(The Center Square) – The Electoral College becomes an issue every four years with presidential elections. In Illinois, whoever gets the majority votes, gets all of the state’s 19 electors.
A candidate for president of the United States must get 270 of the nation’s 538 electoral votes in order to become the next president. The system was established by the Founding Fathers “as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens,” the National Archives says.
“Any candidate who wins a majority or plurality of the popular vote nationwide has a good chance of winning in the Electoral College, but there are no guarantees,” the National Archives said, noting results of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 elections.
Only two states, Nebraska and Maine, split their electoral votes proportionally by congressional district with two statewide electors going to the popular vote. Every other state is like Illinois, a winner-take-all state. Illinois has a total of 19 Electoral College votes.
Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn doesn’t favor a proportional approach to the Electoral College. He said whoever gets the popular vote should win.
“The electoral college is really something from the 18th Century and it doesn’t really work in the 21st Century in my opinion,” Quinn said recently at an unrelated news conference.
The former Democratic governor said he would rather see the popular vote determine who leads the country at the top.
“Every other country in the world does that. We have this sort of antiquated Electoral College that I don’t think really represents the majority will,” Quinn said.
Former Illinois state Sen. Darren Bailey, R-Xenia, disagreed.
“I’m not aware of any really of the ideas of our Founding Fathers that I would call antiquated,” Bailey told The Center Square.
Bailey, who also ran for governor in 2022 and in a Republican congressional primary this year, said the winner-takes-all system for the Electoral College takes voters’ voices away.
“They feel slighted, they feel cheated, they feel their voice doesn’t matter and they’re not showing up to participate because of that,” Bailey said.
Bailey is a proponent of splitting up a state’s electoral votes proportionally to better empower voters while keeping the spirit of the Founder’s vision.
“In the days ahead, and this country has problems, it’s going to be because of the frustrations of the people who are not heard and the Electoral College allows just that from the genius of our Founding Fathers,” Bailey said.
The election is Nov. 5. Early voting is underway.
