Affirmative

I affirm the resolution, resolved: The U.S. presidency ought to be decided by a national popular
vote instead of the electoral college.
I present the following definitions:
- The US Presidency shall be defined as the head of state of the United States with powers
outline in Article 2 of the US Constitution
- Ought implies a moral obligation
- National Popular Vote will be defined by Article 2 Section 1 of The Progressive
Constitution made by the National Constitution Center

The Progressive Constitution Article 2 Section 1

The President shall hold Office during the Term of four Years, and,
together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected
by a national popular vote conducted using a ranked-choice voting
method.
I will list Additional Constraints Written in the Introduction:
A progressive Constitution would provide[s] a general right of Americans to vote in federal , state,
and local elections (including without regard to carceral condition). This includes voting rights and
rights of congressional representation for residents of federal territories (including the District of
Columbia, which would become a state). Voter qualifications in federal elections would be uniform
and would be established by Congress. And because it is also important that voters select officeholders
rather than vice versa, our Constitution would require that congressional district lines be drawn by
nonpartisan commissions, a model that works successfully in several states and in many countries around
the world. This approach would not preclude Congress from experimenting with forms of proportional
representation or multimember districts, which are currently prohibited by federal statute.

- The electoral college refers to the process of selecting the President as defined in Article 2
Section 1 and the Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution
Since the resolution presents two options for electoral authorization of executive authority, the value for
the round should be motivated by the telos of electoral systems. Electoral systems exist to articulate the
general will in such a way that is conducive to government by popular sovereignty. Thus, my value for
this debate shall be popular sovereignty. Popular Sovereignty shall be defined by the 1948 UN
Declaration of Human Rights Article 21 Section 3:
Article 21 UNDHR
1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely
chosen representatives.
2. Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country.
3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be
expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall
be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Taking from the language in the UN definition, specifically when it says “universal and equal
suffrage,” my value criterion shall be maximizing equal representation.

Contention 1: End discrimination against citizens in specific

states both at the ballot and away from the ballot
SA: Politicians are disincentivized to look at citizens in non-swing states
People who live in non-swing states are ignored by political campaigns for President because they
do not have any political potential.
Cohn 19. Nate Cohn, Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times. He
covers elections, polling and demographics. In addition to writing for The Times, he has discussed
politics on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and NPR, and at major colleges and universities. March 22, 2019, “The
Electoral College’s Real Problem: It’s Biased Toward the Big Battlegrounds,” New York Times.
The true quirkiness of the Electoral College comes from how states award their votes, not how many
votes each state has: It’s (largely) winner-take-all.
This is the feature that defines the character of American presidential elections. A candidate who
narrowly wins the tipping-point states will win the presidency, regardless of the margin of victory
in the rest of the country. That means there’s no incentive for candidates to campaign in any
noncompetitive state, whether it’s a populous one like California or the opposite, like North Dakota.
The winner-take-all bias that elevates the battleground states overruns all of the other biases. If the
big states were close and competitive, the big states would decide our elections — as they did until
fairly recently. In 1888, another time there was a split between the popular vote and the Electoral
College, the candidate who prevailed (Benjamin Harrison) swept the nation’s largest states — including
its largest, New York, by one percentage point.

As a result, non-swing voters are more likely to feel voiceless in the political process and therefore
turn out less for elections
Cebula & Meads 2008 [Richard Cebula, GMU Department of Economics and Holly Meads: Armstrong
Economics Department, "The Electoral College System, Political Party Dominance, and Voter Turnout,
With Evidence from the 2004 Presidential Election," Atlantic Economic Journal,
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11293-007-9089- 3.pdf] /Triumph Debate
Although mitigated somewhat by the upward movement of voter turnout during the 2000 and 2004
Presidential elections, concern regarding low voter participation rates in the USA nevertheless is
expressed frequently in the media and elsewhere . As Putnam (2000, p. 31) states, “With the singular exception of voting, American rates of political
participation compare favorably with those in other democracies…” (Putnam 2000, p. 31) proceeds to observe “We are reminded each election year that fewer voters show up at the polls in

the US voter
America than in most other democracies….” Moreover, although this fact is not mentioned in Putnam (2000), it is observed here that not only is

participation rate “low” according to several criteria, but it also varies widely across states. For
example, in the 2004 Presidential election, the voter participation rate by state ranged from a low of
44.5% to a high of 73.3%. The purpose of the present study is to add to the rich literature on voter turnout by extending the previous empirical work by Cebula (2001), as
well as related purely theoretical arguments found in Blair (1979; 1982) and Cebula and Murphy (1980), regarding the impact of the Electoral College System on the voter participation rate. In

particular, using voter turnout rates by state for the 2004 Presidential election, this study investigates the
following hypothesis: within the context of the Electoral College System, in any state, the greater the
dominance of the Republican Party over the Democratic Party or the greater the dominance of the
Democratic Party over the Republican Party, the lower the marginal incentives for members of both
political parties to vote and hence the lower the aggregate voter participation rate in that state, ceteris
paribus. By empirically investigating this hypothesis, it is expected that we can shed at least some light on the current causes of both low voter turnout in the USA
and large interstate disparities in voter turnout. In addition to a focus on the 2004 Presidential election rather than the 1996
Presidential election, this study differs from that in Cebula (2001) in important respects, namely, in its adoption of both (1) a
different study design [which in part reflects theoretical arguments found in Blair (1979; 1982) and Cebula and Murphy (1980)]
and (2) different/broader economic and demographic control variables. To some degree, this study accepts the idea that the
decision to vote may involve “Rational, self-interested individuals [who]...engage in behavior that is not motivated...[solely]
by a [simple] benefit-cost calculation...” (Copeland and Laband 2002, p. 351) as to whether their individual votes will
“count,” i.e., make the difference in the (an) election outcome.

