Al Gore now believes the Electoral College should be replaced by a national popular vote.
“I’ve changed my view on that,” the former Democratic presidential candidate said in a video posted Tuesday by NBC News. “I do think that it should be eliminated.”
“I think moving to a popular vote system is not without peril, is not without problems, it’s not a simple one choice is all good, the other is all bad,” he continued. “It’s a balancing act. But I think the balance has shifted, in my mind at least, and I think that we should go to a popular vote.”
That sentiment comes 16 years after it would have been useful for Gore: He won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election against George W. Bush by more than 500,000 votes.
And while this year’s national popular vote isn’t completely tallied, Hillary Clinton currently has a margin of more than 2 million votes over President-elect Donald Trump.
Gore said he believes our democracy has been “hacked.”
“It’s pathetic how our system is not working today,” he said.
Watch below via NBC:
I don’t.
Not in this environment.
If the electoral college was established by statue, it would be unconstitutional due to one person, one vote.
1P-1V is two Trump Justices from being overturned anyway.
Yeah…the optics of this, from any Democrat, particularly Gore, are just too transparent. This is the team that lost by 1 point due to a 4th quarter field goal arguing that field goals should only count 1 point.
There are problems with the EC, but the chances of it going away are very small. It would require a Constitutional Amendment (good luck on getting the necessary states AND Congress critters to vote for that any time soon), and would be met with staunch resistance from the political-news complex which has an extreme interest in maintaining the electoral strategies that are used. People argue that the EC makes only a small handful of states battlegrounds, but at least there ARE battlegrounds…move to a national public election and the election resides in CA, TX, NY and FL forever.
My own views on it have more to do with correct the “30,000” problem. By artificially putting a cap on the size of the House, we dismissed the popular vote significantly. The ratio of population/electoral votes simply doesn’t hold up, which gives outsized influence to smaller states as a result.
Popular vote and Gore would have won. Popular vote and Clinton would have won.
The two examples in less than a generation that are out there say “popular vote” is the way to go.