Officials, discusses the rising number of cases in several states. Nicole clowers discusses her ys reports of how relief funds from congress are being spent. The u. S. Supreme court is wrapping up its term this week, issuing decisions in cases heard earlier in the term. One of those decisions upholds the Electoral College, by saying electorsfaithless defy the will of the voters. Welcome to the washington journal. It is four months until election day. We will start asking you about the Electoral College. Should the Electoral College be abolished . Isyou think so, that line 202 7488000. If that answer is no, the line is 202 7488001. We welcome your comments on text. The line 202 7488003. We are on twitter. Facebook. Com cspan. Is expected to issue more decisions this week, wrapping up its term. A little Electoral College oneonone from the national archives. A little Electoral College 101 from the national archives. The number of electors is equal to the number of members in the congressional delegation. There is a total of 538. Neededlection day, 270 to elect a president. Five president s have one without the electoral with the popular vote without the popular vote. John quincy adams, rutherford b harrison, george 44,000 with a hundred fewer than al gore, and donald trump. Case, at ruling in the couple of cases. Heres the reporting of richard wolf. Courttes, the supreme addressed one of the potential problems facing the 2020 race, ruling that states can insist members of the Electoral College the winner of the popular vote. 32 states require the people chosen on election day to cast ballots for the winner of the states popular vote. Estates, roguee electors can be replaced or find. Fined. 18 states have no such rule. The constitution passed text and history both support allowing a state to enforce and electors pledged to support the the president. Case, elenangton kagan said, the state instructs the electors they have no ground to part of the decision, the majority opinion, yesterday. Is should the Electoral College be abolished . If you say yes, 202 7488000. F you say no, 202 7488001 we will get to some Facebook Comments first. Jose says yes and no. It should be proportional. If a republican candidate gets getin california, he should 45 of the Electoral College. This one says cut the tuition. This guy says no. We are a republic, not a democracy. Lets go to brooklyn. Yes, abolished Electoral College. Reasons include this decision that just came out. Conflict and the the reasons our founders put the college in place. It was to protect democracy from rule by an educated mob. We know the founders were an elite cream of the time. They do not want to see rabble bringing their sentiments to bear on deciding something so important. Asy wanted Electoral College a buffer to filter the possibly inaccurate or inappropriate through of the mass people with more education and to eliminatenough the chance of a demagogue or a rabblerouser taking power. They, we have the problem could not have foreseen, a president who can communicate directly with the public through Something Like twitter and go directly at those uninformed passions to gain power. Today,nders were alive usingould say a president twitter to gain power is exactly the kind of thing we were trying to avoid. We gave electors discretion. If we are going to give them that discretion if we are not. Host thanks. Caller good morning. I am diametrically opposed to what the gentleman from brooklyn just said. The Founding Fathers were worried about mob rule. Mobou want to know what rule is, look at seattle, minneapolis, new york city, washington, d. C. Those are the uninformed electors. Theychester, new york, tore down the statue of frederick douglass. Are you going to tell me those people that tore that down are informed in know what they are doing . Of course not. No. Mob rule, we are seeing it now. We are seeing the woke culture, the antifa mob rule. Twitter we have a first amendment. People can make up their minds. We are not uninformed. We are not the basket of deplorables. We just believe in the constitution of the united tes, the rule of law, and it is just amazing that there are people out there that dont understand that. Thank you. Host to mark, philadelphia, on the line. Good morning. Caller i second what the first caller said. I am all for getting rid of this antiquated, you know, ridiculous provision from the constitutio , setting up the republican not only madison and hamilton. The last thing they wanted was one man, one vote. You can see what geniuses those guys were. Might be a badte idea, but we have it now. If youre going to have one man, one vote, lets have a real one. Lets get rid of the Electoral College and do it by the popular vote. Texting. Our line from keith in fort worth. He says, abolish . No. You might as well just toss the rest of the constitution. W largeot want a fe states picking every president. Yes, the majority should carry the day. David yes. The Electoral College should be abolished. Every other election is decided by majority vote. David says no. He is in st. Paul. Good morning. Manipulationis a by the democratic body to get votes because host from the brookings institution, this is the opinion of darrell west. At aites in the piece, time of high income inequality and substantial geographical disparity across states, there is a risk that the Electoral College will systematically over represent the views of small numbers of people due to the structure of the Electoral College. Hasonstituted, each state Electoral College votes regardless of its size. Represents