be president on the democratic side and then, and non-trumpian republican breaking from the republican party because they can't tolerate any longer the fact that the republican party has become the party of trump, and offering a genuine third-party alternative. not a democrat, not a trumpian. it could be mitt romney again, given he is so anti-trump. it could be been sasse, it could be a number of figures, larry hogan. the point is, if we do see a three-way split, trump versus some other traditional republican versus a democrat,

our system can't really handle that. and the nature of polarization now and the ugliness of american politics now makes that fraught in a particular way. if we compare the current moment with previous periods in our history where we have had difficulty handling third parties. quickly, in the 1840's, that was a period were significant third-party development occurred over the issue of slavery. you had the traditional split between the democrats and the whigs, but in 1834, there was a three-way split the system couldn't handle. a professor at princeton said that 1834 election may have sent us to the civil war for reasons we can discuss. another period of third-party

involvement was the 1880's and 1890's. and what is interesting if we compare that to today is, grover cleveland winds in 1884, loses in 1888 and comes back and wins again in 1892. and we heard trump talking about wanting to replicate what grover cleveland did, being a president to lost and comes back and wins again. grover cleveland was never impeached once, let alone twice. he conceded defeat in 1888. in fact, he held the umbrella, it was raining, for harrison's and occupation, and unlike trump, who refused to go to biden's inauguration, cleveland was going to hold harrison's umbrella has harrison gave his inaugural address to show that they could still be friends, despite their electoral competition. so if we have a rematch between

trump and some democrat in four years, it won't be as friendly. but the historic parallels are perfect. and that is why as we come to our present era, we haven't fully come to grips with the fact that ever since ross perot was on the scene in 1992 and ralph nader operated as something of a spoiler in 2000, and gary johnson and jill stein arguably were a factor for why trump wins the electoral college in 2016, our system is in a new era of potential destabilization, where it can't handle a third or fourth candidate. so we need to think really carefully about what our architecture and infrastructure is going into the next election. on the last panel you mentioned the idea of ranked choice voting and i do think ranked choice

voting at the level of state choice, like maine has done to appoint its electors, is a way to handle this issue, for reasons we can discuss. thank you. jeffrey: thank you, ned foley, constitution law at ohio state university and your new book is "presidential elections and majority rule." alex, matthew sterling professor of history at harvard, your book, the right to vote and contested history in the united states was named best history by the american historical society. help us put in historical perspective the difference between contested elections which are really close but don't create polarization or dispute, like 1916, which was extraordinarily close. those are the kind ned discussed

in the 1840's. and today, where polarization and other factors makes us especially vulnerable to disruption. how can we distinguish between different kinds of calls elections on what historical perspective would you put on the contested election of 2020? alex: thank you for inviting me. it is a pleasure to be here to join various friends and colleagues in these discussions. i am not sure -- what i would see as the difference between close elections that occur in

periods of partisanship and close elections that occur in other periods. it is interesting that we live now in a world where we talk about venom between the parties and i am old enough to remember when a number of us used to talk about the republican and democratic parties as tweedledum and tweedledee, and quips about the soviet union, that the only difference between our political system and the soviet system was that we had two parties rather than one, but we only had one more than they did. in 1916, there was a lot of noise, and the republican party is living with its own tensions,

but that was not a period of acrid partisanship. the other thing that comes to mind in that respect was the 2000 election, which was extremely close, as close as it could be. the margin of difference was smaller than the margin of error of the technology, so we don't really know who won the 2000 election. but that is what was really notable about it, how muted protests were, certainly if you compare i to wa guys compare it to what just happened, which wasn't as close. there were some threats of violence during the counting in florida, but at the end of it all, you had al gore say, you one. in fact, he presided over the joint session of congress.