…
Clearly, this reasoning applies also for states where the DP dominates the RP. Furthermore, it also follows that the greater the degree of dominance of either the RP over the DP or of the DP
over the RP in a state, the lower the incentive to vote in that state. Thus, according to the hypothesis, the VPR (voter participation rate) in any state is a decreasing function of the degree of

This study
dominance of either the Republican Party over the Democratic Party or vice versa. The electoral college system, political party dominance, and voter turnout 55 Conclusion

has used data from the 2004 Presidential election to test the hypothesis that, under the Electoral
College System, in states where either major political party dominates the other, the incentive to vote
is diminished and so then is the voter participation rate. Within the context of a broadened version of
the rational voter model, the analysis allows for a variety of demographic and economic factors in each
state, including the percent of the population age 65 and older, the percent of the population that is of
minority status, the percent of the population with at least a high school diploma, the unemployment
rate, median family income, and the percent female labor force participation rate. The results of four
empirical estimates are provided. In all four, [obtain] strong empirical support for the hypothesis is
obtained. That is, there is compelling evidence that, within the Electoral College System, the greater
the degree to which either the Republican Party (RP) dominates the [other] Democratic Party (DP) in a
state or the DP dominates the RP in a state, the lower the voter participation rate in that state. As
argued in the text, this diminished voter participation rate reflects decreased expected benefits from
voting under conditions involving such political party dominance. The findings indicate that, overall, i.e.,
on balance, the Electoral College System acts to reduce the aggregate voter turnout. This lends support for the
theoretical case argued by Blair (1982, p. 94) that “...abolition of the Electoral College would raise aggregate voter turnout rates.” Logically, as argued on theoretical grounds in Cebula and

, it also acts to
Murphy (1980), it can be further argued that whereas the Electoral College System acts to discourage/decrease voter turnout in states where DP>RP or RP>DP

encourage/increase voter participation in states where RP and DP are effectively equal or at least differ
from one another only very modestly. This is an issue overlooked in the Cebula (2001) study. Thus, it
appears that the Electoral College System acts to distort voter participation from what it might
otherwise be in the absence of the Electoral College. In any event, it certainly seems that the elimination
of the Electoral College System is past due

Political Participation Increase Because of National Popular Vote Bolsters Democratic Norms And Aids
In Improving Society
Dalton 17 [Russell J Dalton, (Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.) 8-25-
2017, "Is citizen participation actually good for democracy?," British Politics and Policy at LSE,
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/iscitizen-participation-actually-good-for-democracy/] /Triumph
Debate
Thus, the experts agree: contemporary democracies are suffering; the reason is either too little or too
much citizen participation. My forthcoming book, The Participation Gap, argues that both critiques are
flawed. Contemporary democracies face a dilemma, but it involves balancing the actual expansion of
citizen participation against its unintended effect on widening the social status participation gap. Besides
the strong normative argument for political equality, I show that the absolute level of participation and
the inequality in participation are both linked to the quality of democratic governance. The expansion
of citizen participation I primarily examin[ing] evidence from the International Social Survey Program
that measured citizen participation in established democracies in 2004 and 2014[,] The decline in
voting turnout is obvious and a very troubling trend. However, the good news is that democratic
institutional reforms and citizen innovation have increased the number and variety of access points that
people can use to influence political outcomes. The expansion in citizen skills and resources also enables
more people to engage in these more demanding forms of participation. Direct contact with political
leaders has increased. More people are joining public interest groups, civic associations,
Bürgerinitiativen, and other collective forms of action. People have developed new methods of political
action, such as political consumerism, new forms of contentious action and creative activism. The
internet enables new methods of peer-to-peer involvement among citizens who share political views
and want to be active. The ISSP surveys thus describe an interested and involved citizenry, more
engaged than their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. Many of these activities also offer greater
policy content and policy focus than the simple act of voting. Rising political inequality It is not all good
news, however. While participation opportunities have broadly expanded, the skills and resources to
utilise these new entryways are unevenly spread throughout the public. I describe a sizeable socio-
economic status (SES) participation gap across all types of political action. A person’s education and
other social status traits are very strong predictors of who participates. The expanding repertoire of
political action widens this participation gap. Participation research often focuses on voting turnout, but
this is where the social status gap is generally smallest. Labour unions, citizen groups, and political
parties can mobilise lower status voters on election day. However, as citizens become more active in
non-electoral forms of participation, skills and resources are even more important in facilitating these
activities. To write a letter, work with a community group, post a political blog or boycott
environmentally damaging products requires more than just showing up on election day to mark a ballot
and leave. So the expanding repertoire of political activity widens the SES participation gap. The
participation gap is also widening over time. Evidence from several nations shows that the decline in
voting turnout is concentrated among lower-status citizens, while the better off continue to vote at
roughly the same levels as the past. Given the centrality of elections in selecting the officials who
govern, this widening participation gap in turnout implies unequal representation with all the
implications that this signifies. For non-electoral participation, the increase in activity has come
disproportionately from better-educated and higher income citizens who possess politically valuable
skills and resources. Protest activities often display the widest social status participation gap. And while
there is a one-person/one-vote limit on voting that moderates inequality, no such ceiling exists for
writing emails, working with public interest groups, protesting, and other non-voting forms of action.
The sum result is a widening in the SES participation gap in overall terms. Thus, democracy’s dilemma is
that the expansion of participation in old and new forms comes at the cost of a widening gap between
the politically rich and the politically poor. This runs counter to democratic ideals, and it runs counter
to democracy’s goal of effectively reaching the best policy outcomes for society by involving all of the
public in the process. Participation, inequality and governance The two views of citizen participation
summarised at the start of this post offer contrasting assessments of whether an active citizenry
improves or harms the functioning of democratic governance. I directly consider the basic Tocquevillian
logic that democracy will benefit when more citizens participate. There are many potential ways to test
this thesis, and I turn to the simple example of the quality of governance. Does government function
better if the public is more involved? The Economist Intelligence Unit’s measures the quality of
governance with a 14-item index of the functioning of the government, including items such as quality of
administration, government control of its territory, regularised government and the rule of law. (There is
no explicit item on participation in the index.). The 2004 ISSP provides overall participation levels for
about a dozen and a half nations, plus Belgium and Iceland from the 2014 survey. I test whether an
active citizenry correlates with good governance. Nations with higher overall political participation also
have better performing government (Figure 1). This is a substantial relationship based on these 20
democracies(r=.55, p=.01). Nations that score highly on the EUI index, such as Norway, New Zealand,
Canada and Denmark, also have fairly high levels of overall citizen participation . Conversely, the four
lowest levels of participation occur in nations that are below average in the functioning of
government. This supports the general logic that an attentive and involved public press the
government to be more responsive and effective. Simply put, good citizens make for good democratic
governance.

