Below is a brief (and hopefully fun) history of the Electoral College, that much maligned, but often misunderstood, American presidential election institution. And following that, I discuss some logical reform ideas that might do some good for our politics.
Most Americans only think about the Electoral College every four years, and in some ways, that isn't a bad thing. The discussion of it usually reaches its pinnacle on election night, when everyone follows the electoral map to see who is going to win the race to 270 (the amount of electoral votes you need to win the presidency). Most people, however, still don't really understand why we have it. Why don't we just elect the president by popular vote? After all, the president is the president of the entire nation. and not just of the swing states, right?
To answer that question, we need to take a trip down memory lane. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, the discussion of what the executive should look like and how that executive should be elected took up a significant amount of time. We had, after all, just broken away from a country whose king we viewed as capricious and corrupt, so few in Phila that summer had ambitions of making the president overly powerful. Not to be forgotten in this discussion of course is the influence George Washington had in this regard. Had George Washington not been who he was, had he not also been at the convention, and had it not been essentially a foregone conclusion that Washington would be the nation's first chief executive officer, the president's powers would have almost for sure have been even weaker than they ended up being.
But while a more vigorous executive was in fact needed, the bigger context and backdrop for the Constitutional Convention is almost never (or at least not adequately) discussed. As historian Gordon Wood has persuasively argued, the strongest impetus for most of the framers (and especially James Madison) to reform the system of American government was (the perception of) too much democracy in the American states. Significant turnover in representatives in the state legislatures was producing a wild proliferation of laws and generally resulting in chaos. There was not only too much legislation coming out of the states, but many of these laws often times simply overrode what had become law in the previous session, producing confusion and inconsistency and degrading the integrity of the law. Madison called this "the multiplicity and mutability of laws." Additionally, the kinds of legislation were also problematic, especially to the founding fathers (the elites). Most problematic was the creation of paper money in each of the states, as well as other kinds of favorable debtor laws. The American economy was still in very bad shape from the American Revolution (not to mention saddled with debt because of the war as well), and this political instability only made matters worse. Between 1774 and 1789, American GDP fell by 30% (similar to the Great Depression in the 1930s). Many feared the newly created American republics were going to imminently collapse unless something was done. This was truly a crisis situation.
Now, it's important to ask, were these fears legitimate? Who knows. But the fact that the elites at the time really believed it was all that mattered. Elites like Madison were appalled by what they were seeing in the states, so they wanted to take power out of the states and give it to a larger, stronger, central government that would hopefully do a better job of picking distinguished elites like themselves to make law. Madison even wanted the federal government to be able to veto state laws "in all cases whatsoever"! If anything should give the reader some appreciation for how bad things had gotten, consider the fact that within little more than a decade, Americans had thrown off the yoke of one big, central government, and the country's elites were almost immediately looking to create a new one of their own. They knew this was going to be very unpopular and also a very difficult sell, which is why the meetings in Philadelphia that summer were secret. Things only got more complicated when they told everyone they were simply going to reform the existing federal compact (the Articles of Confederation), and instead unveiled an entirely new system of government instead.
With this backdrop now better understood, it should be less surprising for us to learn that when the framers met in Philadelphia, letting Americans elect the president (who was to be the most powerful person in the entire new government, though nothing like the president we have today) directly by popular vote was simply out of the question. Multiple other proposals were considered, but ultimately a compromise was reached where state legislatures would pick an independent body of "electors," or officials who would then vote for president themselves. A similar model was already being employed by Maryland in its selection for state senators, which was likely the inspiration behind this approach.
