FREE OF CHARGE LIVESTREAM EVENT
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
5:00PM PDT
Watch the conversation here:
Please support authors by purchasing Let the People Pick the President from Creating Conversations.
The person with the most votes wins. Except in the race for President. Isn’t it time we remove the outsize influence of some states in favor of a one person one vote system?
The United States was a different country in 1787 when our founding fathers dreamed up the Electoral College. Neither women nor Black people held the right to vote. Voting in a “battleground state” has much more urgency attached to it than voting in a “safe state.” We vote to elect a president, but the Electoral College often makes our votes utterly irrelevant. Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times Editorial Board, an attorney, and a reporter on the Supreme Court, has undertaken a history of the Electoral College and its impact on so many presidential elections. In his new book, Let the People Pick the President, Wegman moves us through the efforts of hundreds of attempts to abolish the Electoral College. He offers a neat solution to getting around the Electoral College: the National Popular Vote Compact, which many states have adopted, but not quite enough. The Electoral College has stood in the way of real voter choice for 250 years, Wegman argues.
In conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland). Congressman Raskin sits on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, among others. He is outspoken about the need for electoral reform and fair representation.