SB: Ending state-based discrimination in funding

Presidents Will Target Swing States And Counties Disproportionately For Grant Funding, Not Due To
Need But Electoral Considerations
Kriner & Reeves 15 [Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves. Kriner is a Professor of Political Science at
Boston University and Reeves is an associate professor and associate chair of Political Science at
Washington University in St. Louis, 03-03-2015, “Presidential particularism and divide-the-dollar politics”
The American Political Science Review, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000598] /Triumph
Debate
To test our hypotheses concerning swing and core state targeting and the political business cycle, Table
2 column 2 includes the interactions of the swing and core state variables with an election year
indicator. We find that swing state targeting is especially acute during election years as presidents
target myopic voters in swing states for electoral gain. By contrast, core state targeting does not vary
with the electoral cycle. The coefficient for the main effect for the swing state variable is positive and
statistically significant, though smaller than in the base model in column 1.37 Swing states receive some
boost in federal grant spending in all years. However, strongly consistent with our argument, the
election year interaction is also positive and significant--in other words, the swing state advantage
increases significantly in the immediate lead up to a presidential election. For core states, by contrast,
we do not see any variation in the size of the effect with the electoral calendar. The core state
coefficient is again positive and statistically significant. However, the election year interaction is
substantively small and not statistically significant. This suggests that core state targeting is not a
function of electoral considerations. Rather, presidents consistently pursue budgetary allocations that
disproportionately benefit their partisan base. As with the previous figure,

Presidents Are Twice As Likely To Declare Disasters In Competitive States – States Reward The
President With Electoral Votes, Reinforcing Favoritism
Reeves 11 [Andrew Reeves, Associate professor and associate chair of Political Science at Washington
University in St. Louis, 10-26-2011 "Political disaster: Unilateral powers, electoral incentives, and
presidential disaster declarations.", The Journal of Politics,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381611000843?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents]
/Triumph Debate
Figure 1 presents the effect of competition on the expected number of presidential disaster
declarations. The x axis present the range of competition for all observed cases in the data set (26.5 to
48.5). The y axis marks the expected number of presidential disaster declarations for each scenario. One
thousand simulations are run for each level of competition in the range by 5-point increments. Figure 1
presents the number of presidential disaster declarations expected from a state identical in all respects
except level of competitiveness. A state where the loser receives an average of 26.5% is expected to
receive 0.7 disaster declarations (the lower bound for the 95% interval is 0.4 and the upper bound is
1.1). A state where the loser received an average of 48.5% of the popular vote in the previous three
elections is expected to receive 1.4 disaster declarations (the lower bound for the 95% interval is 1.1
and the upper bound is 1.7). How dramatic was the change before and after Stafford Act in 1988? To
answer this question I examine the effect of competitiveness on presidential disaster declarations for
each time period. Figure 2 presents two sets of first differences. The top half of the figure displays the
number of disaster declarations expected at high and low levels of competition in the pre-Stafford Act
era, where all other variables are held at their means or medians where appropriate. Surprisingly, prior
to the Stafford Act there is a slight negative (although statistically insignificant) relationship between
competition and disaster declarations. This same scenario is presented in the lower half of Figure 2 for
the post-Stafford Act era. Here there is a relatively large and statistically significant difference between
low competition and high competition states. In the post-Stafford Act era, a competitive state is
expected to receive over twice the number of disaster declarations as a noncompetitive state—a
competitive state is expected to receive 0.87 declarations with a 95% confidence interval from 0.73 to
1.03, and an uncompetitive state is expected to receive 0.43 declarations with a 95% confidence interval
ranging from 0.29 and 0.64. Following the Stafford Act there was a steady increase of disaster
declarations. From 1981 through 1988, there were an average of 20.5 (standard deviation 5 7.8) annual
disaster declarations. This is well less than half of the 46.9 (standard deviation 5 16.0) average yearly
disaster declarations from 1989 through 2004. In addition to the raw averages increasing, this analysis
reveals that before the late 1980s there was no relationship between competitiveness and presidential
disaster declarations but since then electoral forces have played a much larger role. As I show in the
next section, the president has reason to reward electorally competitive states: he is rewarded in turn.

Funding for policy implementation or emergencies should not be contingent on

an arbitrary factor like electoral significance but instead reliant on what is
legitimately in the interest of the common good. National popular vote would
not create arbitrary geographic interest but instead distribute funding interest
to the nation equally, creating equal representation and equal pull on the
president’s agenda to achieve popular sovereignty instead of minority tyranny.

Contention 2: Fair representation of interests

Individual voting power is inherently unequal and biased under the electoral college.
Bolinger 2007. Benjamin Bolinger, senior attorney at City of Colorado Springs. “Point: Abolishing the
Electoral College,” International Social Science Review, 2007, vol.82, no. ¾, pp.179-182.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41887327.
Simple calculations show that some states are grossly overrepresented in the Electoral College . States
with small populations control a disproportionate number of electoral votes compared to those with
large populations. Wyoming and California offer the most striking comparison. According to the
2000 census, California's population was 33,871,648, giving it fifty-five electoral votes. Wyoming,
the least populous state, had only 493,782 residents, earning it three electoral votes.2 In other words,
California gets one electoral vote per [616,000] 615,848 residents; Wyoming receives one vote per
[165,000] 164,594 resi- dents. That is nearly a 4:1 ratio in favor of Wyoming. Residents of Wyoming,
the District of Columbia, Vermont, and North Dakota each receive a disproportionately influential vote in
comparison to residents in California, Texas, and Florida. When the votes of some citizens count more
than those of others, America has failed to honor its commitment to equal representation.