over represent small and mediumsized states at the expense of large states. This will likely fuel continued populism and regular discrepancies between the popular and Electoral College votes. President s who lose the popular vote could become the norm and thereby usher in an antimajoritarian era where small numbers of voters could use their institutional clout in left behind states to block candidates and legislation desired by large numbers of people. We are asking you about it. In west virginia, mary. Abolish it. Lutely this one vote, one person, that is important. Until the Electoral College is abolished, one person, one vote has no power. Host to massachusetts. We say good morning to jean. Sean. Caller hello. I think the Electoral College should be abolished. It was established by the those whoo exclude they look down on. Vote, thee man, one popular vote, is more important than the meaning in the meaning of our founders, that each should have an equal vote. Host what do you think the intention of the founders was in creating the Electoral College . Caller to exclude the hoi polloi. To exclude the people they felt or less educated who hadlanded or those not the educational basis for making decisions. And i think it stinks. Fairlyou are from a popular state populous state. Thatabout the argument states with fewer people, fewerr population, electors, and therefore will have less of a voice . That is athink that spear he is argument i think that is a spurious argument. 200yearold ruling to exclude the holy polo the hoi polloi. It is probably sexist. It is probably autocratic. And it is directly against the american constitution. Will go to jackson, michigan and here from lucas. Ear from lucas. Caller how will we find out results on Election Night . That is one thing i am currents about concerned about. One of the big goals of the Electoral College, at least today, is it makes the president have to go across the country, campaign. I live in michigan, a big battleground state. When you have more swing states, i think it encourages them to go out and get into the rural areas. Getichigan, they had to mccollum county, oakland county. Even that, you dont think about that. He did not win all these areas, but he still had to get a percentage. Ignore big areas with the Electoral College, but you have to take into consideration small states. Host thanks. Here is some reporting from the wall street journal about the case. On faithless electors. Ruled mondayourt that president ial electors can be required to cast ballots for the candidate who wins their states popular vote. In the article, i want to read more into it. They write by longstanding custom, electors have nearly always voted in accord with their states. Theearly 32 states and District Of Columbia, they are legally required to do so. The case presented the justices with a rare chance to define rules for the Electoral College, theh Justice Kagan called 11th hour compromise chosen by the framers to select a president. Florida here is dorothy in florida. Caller i think it should be abolished. If you were on a committee, part of the senate, what pushes a boat . It is the majority. Is one that vote counts in every other instance i can think of. Boards ofn on Different Companies in michigan. Everything is majority vote in this country that i know of. Why should electing a president be any different . A vote is a vote. Soa majority says so and should be president , that is the way it should be. There will be states that do not have a large population. That is not important anymore. All the states have a lot of population. The ones that do not, that is where they choose to live too bad host david, hi there. I support the Electoral College because it has been around too long. None vote. Ne to gorsuch ruled the Civil Rights Act included gayrights. Gorsuch could have imagines a niche in could have imagination for people who live 50 or 60 years ago is absurd. Host peter. Caller it should not be abolished. Provisionrs put this in the constitution specifically because the smaller states did not want to be dominated by bigger states. Also thato understand the presidency and now the vice presidency are the only elected offices that all the people elect. So every state has to get a majority in order to be satisfied that their input into this process was legitimate. You have to win each individual state in order to win the presidency. Understanding that in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton the vast majority of her extra votes from california. If you took california out of the mix, donald trump actually got more votes than she did. This is a fact you could probably check. But not 100 sure of that, what i saw in the media. I think it is fair and the Founding Fathers were smart to do this. Fulcrum,s is from the an opinion piece by rick leroux. Even if the Court Decides they can change votes without consequences, that would not change the chaos of rogue electors conspiring or being bribed to change votes. Electors, faithless are already rare and inconsequential. Some pick them at just 16. They will become more rare regardless of the courts decision or any state. He writes, the electoral of democracysion in each election and its capacity to cause chaos should concern us more. It violates political equality by weighing each vote differently based only on the state in which a citizen lives. 