The plan for what became the Electoral College ended up being constructed as follows: each state would get a number of electors equaling the number of representatives in the newly created House, plus two more for each state's representation in the newly created Senate. Each elector would get two votes, and after the electors voted, the person with the highest votes would be president (so long as that person got votes equal to or greater than a majority of the number of electors), and the second-highest vote-getting person would be vice-president. Importantly though, it was the original intention of the electors to be a politically independent body, and not subject to any political party, candidate, or any-thing or any-one else. Their sole job was to pick the president, with no allegiance or alliance to anyone else. Though it would be naive to think these electors would be completely devoid of political considerations, the intent was to insulate them from politics as much as possible, and simply allow them to pick the candidate they deemed best. After that task was completed, the "college" (a name that doesn't exist in the Constitution but which we attach to the electors when they vote) is dissolved as a temporary institution until the next presidential election, when the process repeats itself.
Madison had this to say about the advantages of the Electoral College over a direct popular election later on in a letter to Robert Taylor in 1826 (the timing of which was notable because electoral college reform was a very hot topic during the years before and after the election of 1824):
One advantage of Electors, is...that altho’ generally the mere mouths of their Constituents, they (the Electors) may be intentionally left sometimes to their own judgement, guided by further information that may be acquired by them: And finally, what is of material importance, they will be able, when ascertaining, which may not be till a late hour, that the first choice of their Constituents is utterly hopeless, to substitute, in their electoral vote the name known to be their second choice. (parentheses mine)
If the election be referred immediately to the people, however they may be liable to an excess of excitement on particular occasions. They will on ordinary occasions and where the Candidates are least known feel too little; yielding too much to the consideration, that in a question depending on Millions of votes, individual ones are not worth the trouble of giving them. There would be great encouragement therefore for active partizans to push up their favorites to the Upper places on the list, and by that means force a choice between candidates, to either of whom, others lower on the list, would be preferred. Experience gives sufficient warning of such results.
Now, a quick but necessary detour into Constitutional Law. Besides the fact that the original intention of the electoral college was to be an independent political body, not subject to any commitments or promises to the people or any popular vote, the Constitution is very clear about how electors are to be appointed. Article 2, Section 1, states:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. (emphasis mine)
Thus, each state's legislature gets to pick how that state's electors are chosen (importantly, this was not changed as part of the 12th Amendment in 1804, which we'll discuss more in a minute). Differences in approach surfaced immediately. In America's first presidential election in 1789, all states but Virginia simply chose electors in their actual legislatures (meaning representatives in those legislatures actually picked the electors themselves by vote, and then those electors voted for president). Virginia, by contrast, chose electors by "district," where the voting public voted by district (hence the name) for individuals to be electors. This is similar to how we pick congressional representatives today, and stands in contrast to the "winner-take-all" approach that would quickly become so popular (which itself is akin to how we pick US Senators today). Amazingly though, and unfathomable to us today, New York actually didn't appoint electors at all, and thus the theoretical electoral votes from one of the largest states in the Union were not part of the equation in America's first presidential election. Thankfully Washington's election was essentially a foregone conclusion, so this ended up not mattering, but it's still pretty wild to think about.
America's first contested presidential election in 1796 gave some indications trouble might be on the horizon for the future of the Electoral College, however. What was originally intended to be an insulated institution filled with noble elites with allegiance and alliance to no one who would pick a worthy president for us almost immediately started to morph into a de facto political pass-through entity (not unlike what it is today). With Washington no longer in the picture, 1796 was the first election where political parties were very much a factor, with Adams leading the Federalists and Jefferson leading the Democratic-Republicans. Elector votes reflected this. Adams would end up defeating Jefferson, 71-68, garnering one vote more than was needed for a majority of the 138 electors at the time (Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, Adams' vice-presidential running mate, also received 59 electoral votes, Aaron Burr got 30, and the remaining 48 were scattered among nine other candidates).