The Electoral College causes climate change because it

disproportionately value the Midwest over more America’s climate
conscious majority

Beinart 20. Peter Beinart, Professor of journalism at the City University of New York. “The
Electoral College Is Also a Climate Problem.” September 15, 2020. The
Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/electoral-
college-also-climate-problem/616347/
the Electoral College also undermines the fight against climate change. If
every additional vote in California, Oregon, and Washington—which
between them boast roughly 50 million people—mattered as much as every
additional vote in a swing state, Biden might have spent the past few
weeks touring the West Coast and explaining how his plans can save its
residents from a climate apocalypse that threatens to make their home
unlivable. But the Electoral College rules that out. Biden has no incentive to
run up his margin in three reliably blue states. Instead, he’s singularly
focused on purple ones in the Midwest. So far this month, he’s
visited Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and he’s headed
to Minnesota next week. Conventional wisdom holds that in a Midwest
built on fossil fuels and heavy industry, focusing on climate change is
politically risky. In January, The New York Times described “fracking”—
an environmentally damaging process that extracts natural gas from
shale—as the swing issue that could win Pennsylvania. And since
clinching the Democratic nomination, Biden has been
furiously refuting Republican claims that he wants to ban fracking. In
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the conservative Club for Growth has
run ads attacking his running mate, Kamala Harris, for supporting the
“radical Green New Deal, eliminating 10 million oil and gas jobs.” And when
Biden gave a major economic speech last Wednesday in Warren, Michigan,
he mentioned electric vehicles but never uttered the word climate. As the
political strategist Dan Schnur recently told the Associated Press, “The
Biden campaign understands that a full embrace of an aggressive
climate-change agenda could create problems for them in [the] Upper
Midwest.”
Biden’s caution might or might not help him get elected. But it will make it
harder for him to take dramatic action on climate if he does, because he
won’t be able to credibly claim a popular mandate. 
Not achieving a substantively fair representation of the preferences and concerns of citizens is a
harm to democratic legitimacy as defined Chiocchetti 17 and has extinction level impacts as it
prioritizes the climate change policy of the Midwest over the nation’s as a whole.

Professor Meyers explains Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer, “Justice and Fairness”,
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-
decision-making/justice-and-fairness/,

The most fundamental principle of justice—one that has been widely accepted since it was first defined
by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago—is the principle that "equals should be treated equally
and unequals unequally." In its contemporary form, this principle is sometimes expressed as follows:
"Individuals should be treated the same, unless they differ in ways that are relevant to the situation in
which they are involved." For example, if Jack and Jill both do the same work, and there are no relevant
differences between them or the work they are doing, then in justice they should be paid the same
wages. And if Jack is paid more than Jill simply because he is a man, or because he is white, then we
have an injustice—a form of discrimination—because race and sex are not relevant to normal work
situations.

And look to Florida, where the Electoral College allowed a very small minority of the population to
dictate national foreign policy.
Chapman 14 Steve Chapman, (Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune. His twice-weekly column on
national and international affairs, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in some 50 papers across the country. Chapman has been a
member of the Tribune editorial board since 1981. A native Texan, he has a bachelor's degree from Harvard), 10/19/14, “The strange source of
our Cuba policy”, Chicago Tribune, https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/steve-chapman/ct-cuba-obama-castro-electoral-college-perspec-
1221-jm-20141219-column.html

What does the Electoral College have to do with our shunning of Cuba? Plenty. Cuban-Americans make
up just 0.6 percent of the American population — hardly enough, you'd think, to warrant much notice
from politicians. But they have nonetheless been able to dictate Washington's stance on Cuba. Why?
First, because for a long time they were united in their strong antipathy toward the Castro regime.
Second, because they let candidates know any deviation on that issue was a deal-breaker. None of this
would have mattered, though, except for the Electoral College. Cuban-Americans are concentrated in
Florida, where they make up more than 6 percent of the population — enough to decide an election.
It's a crucial swing state that is rich in electoral votes. Presidential candidates of either party knew
that if they urged a less hostile policy toward the Cuban regime , they would lose the Cuban-American
vote, which could mean losing Florida, which could mean losing the election. They also knew that it
cost them nothing to appease the Cuba lobby, because the issue is of minor importance to anyone else.
So they did the politically prudent thing. As Texas A&M University political scientist George C. Edwards
III, author of "Why the Electoral College Is Bad For America," told me, "The Electoral College allowed a
minority in a large state to determine U.S. foreign policy." The fact that our Cuba policy didn't work was
irrelevant. As long as it satisfied those voters, it was beyond alteration. What changed? The sentiments
of Cuban-Americans changed. Many of them came to see the policy as blind and futile. In 2008, Obama
went to Miami and dared to say he would meet with Raul Castro "at a time and place of my choosing."
In spite of that pledge — or because of it — he did much better among Cuban-Americans than John
Kerry or Al Gore had done. Four years later, he got nearly half of their votes. That success emboldened
him to adopt his new policy of engagement.

COUNTERPLAN BLOCK
NCFL BYLAWS 2020 (referred to by the 2021 ncflnationals website)
Lincoln-Douglas Debate: 1) The resolution is a proposition of value, not policy. Debaters are to develop
argumentation on the resolution in its entirety, based on conflicting underlying principles and values to
support their positions. To that end, they are not responsible for practical applications. No plan or
counterplan shall be offered by either debater.

The Electoral College Was Created To And Continues To Oppress Minority Voters
Codrington III 20 [Wilfred U. Codrington III, Assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a
Brennan Center fellow, 4-1-2020, "The Electoral College’s Racist Origins," Brennan Center for Justice,
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins] /Triumph
Debate
More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system
continues to do just that. This piece was originally published by the Atlantic. Is a color-blind political system possible under our
Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America
today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began
within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then. In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin
Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.”
Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements
—only they don’t privilege black Americans. For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of
innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities
from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his
essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are
necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part
of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways,
too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the
Electoral College. Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect
whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost. Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to
engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise
overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention
had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When
the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose
their leader. But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their
disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the
people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms: “There was one
difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter
could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.” Behind
Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because
of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one
that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the
country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent.
When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that
emerged was the Electoral College. Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History
buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known
about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise.