but there was a kind of dispirited protest on inauguration day in the rain, but it was quite small. and i think behind that was a broader conviction, which turned out to be false, but a broader conviction that it didn't matter much whether al gore or george bush would become president. remember, george was talked about a kinder, gentler america. -- george bush talked about a kinder, gentler america. i think it is a difference between the periods more than the elections themselves. i think the 2020 election has exposed a variety of flaws built

into our presidential election procedures. they have been there for a long time. they have been latent. they have been avoided because of our reliance on norms that you don't do that sort of thing. for example, the legislature does not choose electors by itself. but these norms are being cast aside. there are a lot of weak points in the process. i would also underscore what we said earlier about the fact we have a bizarre electoral system where we let partisan institutions decide the outcome of elections, and there is no partisan intervention. so icy lots of sources of problems for 2024 and beyond -- so i see lots of sources of problems for 2024 and beyond in an atmosphere such extreme partisanship that i think there is trouble ahead. jeffrey: thank you very much for

that and for pointing us forward and asking us to think about the guard rails of democracy that need to be resurrected. alex: could you mention my book about the electoral college? jeffrey: i can, but you can do it better. everyone should get it. alex: [laughter] it is called, "why do we still have the electoral college?" jeffrey: we will be debating that question, thanks. charles, you are a professor of law at duke law school. harvard announced in july that you would join the harvard faculty of harvard's charles

hamilton institute for race and justice. congratulations. you are also working on a book about the past and future of voting rights. why don't you take us back and also forward? what can we learn from the history of voting rights about the kind of structural flaws or challenges the 2020 election exposed that you think should be corrected? charles: thank you for having me. i also want to build on the comments of my fellow amazing panelists as well as the fabulous panel that came before, to think about some of the structural divisions we have an american micro see that take us to today. -- in american democracy that takes us today. among the states and federal government, we have a deeply

polarized -- there is an expectation of one person one vote in popular election. but within a framework of the latest competition, where we rely upon the states, we rely upon partisans, as others have said, to make fundamental political decisions, and we also rely on courts to resolve fundamental political disputes. ended the same time, we have a presidential election system that is fundamentally a popularity contest. so if you could get through the party primary, what is interesting to me about that is that anybody who has any popularity is being touted as, that person should run for president, whether or not they have held office, whether they

are qualified, whether they are competent. so our current presidential election system overlaid with different conceptions about democratic participation, worries about polarization, overlaid with worries about partisanship, decentralization, without positive, fundamental rights to guide our way without sufficient federal regulation to guide our way, it leads us to the current moment when and if there are distinctive pressures put upon the system. we just saw 2020 distinctive pressures, the intensity of competition and the temp tatian to bend -- and the temptation to bend the rules. jack mentioned what is going on in arizona. and what may be going on in

georgia, let's change voting rights rules to provide an advantage in the next election that is coming, because we now know georgia votes are going to matter and to be determinative for the next presidential election. so there is a temptation to change and bend the rules provide partisan advantage in the next election. given these pressures, we don't have a presidential election system that is capable of responding to these types of challenges. what we have are norms that serve as our guardrails. and if those norms are weakened like we saw a 2020, then that sets up deep clashes within our society, and that is the kind of feeding that leads to things like what we saw january 6. your next panel will think about what we do next, but i want to

point out structural contradictions in the system we have. jeffrey: thank you very much indeed 14 up -- for noting both structural needs come as you suggest, the possibility of federal election supervision, as well as buttressing norms which are necessary for the system to work. i think that would be a great focus for your final observations for this panel. ned, as you look to history, and you have studied the election of 2020, if you had to propose resurrection of any guardrails, constitution, legal or a normative -- or enormative, to prevent what we have just seen, what would those be? ned: i love the constitutional

amendment -- i would love a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college, but i don't see that in the near term ended but see any urgency. as much as we need to work at presidential elections, i am also worried about senate elections and house elections for the reasons came was -- reasons kim was also. the major emergency in the national system is how to have a healthy system where at least the parties believe in the competition where, i play by the rules and believe in the spirit of the rules. one side is not doing that. i started to call this the rob portman problem. rob portman for my state decides he's not going to run for senate again because of the hyper polarization caused by the effective primary elections interacting with our current system of general elections that knocks out the possibility of

center-right candidates like rob portman, leaving you only with very far-right candidates and the left. alaska has a really interesting reform they adopted in november called top for with ranked choice voting is where you have -- top four with ranked choice voting and instead of sending to candidates to the general election, you send or candidates to the generally left -- instead of sending two candidates to the general election, you send for candidates to the general election -- you send four candidates to the general election. states that have ballot initiatives, michigan just adopted gerrymandering reform. they have a commission and we will see how that works from the state of michigan.

