Rev. Jesse Jackson on Saturday called for a constitutional amendment granting citizens a right to vote directly for president.
“We need an amendment … to make sure every American has a right to vote individually and directly for the president, not through the Electoral College,” Jackson said. “The idea of an Electoral College is an aristocratic idea that you can’t trust the people.”
Currently, states are in charge of the mechanics of presidential elections. Jackson claims this system caused 1 million votes by African-Americans to be “discounted” in 2000.
He noted that President Bush’s 2000 rival, Al Gore, received more votes, the fourth time in history that the popular vote winner lost the election.
He also pointed to allegations of people being improperly removed from the voter rolls in Florida. “Across the country, we see these patterns of voter disenfranchisement,” he said.
Under the Constitution, each state is granted a number of electors proportional to its percentage of the nation’s population. In the early history of the nation, most state legislators chose those electors, but over time, all 50 states came to choose electors through popular statewide vote tallies.
Supporters of the Electoral College contend that abandoning the system would weaken or eliminate the national influence of smaller states, because presidential candidates could ignore them on the campaign trail and still capture a majority of the votes across the nation.