[During the Founding Era], The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for
maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election
outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and
abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically
rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and
their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860. In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent
another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued
to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute,
including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested
electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops
that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters. The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old
South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of
black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped
ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork
democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. What’s clear is that, more than two 38 TRIUMPH DEBATE LINCOLN DOUGLAS BRIEF – NCFL TOPIC 2021 centuries

The current system has a distinct, adverse impact

after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that.

on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in
the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’
electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations
are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those
states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black
votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed. Among the Electoral
College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically
inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current
one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign

Funk & Kennedy 20. April 21, 2020. Pew Research Center, “How Americans See Climate Change and
the Environment in 7 charts.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/21/how-americans-see-
climate-change-and-the-environment-in-7-charts/
Two-thirds of U.S. adults say the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of
global climate change. Similar shares say the government is doing too little to protect water (68%) and
air quality (67%), while majorities say the same when it comes to protecting animals and their habitats
(62%) and protecting open lands in the national parks (55%).
…
Compared with a decade ago, more Americans say protecting the environment and dealing with
global climate change should be top priorities for the president and Congress.  Nearly two-thirds of
U.S. adults (64%) say protecting the environment should be a top priority for the president and
Congress, while about half (52%) say the same about dealing with global climate change, according
to a January 2020 survey.

(Extra funding info)

Figure 2 presents estimates of the substantive effects (derived from column 2 in Table 2) of swing state
and core state targeting on grant spending in the population-weighted median county. Counties in
swing states always receive a disproportionately large share of federal grants . In nonelection years,
the median county in a swing state receives approximately $13.5 million more than the median
county in an electorally uncompetitive state, all else being equal. However, strongly consistent with
our theory, we find that this swing state advantage increases significantly during election years.
Because voters reward presidents only for the most recent policy developments, the electoral
incentive to target federal dollars to swing states are strongest in the immediate run up to the
election. As a result, during election years counties in swing states receive twice as much additional
federal grant funding as they do in nonelection years. In election years, the median county in a swing
state receives $27.8 million or fully 6.5% more federal grant dollars than a similar county in a
nonswing state.

Large States Do Not Have An Electoral Advantage – Pivotal States That Give Victory To A Candidate
Mirror The National Popular Vote

Wright 09 [John R. Wright (Professor Emeritus in Political Science from The Ohio State University), 11-
07-2008, "Pivotal states in the Electoral College, 1880 to 2004.", Public Choice,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40270742?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents] /Triumph Debate

The empirical results reveal, first, that large states do not have as big of an advantage in the Electoral
College as much of the existing literature suggests. Small and medium-sized states have been pivotal in
roughly one-fourth of the elections since 1880. Second, pivotal states are not always competitive
states. As defined and measured here, electoral competitiveness is neither necessary nor sufficient for
pivoting. A third result is that pivotal states have the important property of being “barometric
bellwethers”— states whose vote shares for the winning candidate closely reflect the national vote
share for the winning candidate. Finally, a state’s proximity to the pivotal state is an excellent predictor
of how presidential campaigns allocate time and money across states. Campaigns allocate more time
and money to states closer to the pivot than to those far away. Once pivot-proximity is taken into
account, size and competitiveness have little direct effect on the allocation of campaign resources. The
analysis has several implications for current debates about Electoral College reform. First, the ability of
small states occasionally to determine the outcome of the Electoral College suggests that residents of
large states do not have as much power in presidential elections as previously thought (e.g., Longley and
Dana 1984; Polsby and Wildavsky 1996). Proposals to abolish the Electoral College or to institute
proportional allocation of electors, which presumably would enhance the power of smaller states, are
therefore not as compelling as some critics claim. Reformers must recognize that the issue of power
involves more than just size. Small states that closely approximate national trends often exert far more
influence in the Electoral College than their voting weight suggests. Second, the tendency for pivotal
states to reflect the national vote division implies that the Electoral College does not produce
significant distortions in electoral power from what might be achieved under direct election.

Abolishing The Electoral College Wouldn’t Give Too Much Power To Any One Type Of State
Levitz 19 [Eric Levitz, Graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Visiting Lecture at Johns Hopkins University,
and Associate Editor of Daily Intelligencer at New York Magazine, 03-20-2019, “Here’s Every Defense of
the Electoral College — and Why They’re All Wrong,” Intelligencer – New York Magazine,
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/why-everyargument-for-preserving-the-electoral-college-is-
wrong-warren-cnn.html) /Triumph Debate

(C) It would give large states too much power. This might be the single most popular argument against
abolishing the Electoral College. Here is one representative example, from Michael Barone of the
American Enterprise Institute: The case against abolition is one suggested by the Framers’ fears that
voters in one large but highly atypical state could impose their will on a contrary-minded nation. That
largest state in 1787 was Virginia, home of four of the first five presidents. New York and California, by
remaining closely in line with national opinion up through 1996, made the issue moot. California’s 21st
century veer to the left makes it a live issue again. In a popular vote system, the voters of this
geographically distant and culturally distinct state, whose contempt for heartland Christians resembles
imperial London’s disdain for the “lesser breeds” it governed, could impose something like colonial rule
over the rest of the nation. Sounds exactly like what the Framers strove to prevent. Barone does not
explain how a national popular vote would enable the 12 percent of Americans who live in California to
impose “something like colonial rule” over the rest of the country. Nor does he address the fact that the
Golden State is still home to millions of rural-dwelling Republicans, who currently enjoy no effective
say in presidential elections. It is difficult to discern any coherent ideologically (or racially) neutral
principle that would explain Barone’s outrage at the thought of individual Californians’ having the same
influence in elections as their countrymen in smaller states (by which he ostensibly means white rural
ones, and not, say, residents of the District of Columbia). More broadly, the “counting votes equally
would give voters in populous states too much power” is just a long-winded way of saying that one
does not believe in democracy. Why shouldn’t national candidates campaign in the places where most
people live? Congress already guarantees that every region will have some say over policy-making —
and that, within the Legislative branch, small states will actually have disproportionate say. What is it,
exactly, about people who live in big cities that make them so undeserving of democratic equality? (D) It
would give small states too much power. In 2012, then-federal judge Richard Posner argued that
abolishing the Electoral College would be unfair to large states: The Electoral College restores some of
the weight in the political balance that large states (by population) lose by virtue of the mal-
apportionment of the Senate decreed in the Constitution. This may seem paradoxical, given that
electoral votes are weighted in favor of less populous states … But winner-take-all makes a slight
increase in the popular vote have a much bigger electoral-vote payoff in a large state than in a small
one. The popular vote was very close in Florida; nevertheless Obama, who won that vote, got 29
electoral votes. A victory by the same margin in Wyoming would net the winner only 3 electoral
votes. So, other things being equal, a large state gets more attention from presidential candidates in a
campaign than a small states does. I