i think we need to look at a lot of things between now and 2022 because we are in a crisis moment, and i would put the affect of party primaries and the fact there is this verb to be primaried, cutting out the middle of american politics is a concern. the next panel is going to talk about this. we have two problems with the current electoral college. what is the fact it is not the national popular vote. so there is the idea of trying to use this compact to create a national popular vote without a constitutional amendment. the problem with that is, it could leave you with a plurality winter that could be less than 50% in a three-way race. if the race next time is trump, romney, democrat, who wins the plurality, trump or the democrat?

does romney pull more votes away from trump or more votes away from the democrat? what if the non-trump centrist is not romney but then sasse, does that affect the three-way split? we have not looked into this carefully enough. we need to think creatively. can we have both a national popular vote and something like ranked choice voting at the same time without the constitutional amendment? that is very difficult to do, but we need all hands on deck to handle this urgent moment we are in. jeffrey: thank you for this concrete suggestions from ranked choice voting to away a national vote is structured. alex keyssar, if you were proposing reforms to strengthen the guardrails of democracy in presidential elections, what would some of them the? -- some of them be? alex: i would start with

something from my earlier comments. we need to think very seriously about having some kind of new institution that serves as a neutral arbiter of elections. this idea came up very early in our history and it popped up again and was discussed at the time the infamous electoral count back of 1887 ended up being passed instead. particularly in this period of extreme polarization that we let partisan elections in the end be judged and certified bipartisan institutions is a very high-risk. that is one place i would put some energy into building a guardrail. we saw very clearly on january 6

what can happen when it is not present. i think we need strengthened legislative guardrails to strengthen the right to vote, to do something to restore some version of the voting rights act or update the voting rights act. the developments mentioned about what is happening in arizona and georgia and in a number of other states, there are going to be serious efforts made to make it harder for people to vote. and i think the attack, there are already attacks to make mail-in voting our absentee voting more difficult. and that comes from the view that it is democrats and poor people and minorities taking

advantage of that system. we are still involved in the fights we have been in since the 1990's, and arguably for our entire history, to try to protect the voting rights of many of our citizens. and that is the second place where i would put my emphasis on guardrails. although i have to say, we should replace the electoral college with a constitutional amendment. and i think we have to have a serious discussion about strategies to advance that clause. jeffrey: thank you very much for those suggestions. the national constitution center is launching a guardrails in democracy initiative to collect proposals from scholars of different perspectives about what kind of guardrails to erect.

and we will return to these suggestions as the initiative continues. charles, you introduced the discussion by pointing to the future and talking about regulations of elections. if you had to identify guardrails to increase the integrity of elections, what would they be? charles: i will make two points are quickly. one point probably flies under the radar which is, social sanctions and economic sanctions for those who violate norms, and legal sanctions for those who violate norms. we see for example, prominent lawyers who were making arguments that were way beyond the pale. we are not talking about arguments that are within the bounds are stretching the bounds of legal argumentation as to what a legitimate election would look like.

we see law firms, sanctions for that kind of behavior. i think these social sanctions are important and necessary. we are also seeing corporations not contributing campaign financing to candidates and elected officials who have participated in serious norm violations. so advocacy in favor of those kinds of sanctions are important. we have not mentioned a bill currently before the house, the college for the people act, trying to extensively rethink voting rights in this country, including campaign-finance. those types of broad voting reforms are absolutely necessary in lieu of a rethinking of the constitutional structure with an amendment on the electoral college.

if can't do that, congress can certainly pass legislation which addresses significant aspects of our voting systems, including shoring up voting rights. jeffrey: thank you for those important suggestions, including social sanctions, reminding us again guardrails are often enormative, and not always legal or constitutional. thank you ned foley, alex and charles for a thought-provoking discussion. our final panel, i will introduce now. thanks to the three of you. let me have the pleasure of introducing our final panel, which will jeffrey: our final petal will discuss prospects for the future of presidential elections. the ceo of the strategy group who led research and pulley

programs for that 2008 2012 convince of president obama. matthew dowd with news who previously played a role with governor short negra. -- schwarzenegger. and from the capital university law school, previously served on the federal election commission and contributes to the interactive constitution. and jesse wegman, a member of the new york times editorial board and author of the superb book i can endorse because i have read it and we have help apples on it. let the people pick the president, the case for policy electoral college. welcome to all four of you. in the interest of distilling your learning, i would like to begin with a mini discussion, debate between jesse bregman and brad smith about whether or not we should keep electoral college?