While the Election of 1796 indicated the Electoral College would likely not perform as originally drawn up, it did also demonstrate the independent nature of electors, as the first "faithless elector" occurred in this year. "Faithless electors" are electors who pledge their support to one candidate but then instead vote for another. In 1796, our first faithless elector's name was Samuel Miles, a Pennsylvania Federalist elector who pledged support to Adams but who decided to vote for Thomas Jefferson instead. Further adding to the intrigue that year was that prior to the election, rumors persisted that Hamilton was working behind the scenes to persuade Jefferson electors to use their second vote on Pinckney, with the hope of Pinckney defeating Adams in case their preferred candidate Jefferson did not win. Notably though, only 27 electors throughout American history have cast "deviant" faithless votes, and 1796 was the closest a faithless elector has ever come to deciding an election. Faithless electors are also increasingly likely to be a historical anomaly, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 in Chiafolo v. Washington that states could pass laws to punish unfaithful electors, and also cancel their votes. Consequently, today we have 38 states and Washington D.C. that have laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate whom they pledged support to. Additionally, only one swing state (Pennsylvania, two if you count Georgia) does not have one of these laws, so it's probably pretty unlikely a faithless elector swings a presidential election at some point in the future. Though the Chiafolo ruling is potentially problematic in ways we'll save for another day, the positive was that this is potentially one less election-related thing for us to worry about.
While Miles' abandonment of the Federalists didn't end up costing them the election, electoral vote allocation methodologies were very much a factor as well. Several Democratic Republican states used the district method of apportioning electors in 1796, most notably North Carolina and Pennsylvania (Virginia was also still using this approach). Unfortunately for Jefferson, but this resulted in one Adams elector winning (his name was William Bentley), and thus Adams got 1 of Virginia's 42 electoral votes. Similar things happened in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where Adams also got one electoral vote. Maryland on the other hand, a Federalist dominated state, also apportioned electors based on popular voting in districts this cycle (Maryland used the winner-take-all method in 1789 and then a western / eastern district system in 1792), with Jefferson getting 4 of Maryland's 20 electoral votes. One elector in Maryland actually voted for Adams AND Jefferson (go figure). If anything, proportional elector apportionment methodologies probably helped Jefferson more than it hurt him, and this too did not swing the election. But what it did do is put everyone on firm notice that how a state decides to allocate its electors could very easily decide an election in the future.
Then in 1800, an electoral crisis of a different kind hit: Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College. Alexander Hamilton had previously lobbied electors in 1789 to choose someone besides John Adams with their second electoral votes so that George Washington and John Adams wouldn't tie. In the eyes of John Adams, too many people listened, and this resulted in Adams getting far fewer electoral votes than Washington (69 to 34). While this is somewhat odd considering Washington's election was pretty much in the bag, it was one of many instances of Adams acute sensitivity, and was also the beginning of the bitter hatred between Hamilton and Adams that would last the rest of their lives (Hamilton and Adams would never reconcile, as Adams and Jefferson did in their later years). As noted above, Hamilton had also privately worked against Adams in 1796 as well, and this also produced a tremendous hatred towards Hamilton from John Adams' wife, Abigail.
Hamilton's greatest fear came true in the election of 1800, and it was not hard to see why. Unlike in 1796, there were really only 2 true candidates in 1800, Adams and Jefferson, each of which ran under a party "ticket," with a Presidential candidate (Adams and Jefferson) and a Vice-Presidential candidate (Pinckney and Burr). But while Pinckney and Burr were vice-presidential candidates in name, for Electoral College purposes, they were on equal footing as Adams and Jefferson. Because each elector had two votes, all electors in this cycle voted along party lines, except since they had two votes, they cast one vote for Jefferson and another for Burr, or in the case of Adams, one for Adams and one for Pinckney (the lone exception was the one who voted for John Jay in Rhode Island for vice-president, which was done to avoid the exact scenario between Adams and Pinckney that ended up happening with Jefferson and Burr).
Notably in 1800, Virginia, who was the only state to allow its people to vote for electors in 1796, switched methodologies to the "general ticket" (otherwise known as "winner-take-all") in 1800 so that their favorite son, Thomas Jefferson, might get more electoral votes. Pennsylvania and North Carolina continued to apportion (as did Federalist Maryland), and Adams got 7 and 4 electoral votes from those states in 1800, considerably more than the 1 he got from each state in 1796. By contrast, Jefferson got 5 from Maryland, only one more than his 4 in 1796.