The Electoral College Harms Small States’ Representation

Eberhard 20 [Kristin Eberhard, Director, Climate and Democracy, 12-11-2020, "Small States Aren't
Actually Protected by the Electoral College," Sightline Institute,
https://www.sightline.org/2020/12/11/small-states-arent-actuallyprotected-by-the-electoral-
college/] /Triumph Debate

The Electoral College gives a numerical advantage to small states. Because each state gets two Electoral
Votes for its two senators, no matter how many people live in the state, smaller states have more
Electoral College representation per voter. For example, a voter in Wyoming has four times as much say
in the Electoral College as does a voter in Texas. But despite getting a bump in Electoral Votes relative
to their populations, small states that vote consistently red or blue are still just spectator states in the
current state-winner-takeall system. In practice, a voter in Wyoming counts for just as much as a voter
in California. Nothing. In other words, small states’ numerical advantage doesn’t translate into political
advantage. If all the small states leaned the same way, the Electoral College would put a heavy thumb
on the scale in favor of that small-state-favored political party. But small states don’t all lean one way.
The ten smallest states are evenly split, five red and five blue Of the ten smallest states, five are safe
blue states(Maine, Vermont, DC, Rhode Island, Delaware) and five are safe red (Alaska, Montana,
Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota). In other words, they don’t have a shared “small state” political
agenda for the Electoral College to protect. The fact that the smallest states all lean heavily toward one
party or the other might not be entirely accidental. Small states tend to have more homogenous
populations, making it more likely that they will lean toward one party. In the map below, each square
represents one Electoral College vote, and the ten smallest states are blue or pink according to which
party has consistently won in that state in recent decades. Even though they have more Electoral Votes
than they would based on population, these 10 states still only boast 32 Electoral Votes between them,
which is only three more than the state of Florida. Faced with seeking support from 10 states with
widely varying values, or trying to win over a single state for nearly the same political advantage,
political parties pay more attention to big Florida than to the 10 small states. The ten battleground
states are big The presidential race is fought and won, not across the country as a whole, and not in
small states, but in battleground states. These are the handful of states where the margin between the
two major parties is thin, and so all their Electoral College votes are up for grabs under the state-winner-
take-all system. This is where candidates campaign, campaigns spend money, and presidents spend
more federal funds once in office to boost their chances of reelection. Battleground states are the ones
that matter. And they are big states. Of the ten main battleground states in 2020, six of them are in
the top ten biggest states. And nine of them are in the top twenty largest states. The only one that’s
not is Nevada. Again, that’s not coincidental. Bigger states have more diverse populations, making it
more likely that voters might be closely divided, creating stiff competition between the two parties. The
state-winner-take-all model makes closely divided states more important, and bigger states may be
more likely to be closely divided (see big, diverse Texas trending toward battleground status). Plus,
bigger states offer more bang for their buck, more Electoral College votes per victory. Together, these
ten battleground states hold 151 electoral votes, nearly five times as many as the ten smallest states.
Campaigning in and winning Florida gives 29 Electoral votes for one state victory, compared to just three
for a victory in Wyoming. Spectator states don’t matter All the gray states in the map above are “safe”
for one party, which makes them mere spectators to the presidential race that plays out in battleground
states. Because all of their Electoral Votes are locked up from the outset, candidates don’t bother
campaigning in those states. They don’t bother trying to win over voters in those states because winning
extra votes there won’t help them win any more Electoral Votes
High Voter Turnout Provides More Support For Generous Social Welfare Policies Resulting In Less
Income Inequality And Higher Social Welfare

Mcelwee 15 [Sean Mcelwee, (Co-founder of Data for Progress, policy analyst for Demos), 9-16-2015,
"Why Voting Matters," Demos, https://www.demos.org/research/why-voting-matters-large-disparities-
turnout-benefit-donorclass#Voter-Turnout-and-Policy] /Triumph Debate

International differences in turnout affect policy; here, again, higher turnout and lower class bias in
voting are associated with more generous social welfare policies. There is also growing evidence, for
example, that our history of comparatively low and unequal voter turnout has been a key constraint
on welfare state growth and development in the United States. As Lane Kenworthy and Jonas
Pontusson write, “low turnout offers a potentially compelling explanation why the American welfare
state has been so much less responsive to rising market inequality than other welfare states.”27 A study
of 85 democracies finds that higher voter turnout leads to “larger government expenditure, higher
total revenues, more generous welfare state spending.”28 A study that focuses on 18 democracies
between the years of 1960 to 1982 concluded that turnout boosts welfare spending, even after
controlling for political and environmental factors.29 Compulsory voting in Switzerland increases
electoral support for progressive referendums by up to 20 percentage points, according to another
study.30 Other models look at voter turnout and inequality. One study of 78 countries finds that if
voter turnout increased from 40 percent to 80 percent, on average it would reduce the Gini Coefficient
(a frequently used measure of income inequality) in these countries by .04, which is equal to the
entire effect of taxes in the United States.31 I

America Needs A Multiparty System, Modeling Other Democracies Around The World. This Would
Increase Legitimacy And Increase Voter Satisfaction As Popular Policies Become More Likely To Pass

Drutman 16 [Lee Drutman, (Senior Fellow at New America and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom
Loop: The case for Multiparty democracy in America), 11-8-2016, "Let a Thousand Parties Bloom,"
Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/19/us-democracy-two-party-system-replace-
multiparty-republican-democrat/] /Triumph Debate

