that guy in AZ Wrote:On September 18, 1969, the U.S. House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming 338 to 70 to send a constitutional amendment to the Senate that would have dismantled the Electoral College, the indirect system by which Americans elect the president and vice president.
“It was the only time in American history that a chamber of Congress actually approved an amendment to abolish the Electoral College,” says Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board and author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.
The House vote, which came in the wake of an extraordinarily close presidential election, mirrored national sentiment about scrapping an electoral system that allowed a candidate to win the presidency even while losing the popular vote. A 1968 Gallup poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed it was time to elect the nation’s highest office by direct popular vote.
Yet just a year later, the Senate bill that would have ended the Electoral College was dead in the water, filibustered by a cadre of Southern lawmakers intent on preserving the majority’s grip on electoral power in their states. Despite widespread bipartisan support for the amendment in both large and small states, the Senate came five votes shy of breaking the filibuster.
https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-nearly-abolished-thurmond
The article above highlights why the Georgia senatorial race is so important.
In 1969, the House overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment to dismantle the Electoral College, but the act got torpedoed in the Senate. However, even if Moscow Mitch manages to maintain his grip on the senate, there IS another way to put the thing to bed.
It's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and its passage is closer than you might think.
Currently, 15 states and the District of Columbia, accounting for 196 electoral college votes, have passed the law. Organizers need 74 more electoral votes. Both chambers of the Nevada legislature passed the bill, but it was not signed into law, which would bring in six more electors. One house of the legislature has passed the law in an additional eight states: Arizona, Arkansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia. Those eight states account for 82 electoral votes. If it became law in all of them, we would at long last elect our president by popular vote.
https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/its-time-end-electoral-college
Of the states mentioned above, Biden won in Arizona, Maine, Minnesota, and Virginia, and Nevada, so there is a chance that the necessary 82 votes could get picked up. At the earliest, though, it won't happen until the 2022 midterms.
If you look at the interactive map below, you'll notice that there are only 6 states where no action at all has been taken, which means the eventual passage of the act in the necessary number of states is not as far fetched as you might think.
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status