Perhaps more importantly, several states in this election changed electoral allocation methods from a popular vote to electors merely being chosen by the state legislatures. This included Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Said differently, these states, removed the right of people to vote for presidential electors, and instead decided they'd choose them for themselves so that the legislatures' preferred presidential candidate would receive as many of the states' electoral votes as possible. Imagine today Michigan's legislature (which for the first time since 1983 is Democratic controlled) simply decided there was no need for you to vote for president this year, and said we're simply going to pick the electors who vote for president for you. And since we're Democrats, we're going to pick electors who are going to vote for Harris. Though it wasn't exactly interpreted like this at the time, a newspaper in 1868 described this tactic as essentially canceling the presidential election in these states. This would not be the last time this would happen, though after North Carolina did this in 1828, we didn't see it again until 1868, and since then, never.
Where Jefferson made up a lot of ground in 1800 was in New York. In 1796, Adams won all 12 of New York's electoral votes, as the Federalists controlled the state legislature that year and, choosing to have the legislature pick electors, subsequently appointed Adams friendly electors. In March of 1800, however, two months before New York legislature elections, the Democratic Republicans (who were in the minority in both houses of the New York legislature) attempted to pass a bill that would switch elector allocation to a district method in New York (similar to what Virginia had done previously but which was not doing so in 1800). Federalists, thinking they'd still be in control of both houses of the New York Assembly, killed the bill. After the Democratic Republicans surprisingly took control of the Assembly (the lower house of the New York legislature) in May of 1800, the combined number of Democratic Republicans surpassed that of Federalists in the legislature, giving the Democratic Republicans control over how the state's electors would be selected. Since they now had effective control, they kept the existing method of having the legislature choose the state's 12 electors.
In a sign of how intense partisan warfare was at this time, Hamilton wrote to New York's governor John Jay a week after the election loss in May, completely distraught. If you read nothing else from this post, go read that letter. It will make you feel a little better that despite all the talk of how bad our political climate is, we've been here before. He says:
In times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overscrupulous. It is easy to sacrifice the substantial interests of society by a strict adherence to ordinary rules...In observing this, I shall not be supposed to mean that any thing ought to be done which integrity will forbid—but merely that the scruples of delicacy and propriety, as relative to a common course of things, ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis. They ought not to hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step, to prevent an Atheist in Religion and a Fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of the State.
In Hamilton's letter to Jay, he makes the extraordinary request to have Jay call a special emergency session of the prior New York state legislature to pass the bill that the Democratic Republicans put forth in March. Notably though, Hamilton did not address his name at the bottom of the letter, seemingly because he knew of how dire his tone, commentary and request all was. Jay (probably thankfully) neglected to go along with the scheme, and Jefferson ended up carrying all 12 of New York's electors. The Federalists needed only 4 electoral votes from New York to defeat Jefferson that year (though they did not exactly know that at the time), and had the proportional district method been in place, at least 8 of the 12 going Federalist "did not admit of any doubt." (see also, here) But instead, all 12 went to Jefferson, giving him 73 electoral votes.
The 73-73 tie between Jefferson and Burr threw the election into the House of Representatives (which decides presidential elections in the case of a tie in the Electoral College), where it took 36 votes to break the tie. Ironically, it was Hamilton, who had gone to such great lengths in New York to keep Jefferson out of the presidency, whose lobbying against Burr (and in favor of Jefferson) helped break the tie. That should tell you a lot about how Hamilton felt about Burr.
Following this constitutional crisis, the 12th amendment was adopted in 1804, which subsequently required "distinct ballots" for president and vice-president, rather than the first place vote-getter becoming president and second place vote-getter becoming vice-president. The new amendment also removed the possibility of an unwanted vice-president in the White House (as was the case with Jefferson in Adams' administration in 1796). The 12th amendment therefore eliminated the problems the country dealt with in the election of 1800, but at the same time it all but formally institutionalized political parties.