The only way to break this destructive stalemate is to break the electoral and party system that sustains
and reinforces it. The United States is divided into red and blue not because Americans want only two
choices. In poll after poll, majorities want more than two political parties. Few Americans enjoy the
high-stakes partisan combat. The United States is divided because in winner-take-all plurality
elections, third parties can’t emerge. And even if Americans agree on wanting a third party, few are
willing to gamble on an alternative for fear of wasting their vote. Nor can Americans agree on which
third party they would want, either. The United States would need five or six parties to represent the
true ideological diversity of the country. All else equal, modest multiparty democracies (with three to
seven parties) perform better than two-party democracies. Such a party system regularizes cross-
partisan compromise and coalition building. Since parties need to work together to govern, more
viewpoints are likely to be considered. The resulting policies are more likely to be broadly inclusive,
and broadly legitimate, making voters happier with the outcomes. Some might cite Brazil, Italy, or
Israel as paradigmatic and thus cautionary cases of chaotic multiparty democracy. But these are very
different countries. Political culture and political history both matter tremendously. Brazil and Italy have
long histories of corruption that challenge any party system, and Israel is perpetually surrounded by
hostile enemies. Brazil and Israel have too many parties, the result of electoral rules that make
legislative representation too easy for parties to obtain, rather than too hard. A sweet spot is between
four and six parties—enough to give voters meaningful choices, and offer coalitional variety, but not so
much to fragment a polity and make coalition management difficult. Comparing countries is always
difficult, but the more appropriate comparisons for the United States would be the modest multiparty
democracies of Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia—hardly dysfunctional polities.

The 2-Party System Makes Governing Impossible In The US Due To Increasing Partisanship - Zero-Sum
Politics Reduces Focus On Policy

Drutman 16 [Lee Drutman, (Senior Fellow at New America and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom
Loop: The case for Multiparty democracy in America), 11-8-2016, "Let a Thousand Parties Bloom,"
Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/19/us-democracy-two-party-system-replace-
multiparty-republican-democrat/] /Triumph Debate

A divided two-party system makes effective governing difficult under any political system, but almost
impossible given U.S. governing institutions, by sacrificing the flexibility of officials to party discipline.
But while the Founding Fathers thought and worried a lot about divisive partisanship (as John Adams
warned, “a Division of the Republick into two great Parties … is to be dreaded as the greatest political
Evil”), they gave little thought to electoral mechanisms to prevent partisanship from becoming too
divisive. That’s forgivable. At the time, national electoral precedents were few, and the Framers
unthinkingly imported Britain’s simple 1430 innovation of place-based, first-past-the-post elections. This
enabled the almost immediate formation of a two-party system, with Thomas Jefferson and Madison’s
power-to-the-people Democratic-Republicans teaming up against the more trustthe-elites Federalist
Party of Alexander Hamilton, Adams, and (more or less) George Washington. But for most of U.S.
history, the two parties were sprawling, mixedup coalitions of state and local groups—and thus flexible
enough to compete in most places with different faces and with enough overlap to make deals in
Washington. Much as critics complained about the lack of meaningful choices and complex, parochial
logroll politics, incoherent and nonideological parties worked well with U.S. governing institutions. Weak
partisanship allowed majority coalitions to come together on an issue-by-issue basis—just as the
Framers had intended. In the 1960s, the old system gave way. Civil rights shook U.S. politics and set in
motion a decades-long realignment of the party coalitions. Politics nationalized, and pragmatic
economic materialism gave way to culture wars and fights over national identity. By the 1990s,
conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans began to go extinct, unable to survive in this new
environment, leaving only liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. B

*Appeals To “What The Framers Wanted” Are Both Inaccurate And Racially Biased

Levitz 19 [Eric Levitz, Graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Visiting Lecture at Johns Hopkins University,
and Associate Editor of Daily Intelligencer at New York Magazine, 03-20-2019, “Here’s Every Defense of
the Electoral College — and Why They’re All Wrong,” Intelligencer – New York Magazine,
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/why-everyargument-for-preserving-the-electoral-college-is-
wrong-warren-cnn.html] /Triumph Debate 1.
The Electoral College currently exists, therefore it is good. (A) The founders thought superhard about
this, and so we should defer to their judgement. From Allen Guelzo and James Hulme’s Washington Post
op-ed, “In Defense of the Electoral College”: The Founders who sat in the 1787 Constitutional
Convention lavished an extraordinary amount of argument on the electoral college, and it was by no
means one-sided … The Founders also designed the operation of the electoral college with unusual care.
The portion of Article 2, Section 1, describing the electoral college is longer and descends to more detail
than any other single issue the Constitution addresses. More than the federal judiciary — more than the
war powers — more than taxation and representation. This isn’t the op-ed’s only argument. But the
authors devote a solid 350 words of their short column to saying, essentially, “Look, our finest
slaveholders already debated all this only a couple decades before the advent of the steam engine, so
why reopen this can of worms?” And they are hardly alone in presenting “the founders said so” as a
trump card. The trouble with this argument is twofold. First, the founders were (mostly) a collection of
land speculators who built their fortunes by ethnically cleansing Native Americans, and slavers who
built theirs by participating in one of the greatest atrocities in world history. Most did not believe in
popular democracy (as the vast majority of Americans do today). As political theorists, these dudes
were so foresighted, they assumed that America would never have political parties. None of this
means that some of them weren’t brilliant, or that they didn’t build some institutions that are worth
preserving. But it does mean we’re talking about incredibly flawed, extremely dead human beings, not
philosopher kings appointed by God. Thus, there is no reason to reflexively defer to their judgement
— which was itself the product of compromise between disparate interests, not Socratic dialogue on
the ideal form of the state. Some founders favored the popular vote; others wanted to leverage their
chattel into disproportionate political power. Understandably, Hulme and Guelzo are eager to deny
these grubby origins, writing: Above all, the electoral college had nothing to do with slavery. Some
historians have branded the electoral college this way because each state’s electoral votes are based on
that “whole Number of Senators and Representatives” from each State, and in 1787 the number of
those representatives was calculated on the basis of the infamous 3/5ths clause. But the electoral
college merely reflected the numbers, not any bias about slavery (and in any case, the 3/5ths clause was
not quite as proslavery a compromise as it seems, since Southern slaveholders wanted their slaves
counted as 5/5ths for determining representation in Congress, and had to settle for a whittled-down
fraction). [Emphasis mine.] There are multiple issues with this defense. For one thing, some southern
framers were quite forthright about the nature of their concerns. As Jamelle Bouie notes: Hugh
Williamson of North Carolina made this point explicit in his objection: Because there won’t always be
“distinguished characters” with national recognition who could win a majority of votes, “the people will
be sure to vote for some man in their own State, and the largest State will be sure to succeed.” But this
will not be Virginia, “since her slaves will have no suffrage.” And even if this hadn’t been the case, Hulme
and Guelzo’s argument would be nonsensical. If the framers had adopted a popular-vote system, then
only the enfranchised would have influenced presidential elections — and thus, slavers wouldn’t have
been able to leverage their human property into outsized political influence. This is not complicated.
Furthermore, what, precisely, is “in any case, the 3/5ths compromise wasn’t that pro-slavery since the
plantation owners wanted it to be 5/5ths” supposed to prove? But the most fundamental problem with
the idea that we should defer to framer’s judgement is this: Almost immediately after writing the rules
for presidential elections into the Constitution, the leaders of our republic realized they’d made a
mistake (which is why the 12th Amendment exists). Among other things, making the Electoral College
runner-up the vice-president proved to be deeply problematic the moment political parties took hold. If
we were actually committed to honoring the founders’ intentions, then Hillary Clinton would be
Donald Trump’s vice-president today.