you are among the best defenders and critics in the country and then i will ask joe and matthew about the question of polarization, radicalization of voters and what if anything can be done technologically, politically or legally to decrease the dramatic polarization we saw. jesse, what we start you jesse, why don't we start you off. you and brad have debated this before. you have about four minutes if you can manage it, i know it is tough. why you think we should abolish the electoral college, but your -- give us your best arguments. jesse: i think we should switch to a national popular vote by whatever means. not because i think it is the best idea but because people of all political faiths throughout american history have thought it's the best idea. nearly 800 attempts throughout history to amend or abolish the college speak to that. it gets at this basic modern

democratic notion that we value political equality, one person, one vote. and we value majority rule, the the person who gets the most votes wins. electoral college as it operates violates both of those. everybody gets that the moment that their party suffers. what looks like a partisan debate is not true. republicans say they like it because they have happened to win to split elections in the last 20 years. what i really think is necessary to do here, my book says the case for abolishing electoral college, yet i write at length about the interstate compact which is not technically abolish the college. it uses the design of the college to achieve an effective national popular vote. here is what i will say. i think it is really important in this debate, and how we talk about it, to make sure people are understanding the stakes and what is going on, regular americans are. the way i we do this most

directly is to say, we already have a national popular vote for president and we have had one, at least since 1876, and it almost every state before then. that means all eligible citizens have been able to cast their ballot for president. technically they are voting for electors, but they think are voting for the president, since 1876 in every state. the only reason we do not measure the vote in that way, the national popular vote, is because of the statewide winner take all laws. it is those laws of the heart of the distortions caused by the way the electoral college functions today. when you talk to people about that and make people understand that, you find almost nobody supports it.

people say yes, that is a terrible system, to erase all of the voters in the state who do not choose a candidate with the most vote? i think that is really something that gets to people. when you can emphasize that point, that, to me, is the crucial way into peoples consciousness about this problem. that national interstate compact targets that part of our constitution, that states decide how to award electors and they virtually all do it right winner take all. we can debate for hours about whether the compact will survive. whether we'll get enough states to join it for it to become effective, whether there will be constitutional, or legal challenges to it that might eviscerated before can take effect. ive, whether there will be constitutional or legal challenges to it, that might eviscerated before can take effect. the bigger point is, what it is doing, this effort now 15 years old, is making people aware of the state winner take all distortion. that is valuable. the reason it is so offensive to people, was made aware of when i was working on the book, is nobody but votes for president

based on the state he or she is in. people vote because of their political ideology, the personal history, the community that event. they do not do it because that's the community that they live in. they do not care of out the state. -- they do not do it because of the state that they live in. when people realize that is the reality of how people vote, the state white winner take all will becomes indefensible. it is that we need to focus on to talk about steps forward to getting to a true popular vote for president, the way i think we should elect the one truly national office in the country. jeffrey: thank you very much for that concise case against electoral college. brad smith, can you make the most concise case you can in favor of the electoral college? what are the reasons for retaining it even though it now serves a different purpose than the original framers had in mind. perhaps you can also address

jesse's point, what a national popular vote pass legal muster? and would you support other means of questioning a winner take all system and allowing multimember districts in the present which might address some challenges he put on the table? brad: four minutes. jeffrey: maybe five. you're all doing great. brad: let me start with a reminder. almost every advanced democracy provides a system in which the governments the executive officer can be elected even though the person's party got the second most votes, since world war ii that is happened more than once in the united kingdom, australia, japan, canada, new zealand. it happens in a most all of the world's vance democracies. there is a reason for that.