States' choices of elector apportionment ebbed and flowed for the next several decades, with changes usually dictated by politics, as they had been before that. Several other important and contested elections raised calls for Electoral College reform during this period, however, the most notable of which was 1824 (where six states' legislatures still chose presidential electors). The tide was clearly moving in one direction though, and the 1824 election was only another large wave of momentum in that regard. By 1836, "democracy" in American presidential elections was prevailing almost everywhere, and all states but South Carolina had moved to the "general ticket" / winner-take-all system. Notably, South Carolina did not hold presidential elections as we know it until after the Civil War, choosing instead to allow its legislature to pick electors until 1860. Even they, however, changed course in 1865 and moved to the winner-take-all approach.
Since the Civil War, there have only been a few cases where legislatures have picked electors, rather than through some form of popular vote. In 1868, Republicans, who were now (temporarily) in control of southern state legislatures as part of Reconstruction, worried that popular voting in southern states would result in electors being chosen that would favor Democratic presidential candidate, Horatio Seymour. Largely because of awful racial violence towards blacks that was deterring voter turnout in those states, Republicans boldly introduced bills in Florida and Alabama in August of 1868 to switch the elector apportionment back to the legislatures to try and overcome this. Florida would follow through on its new plan to more or less cancel the presidential election (this was how people at the time saw it), but Alabama's (Republican) governor balked at his state's bill, which sparked a nationwide backlash. Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant ended up winning comfortably in 1868, but it was a telling sign how much the nation now firmly believed in popular influence in picking the president.
The only other post-Civil War incidence of a state legislature choosing its electors on behalf of the state is Colorado in 1876. Colorado joined the Union in August, 1876, just in time for the presidential election of 1876 (one of many things that caused an uproar in the presidential election that year). In its state constitution, Colorado decided to have its legislature pick electors for 1876, but then to have them chosen "by the direct vote of the people." Colorado has been a winner-take-all state since 1880, though they attempted to move to a proportional system in 2004, but the proposition failed 65% to 35%. Colorado is therefore the last state to have its state legislature pick presidential electors.
Several other notable instances of non-winner-take-all elector apportionment methods are worth highlighting:
In 1872, both Georgia and Kentucky voted for Republican Horace Greeley over Ulysses S. Grant. Sadly, Greeley died after the election but prior to the counting of the electoral votes. Kentucky's electors voted for Thomas Hendricks and Greeley's running mate, Benjamin Gratz Brown instead. Unlike in Kentucky, however, three of Georgia's electors still attempted to vote for the deceased Greeley. In an important precedent, those votes were ultimately rejected by the House of Representatives.
The Election of 1876 was very significant from an Electoral College perspective, but needs to be the subject of its own post.
In 1880, California allowed voters to pick individual electors, with the top 6 being selected. One of the electors on the Democratic ticket was David S. Terry, who had killed a man in a duel in 1859. Because of this, Terry was a controversial figure, and about 500 Democratic voters scratched Terry's name off the ballot, which resulted in Republican elector Henry Edgerton to be 6th highest vote-getting elector. Despite 5 of the 6 electoral votes going to Democrat General Winfield Scott Hancock, Hancock actually won the popular vote over James Garfield (by a mere 94 votes, 80,442 to 80,348). Somewhat amazingly, California would actually break it's record of closeness in a state election in both 1892 and 1912, though neither set the record for closest margin of victory in any state, which to this day is still 1832 in Maryland, which Henry Clay carried by only 4 votes.
1892 was a novel year in that five states moved to proportional elector allocation. After moving to a general ticket in 1884 and 1888, California again apportioned its votes in 1892, as did Oregon, North Dakota, Ohio and Michigan (the last of whom would be involved in the most significant Supreme Court case on the question of popular elector methods in McPherson v. Blacker, decided in 1892). Only California would stick with proportional elector allocation in 1896, though they'd abandon it by 1900 (California would return to allowing their electoral vote to be split in 1912, but would return to the general ticket in 1916, which it's followed ever since).