Republicans Want NPV – The Current System Ignores Smaller Red States

Klaas 21 [Brian Klass, Associate Professor of global politics at University College London, 03-08-2021,
“Opinion: Meet the Republicans who want to end the electoral college,” The Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/08/republicans-electoral-college-trump-
elections/] /Triumph Debate

I recently got back in touch with Rosenstiel after the dust settled from the 2020 election to ask him why
he, a conservative Republican, favored jettisoning a system that continues to systematically advantage
Republican candidates. “I think Republicans and Republican ideas win whenever we campaign directly
to voters,” Rosenstiel explains. “And I believe national popular vote will force the Republican
candidate for president to campaign in all 50 states. Plain and simple, Republican ideas win, and I’m
not afraid of our ideas.” More specifically, though, Rosenstiel points to the fact that the electoral
college battleground map means most of the country gets ignored. “Ninety-six percent of the 2020
presidential campaign occurred in just 12 battleground states,” he says. “President Trump won the
popular vote in those battleground states in 2020 and 2016.” The same dynamic held in 2016, when 94
percent of campaign events were held in just 12 states. Two-thirds of 2016 campaign events were held
in just six states. Thirty-eight states were effectively ignored by both candidates. These startling facts
refute the main objection that many Republicans usually raise to the national popular vote: that small
red states will no longer matter in presidential politics. The truth, Rosenstiel argues, is that small red
states (and small blue states) already don’t matter. They’re simply taken for granted by candidates in
both parties. “When is the last time you’ve seen a general election campaign event in North Dakota or
Montana or Vermont or Delaware?” Rosenstiel asks. Some Republicans I’ve spoken to also argue that
the electoral college causes Republican presidential candidates to pursue campaign strategies that give
them a narrow path to the White House but ensure the party remains unpopular nationally. They argue
it’s a losing strategy over the long term, and the GOP’s survival requires a course correction toward
national popularity — not just popularity in a few crucial battleground states. In their view, the
Republican Party would be healthier if GOP presidential candidates couldn’t write off big states such
as California or New York and needed to once again compete for votes in cities. American democracy
requires serious reforms. But many of those necessary reforms are dead on arrival in Congress, because
only Democrats support them. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact can be different. All it
takes is some brave Republican state legislators who, like Rosenstiel, recognize that removing the
distortions of the electoral college isn’t good for Democrats; it’s good for democracy.

Washington Post Analysis Shows Spoilers Are Incredibly Rare – Less Than 1.4%

Bump 14 [Philip Bump, Bump is a national correspondent for The Washington Post, 10-8-2014, "How
often do thirdparty candidates actually spoil elections? Almost never.", Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/08/how-often-do-third-party-candidates-
actually-spoilelections-not-very/] /Triumph Debate
We have reached the what-if point of the election cycle. What if that Glens Falls baker spoils a race in
the House? What if former South Dakota Republican-turnedindependent Larry Pressler recasts the
Republican-Democrat Senate race in that state? What if the libertarian in North Carolina spoils that
Senate race? What if! It's only natural that the political press turn to spoilers and upsets now. Election
Day is a month away, and most major-party candidates have been written about enough to cover the
entire state of Alaska with pixellated text. So: what if? "If" rarely happens. We looked at every federal
general election race from 2006 to 2012 and found that only 61 of the 1,800-plus races were possible
spoilers -- and slightly less than half of that number actually were spoiled. In every 1,000 races, in
other words, 14 of them saw a third-party candidate (or, simply, a third candidate) that likely cost
someone a race. Image without a caption About half of federal races in the United States are either
between a Democrat and a Republican or (occasionally) uncontested. We looked at the 900 other races,
ones in which there was a third or fourth (or fifth) candidate, to figure out how often the person who
came in third beat the margin of victory between the first two. In other words, given candidates Adams,
Baker, and Cobb, who finished in that order, how often the vote total earned by Cobb was larger than
the amount by which Adams beat Baker. Without Cobb in the race, then, Baker could possibly have
gotten those votes and won. Only 6.7 percent of those three-or-more candidate races had the third
candidate beat the margin of victory, landing them in what we call the "spoiler zone." Image without a
caption Not all of the candidates in the spoiler zone actually spoiled races, though. In some cases, they
were members of the same party as the winner; often they were ideologically similar to the winner,
such as a Green Party member who came in third in a race that a Democrat won.

Abolishing the Electoral College Would, in Most Cases, Reduce Campaign Finance Spending

Gordon 16. Brett Gordon, Associate Professor of Marketing at Kellogg Institute at Northwestern
University. Kellogg institute website. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/abandoning-
electoral-college-campaign-spending

But what if the country abandoned the Electoral College and switched to a direct-vote system, where
votes are simply tallied nationally to determine the winner? How would that change presidential TV ad
strategies and spending—which reached nearly $1 billion in 2012?

Gordon and Wesley Hartmann, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, created a model to
simulate a direct-vote scenario. They used their model to examine two recent presidential elections.
They found that in the hotly contested 2000 race, spending would have gone up by 13 percent. But in
the less tight—and likely more typical—2004 race, spending would have dropped by 54 percent.

In other words, overall, a direct-vote system could greatly reduce the amount of campaign money
devoted to TV ads. This could have significant political implications. Instead of using ads, candidates
might try other tactics to sway voters, such as adopting more popular policy positions.