i am not impressed by the argument people feel if my candidate did not win the state our votes are raised. the loser she not elect people -- the losers do not elect people. that is true in canada, the united kingdom. that elects people primarily in single number districts, where when you lose your foot is erased. i think that is too strong -- your vote is erased. people do care about margins of victory and democracy works in more ways than just aggregating vote. people do not say i'm going to but because i'm a pennsylvanian, but they vote based on interests shaped by places they love. the interest of a state like wyoming are different than the interest of a state like sorta -- like florida, different than colorado. these things very from place to place. one thing the electoral college does is forces a national campaign. if you think about how president biden one, he had to-- won, he

had to go into traditional republican are closely divided states, arizona, georgia, and he had to win the state. if you took the electoral college out, the close elections might have fostered animosity and partner -- partisanship, if you took it out you would not need to go try to appeal to enough people in georgia or wisconsin to turn those now trump victories from 2016 into nobody victories in 2020. he has been a moderating influence on politics, one of the few good things we can defend once we start to concentrate on how do we improve our system? i do think the national popular vote, the combination jesse mentioned, would be something of a disaster. in part because you do not have a uniform system providing our counting ballots.

some states might say we are going to lower the voting age to 16. an estate from the other party might say let's make it 15. states might start doing all kinds of things to gin up the boat, -- vote, with the most partisan states leading the way. and there are other problems. it should be a nonstarter for some of the constitutional issues are close. at the end i don't think states can gang up to deprive other states and voters of the rights they have under the constitution. that is something we will see about and there more important things we need to look at as we go forward. jeffrey: thank you very much for that and that concise answer, a triumph. joel, you let award-winning research and the polling program for president obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns. in your experience, to what degree does the electoral college distort the nature of campaigning? does it focus all the attention

on campaigns on a handful of swing states? joel: yes. jeffrey: more broadly, what concerns you most about what we learned from the 2020 election from online radicalization, disinformation, extreme polarization. what are the lessons you take from it we should be most concerned about and attentive to? joel: since everyone else has been talking about the electoral college i will start there and come back. i have to disagree with brad smith who has studied this from one vented point. campaigning and just one vented quite. campaigning in arizona and georgia was not to guarantee biden's election, it was to make his opponent play defense. we only have one national election every four years, for the president of united states. i have been skilled at working on campaigns, that target the

right states and the right people, battleground states. 12 to 14 states is whether campaigning takes place. we have a third of the country lives in the four largest states, california, texas, florida, and new york. one third of the country live in those states and get virtually note national campaigning, except for when the candidates are asking for money. this reflects the same distortion i think you mentioned earlier about the u.s. senate. if we truly want to be one country, we have to modernize our system. and we have to not be -- i don't think any of the founders strictly believed in strict constructionism and original intent. i have a lot of historians here so i may be out of my leg. -- my lane. they believed in the theory of disinterestedness, that those who would run for office would have property and wealth and be disinterested in serving for long times. we now have political figures,

who are significantly interested in preserving their power. this does go beyond the issue of the electoral college. for us to say we are not going to campaign in four states that are the four largest in population, and among the largest and contributed to the economy of the country as well. probably those states that have some of the most significant health interests and health care issues. have disadvantaged populations. they are all among diverse state. yet, they are not going to get the level of campaigning, that even your example of arizona, that arizona got with 11 electoral vote. we have to be rational about the times we live in here. with the changes in media, with the consumption of really not having three television networks, like i am guessing a lot of us grew up with three networks. some of us may be younger than that. but we do not have a common

conversation in america. we cannot use our presidential elections to turn them into a national conversation, that is going to elect the most powerful person in our country and in our world, then i think we are really not being true in a way to what the founders would have anticipated we would do. hamilton was a great preacher of this when he talked about things that are necessary. we cannot be rigid about not modernizing our democracy. a host of other things have been mentioned. as a practitioner i think getting back, with a fractured media environment. and i was a journalist, so i'm an advocate of the first amendment. i wonder if we don't need a fairness doctrine as well, which we got rid of. because we are so fractured in our communications. and for the greatest power on earth to have a fractured national election, fractured media system, it is going to compound our political