After a long hiatus, Maryland returned to a popular election method in 1904, when the state allowed voters to cast their ballot for electors of their choice. The Democratic controlled Maryland legislature had removed party symbols from their ballots in 1901 as part of what became known as the "Wilson law." These "trick ballots," as the New York Times called them four years later, were "so printed and folded that the illiterate Democrats could by turning down one fold mark the heads of their ticket for President and Congressman, which were designated at the top, while illiterate Republicans, principally the negroes, had to open the whole ballot and were so mixed up by the arrangement that they could not mark it properly." As a result, despite Theodore Roosevelt winning the popular vote in Maryland by 51 votes, he only got 1 of Maryland's 8 electoral votes in 1904, the rest of which went to Alton B. Parker, the Democrat. After ballot confusion again seemed to cost the Republicans electoral votes in Maryland in 1908 (the Republican Taft only received 2 of the 8 despite again winning the popular vote), the "Wilson Law" was subsequently repealed in January of 1912. It wouldn't be until 1937, however, when Maryland would remove the names of the electors on the ballot, which helped eliminate (intentional) confusion and allowed the voter to simply vote for the candidates for president and vice-president. Maryland would return to the winner-take-all approach in 1912 (a chaotic election worthy of its own post), though similar to many other states, elector slates would be put forth by each party's candidate and would be voted on that way, similar to how we do things today.
West Virginia would split its electoral votes in the 1916 election, but move to a winner-take-all system with party slates of electors next cycle in 1920.
Alabama and Oklahoma both split their electoral votes in the presidential election of 1960.
In Oklahoma, Nixon won the popular vote, and thus his slate of electors was chosen to vote in the electoral college, similar to almost all other states by this time. Unfortunately for him, he only got 7 of those 8 pledged votes, as Henry D. Irwin decided to vote for Senator Harry F. Byrd instead.
With respect to Alabama, Wikipedia describes the situation in Alabama as follows:
In Alabama, voters voted for electors individually instead of as a slate, as in the other states. Twenty-two electors were on the ballot, 11 Republicans and 11 Democrats. Voters could vote for up to eleven candidates. As a result of a state primary, the Democratic Party had a mixed slate of electors, five being pledged to Kennedy and the remaining six being unpledged. The highest vote for a presidential elector was 324,050 votes for Frank M. Dixon, who was unpledged; the highest vote for an elector pledged to Kennedy was 318,303 for C. G. Allen, and the highest vote for a Republican elector was 237,981 for Cecil Durham, which was fewer than the vote for any Democratic elector. As a result, six unpledged electors and five electors pledged to Kennedy were elected. All six elected unpledged electors cast their vote for Byrd.
The 1960 election had one more unique electoral college element, which happened in Mississippi. In 1956, following disapproval of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling, the Citizens' Councils, a group of white, pro-segregationists, succeeded in getting an alternate slate of electors on Mississippi's presidential election ballot. While it did not succeed (only garnering 17% of the state's vote), the de facto Dixiecrat slate would return in 1960 under Gov. Ross Barnett, and this time won a plurality of votes in the state of almost 39%. As a result, those unpledged electors threw their support to Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd from Virginia and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, the former of whom wasn't even running and the latter of whom had previously run for president under the Dixiecrat label in 1948 (receiving over a million votes and carrying 4 southern states). This deprived both JFK and Nixon of any electoral votes from Mississippi in 1960. That being said, since these electoral votes didn't go to Kennedy, and since Nixon lost in the electoral college by 84 votes, the lost 8 votes did not cost Nixon the election.
In 1972, Maine became the first state since West Virginia in 1916 to opt for a proportional elector allocation system. Maine's 4 electoral votes are allocated accordingly: 2 for the winner of the state's general popular vote (representing the electors from its U.S. Senate representation), and then one for each of its two Congressional districts. Maine has split its electoral vote only twice since it changed its law in 1972, and both times were in the last two elections in 2016 and 2020, when Donald Trump won Maine's 2nd district.