20 of the time, it delivers a theire election, in which winner of the popular vote is not the winner of the election. Next is keith in denver, colorado. Good morning, keith. Caller i am encouraged to hear so much support for abolishing the Electoral College. I will tie a couple things together. The reason it exists is slavery. It is not even debatable. Historyght there in the for anyone who wants to see. When we talk about systemic racism in america, yes, it is woven into the fabric one way through the Electoral College. Now bear with me. A recent study, i think the southern poverty law center, of highnly 8 School Students knew the civil war was about slavery. You cannot blame the students because the teachers and the School Boards know what it was about and they denied that to students. We are doing the same thing to the Electoral College. Lets be clear. Virginia cameof up with the idea for the slave states. Moreight of suffrage was diffuse in the north than in the Southern States. Insured that the slave states will continue to have power. Dismantleng to systemic racism and have a real conversation about our republic, our democracy, and what we need to fix. Lets start with the Electoral College. The civildressed war and have finally defeated the confederacy. Abolishily says do not the Electoral College. She is in north dakota. Caller i have been listening to a lot of the comments. We do have direct representation in local and state elections. That includes your mayor. Representation in our congress and other direct votes, but the president is a representative of the union. Without the Electoral College, our union would not stay together. We would no longer be the United States. We saw that with the civil war. Someone said it was about slavery. Well, it was. But more importantly, it was about state rights. To keep the union together, we have to find a way to balance that out. That is through the Electoral College and direct representation. Again, we vote directly for almost all of our representation. We vote for the president. Is ourctoral college means of making sure the states of the United States are represented. Host that 5 number. Electionsyou the five since 1820 41 by the candidate that did not get the popular vote. Are you comfortable with 10 rate of error . It is my understanding that Abraham Lincoln did not get the popular vote. Host he did not get a majority of the popular vote at that time. The vote was split among several candidates. I do not think he won a majority of the vote. He won most of the vote. This is off the top of my head. I am trying to recall my history. It was not the exact same thing as we are talking with the five president s here who were elected with the Electoral College vote. Caller i will defer to you because you probably know this better than i do. We will keep having situations in this country where people do not agree. Live i used to live on the west coast and now i am back in the midwest. The interests people have are different. If you are an agrarian state you will have different issues than People Living in a huge metropolis. It is not the same. Inn the resources we have this country require different things. The president is supposed to represent all of the states. That is not easy. A time will come. Themember when obama won election. Everyone was so excited. Butblicans were unhappy, generally speaking, all the states came together. We will have situations where states agree and disagree. Part of this will be in line with what is going on in the world. Right now, the world is in upheaval. If we forget that we are a union made up of states and have direct representation in a vote locally and in our states with thatess, local government, is what makes us unique. I lived on the west coast. I know that if we only allow large metropolitan areas to go by popular vote we will not have representation. At sometime down the road, states will want to separate and we will not have a United States anymore. Host appreciate your input. My producer has gotten us the answer on the lincoln election. Lincoln, elected 16th president , became the first to win the presidency republicans when the presidency. He won 40 of the vote. Johncandidates breckenridge, john bell, and stephen douglas, u. S. Senator for illinois. Some comments on twitter and on text. The plenaryis power of any state to determine how to deal with faithless electors. The super court the Supreme Court indirectly holds the austro college as immune from regulation by the federal legislature. I think it is time to get rid of an ancient practice like this. Give courts the authority to punish faithless electors. If california chooses not to pass legislation to punish faithless electors, the decision is moot. In pennsylvania, we say hello to john. Caller good morning. From listening to washington ,ournal over the past months in order to vote, to cast your ballot in a federal election, you have to be a citizen. Some of the states let you to vote in state elections without being a citizen. Castf them votes that are are citizens voting. Oralit comes to the elect the elect tori a the electoral, they are chosen by the amount of representatives in each state. Those representatives are chosen by the senses. The census. Votes like texas that can these illegals are getting much more representation in the house of representatives and they are getting much more electoral votes. Vote iselectoral actually a vote of people that are not citizens of the United States, and that should not be. It should be the citizens that choose who the president is. Read section one of the constitution, it is on how the census as to count people. The only thing they talk about is native americans are not to be counted. But the enslaved people at that time were c