dissidents -- dissonance, distaste -- and peoples distaste for it. we have to find a way around it so our leaders are not fighting over small paragraphs but they are focused on the people they represent, all 330 million. jeffrey: thank you for discussing the practical effects of the electoral college on defense campaigning. and thanks for putting on the table the possibility of reforms to our fractured media environment, which could be critical, and might address polarization problems. matthew doubt you also are distinguished legal observer and have been working on the elections of governor schwarzenegger and president george w. bush. do you agree with joel or not about the incentives the electoral college gives to focus campaigning in the swing states? in your thoughts also about what

reforms, legal technological, or other, might address this question of online polarization and radicalization? i think you are muted. matthew: i will likely agree with joel. most practitioners would agree. the system, i can have a debate, i can give you my viewpoint on the electoral college. but as a practitioner i think what we do is we play the game with the rules provided. the rules provided is an unrepresented presidential race.

>> therefore you design a campaign based on an unrepresented base. the republicans know this and they have lost the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections they have lost the popular vote. in 2004, bush came within 70,000 votes in ohio, of winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college in that race. what joel said, it is 14 or 15 states, i think it is less. campaigns really focus on today 10 states. in some ways, it is eight states. in 2024 is likely to be less. i think the democratic campaign will not target florida, ohio, iowa, in the 2024 presidential race, which reduces that to a large degree. what that means is if you have 10 states you are campaigning

and, to win the presidency, you are ignoring 40 states. and you are ignoring 40 states, not only as joe said, california and texas and york, and new jersey. but you're also ignoring alaska and wyoming and idaho and mississippi and alabama. so, in a national popular vote, and i have gained this out as probably joel has done, with other people. what you would end up doing in a national popular vote campaign, is concentrating on 40 states. it would not shoot -- it would not just be california and texas and york. you would look at, urban areas, suburban areas and rural areas, and what coalition 22 put together? what margins do i need to put together, to reduce that will but against me and to increase that will vote for me. then i will go to swing areas

around the country. you would campaigning california. a democrat would campaigning texas. a republican what campaign and your. so -- in new york. so it would change the conversation and the issues of importance. because right now the issues of importance that drive the conversation are reduced to a small group of states, that have particular interests, that may be separate from what the broad national issues that should or must be in the course of this. as a practitioner. in 2000 for you design the campaign almost exclusively on a resource allocation and communication allocation that goes after the states you think. you count the red states in her column you cap blue states in the column. you go after these particular states you allocate your resources and time and the candidates voice and those states. after we lost the popular vote

in 2000, and then approach 2004, we looked at it in such a way we realized the legitimacy of a presidency is compromised when you win the electoral college and lose the popular vote. so one thing we did was we knew we had to win the electoral college. but we also knew from advantage point, and we were thoughtful about this that we wanted to win the popular vote for the legitimacy of the president and a reelection campaign, for many reasons. for me, we can argue over the theory of electoral college. the practical application of it is 85% of the country is left out of input, fundamental input, into who the leader of the country is. it is the way it works in practical politics. -- 80%-80 5%. now you have -- 80%-85%.

now when you have a house that follows where the president goes, it forces every institution of government now, to follow the lead of a president who is elected in 10 states basically. so we no longer have any national popular leader. we have a senate out of sync with where the country is and how it -- how senate seats are allocated in the country. and we have a house which is heavily gerrymandered in a polarized and divided environment. i do not call it a constitutional crisis. i collect constitutional rot, where we are today, so far removed from the idea of one man , one vote or one woman, one vote, in the sense of this country. in any sense of a country there represents the interests of the country as a whole. and i will agree with joel we have always had media environments that were partisan, but now we have because of technology, with cable in

everyone's home, that what we are doing is confirming people's worst biases. and worst prejudices. we now have a segment of the country who, because of how they consume information, they no longer believe in the democratic institutions all of us believe in. they believe in winning before they believe in what our constitutional rights are, or what those are. if you watch what happened to 2020, but for a few elected officials in a few states, this system in my view would have collapsed, but for a secretary of state in michigan, elected officials in wisconsin, some particular elected officials in pennsylvania, some people who stood up in georgia. if those five or six or seven people had been different people, and they could be different people in 2024, which is concerning. if they had not stood up and defended the system, we went about a system where what

happened on january 6, what have been much worse because i think the house of representatives and senate would have been contested elections and electrodes in various states. that is where we have arrived at. i do not think at any time soon we are going to pass a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college. the question is, what to we do that we can take steps to take to make our system more responsive to the country as a whole? there are many things we can talk about i think we could do, to fix that before we get rid of the electoral college. because i do not think that will happen. jeffrey: thank you very much for that powerful statement. he said 80% of the country is denied a voice in the election for president. and a kind of constitutional rot and we need to make our system responsive to the country. we have five minutes left.