Nebraska moved to a proportional elector allocation system that copied the Maine model in 1992 (two electors were allocated from the winner of the state's overall popular vote, and then one elector from the winner of the popular vote in each of its three congressional districts). 2008 would be the only time Nebraska has (at least to date) split its electoral votes, with 1 going for Barack Obama and 4 for John McCain.
Thus, while we've had considerable nuance (and action) in the Electoral College since the Civil War, state legislatures have not picked presidential electors themselves since 1876 when Colorado did so upon first entering the Union. Importantly, however, even if state legislatures wanted to do a very unpopular thing and return the power of choosing electors to themselves, the 14th amendment, passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, appears to have permanently impaired their ability to do so. Consider Section 2 of that amendment, which says the following:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State (emphasis mine)
The mechanics of this part of the amendment therefore act to proportionally reduce a state's representatives in the House if a portion of the male-bodied population is denied the vote (questions of what might happen if women were ever deprived of the vote, though also now unconstitutional, might arise though). Since a state's electoral college votes are determined by adding its representatives in the House plus its two senators, this would directly impact its significance in the presidential elections. Thus, if black people were hypothetically denied the right to vote in say, Florida, then upwards of 12% of its representation ought to be reduced in the House of Representatives, and consequently, the Electoral College.
One might ask why southern representation in Congress (and subsequently in the Electoral College) was not reduced when they denied the right to vote to Blacks after Reconstruction (and for essentially 100 years thereafter). The answer seems to be for two reasons:
First, because they did it through de facto means instead of de jure means. Said differently, they did it by creating tests that many Blacks effectively wouldn't be able to pass at the time (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.), rather than by expressly denying Blacks the vote. The legs of this nefarious legal workaround were evidently strong enough to placate judges for 100 years, and it took a U.S. constitutional amendment in 1964 to eliminate the ability to use poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting.
Second, because the political will in the north to (again) go after the south for its awful racial activity just wasn't there. Fatigue from the Civil War and Reconstruction lingered long after each had ended, and this likely worked against the case for reducing southern representation on account of denying blacks the right to vote.
But while the 14th amendment appears to have addressed the problem of states returning the power to pick electors themselves, it does not solve the bigger problem we still deal with today, which is the "winner take all" problem. Today, all but two states (Nebraska and Maine) allocate all their electors based on the winner of the popular vote in that state. As we've discussed above, the winner of the popular vote in a "winner-take-all" state gets all of the state's electors. So if one candidate has even one more vote than another, they get all of the state's electoral votes, despite the fact that a substantial number of voters picked someone else. This is what occasionally produces large discrepancies between the results of the Electoral College and the nation's popular vote (as it did most recently in 2016).
As we know from our discussion above of the history of elector allocation methods, however, it does not have to be this way. The 14th amendment may have made it more difficult (legally anyway) for state legislatures to deprive citizens of their state to vote for presidential electors, but it does not force them to allocate them in one way or another. State legislatures would therefore be free to continue to allocate those electors in winner-take-all fashion, as most states have done since 1836. Additionally, something called the Independent State Legislature Doctrine might make it difficult at first glance for states' voters to force state legislatures to allocate electors proportionally through state constitutional amendments. Several options remain:
Amend the US Constitution (never easy, but probably the best option)
Work to get state legislatures to simply change their elector allocation laws, as we've done so many times in our nation's past (and how Nebraska and Maine successfully did and continue to maintain today). This route has the (substantial) weakness of always being susceptible to the whims of the next legislative session, but it's the easiest option we have.
Attempt to get state constitutional amendments passed, whether by state initiative, referendum or otherwise. While this could theoretically take the decision out of the state legislature's hands, this path has the potential problem of running into the Independent State Legislature Doctrine mentioned above (which may give state legislatures legal authority to ignore state constitutional amendments on this question because of the Electors Clause in Article 2, Section 1 of the US Constitution, which we discussed above)
Regardless of that, voters can still work to get referendums put on the ballot every four years knowing that the referendums might not legally obligate the legislatures. Even if state legislatures choose to ignore those referendum under the Electors Clause mentioned above, voters repeatedly telling them to do otherwise would send a very powerful signal, and ultimately the popular will is likely to prevail. It would also probably produce lawsuits that would force the Supreme Court to expressly deal with the question of whether state legislatures ought to abide by restrictions in their state constitutions, or at least more specifically, under whether they would be obligated to follow state constitutional amendments that limit their power under the Electors Clause.
Lastly, other creative options exist as well, like those coming from Making Every Vote Count.
One option they've put forth is the "Voter Choice Ballot," where states adopt ballots that allow a person to choose the candidate of their choice, but then if their candidate doesn't win the national popular vote, their vote can be changed to support the winner of the national popular vote (so for instance, if anyone in Michigan voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and Michigan adopted these ballots, since Donald Trump lost the popular vote, the votes for Trump in Michigan could be switched to Hillary Clinton so that Michigan's electoral votes would go the way of the nation's popular vote).
Another option is what they call the "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact," where each member state agrees to give its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. This idea has the novelty of helping to remove the "first mover disadvantage," where one state makes the change alone and sacrifices electoral votes to the detriment of their own party in the next presidential election. It's therefore encouraging to note that states totaling 209 electoral votes have signed onto this compact so far.
The Electoral College has been the subject of constitutional amendment more than any other part of the U.S. Constitution. According to the National Archives, more than 700 attempts have been made to abolish or reform the "college" since the founding. The vast majority of us, probably even including those living in the "swing states" do not like the way things are done today, but as it so often happens in politics, the party who most recently wins, and thus who are the ones with the most ability to change the system, are always the ones who keep the system in place, since it was that very system that put them in power. Because more reform efforts are generally geared towards the Electoral College more so reflecting the popular will of the people, it's likely that Republicans (who have lost the popular vote in presidential elections all but once since 1988) will resist reform efforts more than Democrats. It therefore shouldn't be surprising that the 17 states (and Wash. DC) that have signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact are almost all solidly "blue" democratic states (DE, HI, ME, RI, VT, CO, CT, MD, MA, MN, NJ, MN, OR, WA, CA, IL, NY and Washington DC).
Nervous Republicans who are reading this and (reasonably) concluding that electoral college reform is merely a democratic political ploy should take solace in this regard though: removing the disincentive for people to vote in "red" or "blue" states would likely increase voter turnout, draw more moderates into the voting booth, and cool down the temperature in our politics. In blue states like New York, California, Illinois, or red states like Alabama, Tennessee or Montana, people don't really have an incentive to vote right now, since those states have overwhelmingly voted democratic (blue) or republican (red) for years now. If electors are allocated proportionally based on the votes in those states, whether through some kind of district method or otherwise, all of a sudden those voters in the minority matter again. If Maine and Nebraska can do it, so can the rest of the country. This is especially encouraging considering both Maine and Nebraska has held their elector allocation laws even after splits have occurred, and when each cycle a split in each state could swing the election (though a cynic could reasonably argue that this is exactly why those allocation methods have indeed held...they haven't cost anyone an election yet).
Our Electoral College system isn't broken, but it's probably safe to say it's not optimal either. Even Madison was a believer in electoral reform as time wore on (he was in favor of the district approach, which isn't far off from proportional elector allocation). Going to greater lengths to making every vote count would likely infuse some much needed "moderates" back into the voting booth who otherwise feel put off by the intense nature of politics in 2024. More people voting who don't feel quite so energetic or extreme about politics are exactly what we need right now, since it would give more moderate candidates encouragement that voters in favor of more moderate views are out there (and more importantly, that they're actually more likely to vote). This is unlikely to solve all our political problems, but it would almost assuredly be incrementally helpful and be a step in a very good direction.
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