each of you has time for one sentence essentially, one or two sentences to answer the question matthew doubt set up so well. if you had to name a single reform, legal, political, technological or normative, that would make our system more responsive to we the people, in the spirit of james wilson, the founder so powerfully channeled. what would it be? one or two sentences. what single reform you would identify to make our system more responsive? and that has a chance of passing. jesse: i would call for mandatory voting. but i think that will be struck down right off the bat. [laughter] i will choose the next best thing which is automatic voter registration in all states. jeffrey: great, brad?

brad: big challenge facing us as a loss of confidence in elections. prior to november, 70% of republicans indicated they thought there would be massive fraud almost as many democrats said they thought there be massive fraud. if trump narrowly won and might've stormed the capital, you might see the same attacks on legitimacy. so we need to work on legitimacy. i think a key element is not to make it harder to vote. improving registration and making it easier. but we should cut back on absentee ballots and early voting get back to the idea we have an election there were become together as americans think hard about what we want to do the next two years or four years, a day in which we come together and celebrate democracy and stand together with neighbors at the polls where there is less concern about fraud.

it has long been known and uncontroversial to say there is fraud in balance, put attention on restoring trust in results of elections. jeffrey: thank you for that. three minutes, joel? joel: i would try to pass a constitutional amendment to require all states to have independent redistricting commissions. the fracturing of the country is worse with the most extreme gerrymandering because technology allows it in ways the founders could not have envisioned. that constitutional amendment to require commissions to keep communities as whole as possible. i think we would get a better sense of representation, in congress from that. that would go a great way to deal with the day-to-day politics and washington, d.c.. jeffrey: thank you for helping us come in right on time.

last word, matthew? matthew: i'm going to second joel on independent registration and get rid of partisan gerrymandering. i would increase the size of the house of representatives, which can be passed by majority. we have not increase the size of the house of representatives since 1912 when it represented, one person represented 200,000 people and not one person represents 750,000 people. it would make the electoral college more representative. more representative votes for key states you would have to campaign and. i would do those things. we fundamentally have to think about what we do about the united states senate because it is unrepresentative. maybe, adding or crating more states to make it more representative in the united states senate because today it not represent the country either. jeffrey: beautiful. right in on time, well done, everyone. thank you so much.

two are phenomenal panels, all three panels, for an illuminating and thoughtful, and thought-provoking discussion. we have tangible takeaways, resurrecting guardrails, the constitution center will collect and keep as part of the conversation. this great symposium will be posted online as many of you have asked. all of the light are brilliant practitioners and scholars have spread can inspire the country and guide us forward. thanks to the university of pennsylvania journal of constitutional law. and bill ewald. and for taking out a half in your workday to educate yourself about the u.s. constitution. >> the 170 state

representatives, television reporters, and former college and professional athletes. watch our conversations with new members of congress, this week at 8:00 p.m. eastern, president's day, tonight. we feature freshman house democrats and senate republican members including deborah ross, frank mrvan, bill hagerty, and roger marshall. watch interviews with new members of congress at ed :00 p.m. eastern on c-span, online at c-span.org, or listen online at the c-span radio app. tonight, on the communicators, long time amazon executives talk about their book, working backwards. insights, stories, and secrets from inside amazon. >> how an e-commerce company is

going to become a hollywood producer of movies and tv shows. by doing so is actually how we created considerable value and why these businesses of the kindle e-book business, amazon music, and prime video businesses are so globally popular today because there are devices that amazon has developed for people to enable people to watch and read, and in fact, we are running content as well. >> we are excited to really talk about what we think will be an enduring legacy of amazon as we manage a science on how to build and operate customer focused, long-term thinking that will take pride in operational excellence. >> watch the communicators tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2.