Why are electoral college votes winner-take-all?

Because that's how 48 of the states have decided to do it. I agree it doesn't seem right. Maine and Nebraska do it differently so occasionally their electoral vote is split, though not often. Primaries, on the other hand, are up to the parties, not state governments. So it's different people making the rules.

It's up to the state legislatures, and once one goes for "winner takes all", the rest will do it so the party they favour isn't disadvantaged. If anything is to be done, it needs to be imposed nationally.

But Congress can't do this because the constitution specifically states that the state legislatures decide how to choose electors. So it would take an Amendment for Congress to be able to tell the states how they must do it. Without Congress having the power to change what states do, the only way of changing anything is for the states to work together, which is the idea of the National Popular Vote plan http://www.fairvote.org/national_popular_vote#what...

But this really isn't ideal. It's a work-around to make the popular vote work within the existing system.

Just to go off the point and imagine what could be done in an ideal world where we could make an Amendment, my idea would be this:

1. Make the electoral college virtual, so there are no actual electors. That abolishes faithless electors.

2. Require that states allocate their electoral votes by proportional representation, exactly as you suggest. I agree it makes your vote matter more - proportional representation always does.

You need a mathematical method for this because it is impossible to do it exactly with millions of votes and only a limited number of electoral votes. A few exist and are actually used around the world - just pick one and write it into law.

One I actually know because I'm British is the d'Hondt method, which we use for electing our representatives in the European Parliament. (Or rather, used, now that we have voted to leave the European Union.) What we do is proportional representation by regional party lists. The UK is divided into large regions, the parties put up lists of candidates in each region, voters vote for a party, the votes are counted, and the d'Hondt method is used to calculate how many MEPs should be allocated to each party. For example, I live in London, the London region elects 8 MEPs, and in 2014, applying the method to the actual numbers of votes resulted in Labour 4, Conservative 2, UKIP 1 and Green 1. So the MEPs representing me are the top 4 from Labour's list etc.

It would work equally well for a state with 8 electoral votes wanting to allocate those electoral votes to candidates by voter proportion. Or indeed any other number of electoral votes. And actually, with only the Democrat and the Republican likely to get any electoral votes because the number of people voting for anyone else is too small, it wouldn't much matter whether the state used d'Hondt, Sainte-Lague or some other similar method. It's just that you must have a method that can cater for all possibilities of how the people vote.

But as I say, that wasn't your question and it would need 3/4 of the states to ratify any such Amendment. Maybe it's a pipe-dream, but without dreaming, nothing ever changes. Martin Luther King had a dream, didn't he?

The rules for the primaries are set by the state and national parties because the parties are considered private associations. The current set of rules are rather new (all dating to the past 40 years)

When you get to the general election, the Constitution gives the authority to establish the rules governing electors to the state legislatures. With two exceptions (Nebraska and Maine which both do winner-take-all by Congressional District), all of the state legislature have chosen to select electors on a winner-take-all basis.

Originally, in some states, the legislatures chose the electors, but, in other states, voters directly elected the electors. (E.g., if your state had nine electors, each voter got to vote for up to nine candidates for electors.) Over time, all of the states switched to the voters electing the electors. Normally, this system led to the winning candidate getting all of the electors. Occasionally, if the losing presidential candidate in a state had a "popular" electoral candidate, the losing candidate did manage to get an elector or two in a state that they lost (last occurring in 1916). For a variety of reasons (easier to count votes, takes up less ballot space), states have switched to having voters cast a vote for an entire slate rather than voting for individual electors.

To begin with, the Founding Fathers did not trust the public to make important decisions. They wanted a system where the public would appoint people they considered capable to make laws and choose the president. In fact, in the original Constitution, your senators in Washington were chosen by your state legislature, not by popular vote.

The electoral college is left over from that kind of thinking, but the way electoral votes are apportioned is a slightly different matter.

Due to states' rights. each state gets to choose how its electors will represent its public. With the two-party system, almost every state party has chosen to make the electors winner-take-all. Although I agree it's a bad idea overall, once one state does it, it's logical for other states to follow suit. If some large blue state becomes winner-take-all, it's logical for a large red state to follow suit; it's advantageous to the party that dominates that state.

But there is a possible fix on the horizon that doesn't involve amending the Constitution. It's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, http://www.fairvote.org/national_popular_vote#what... and it has been passed by 11 jurisdictions allocating 165 electoral votes.

Basically, if your state passes the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, nothing changes until at least 270 electoral votes worth of states pass the Compact. At that point your state and all the other states who have passed the Compact are legally obligated to allocate all electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Thus at that point the national popular vote winner is guaranteed at least 270 electoral votes and therefore the win.

48 states (plus DC) use winner-take-all but two states don't. Most states have adopted winner-take-all because it gives their electoral votes more 'weight' if they're awarded as a block rather than being split up; however there's nothing stopping states from allocating electoral votes differently. If you don't like how your state allocates electoral votes then lobby your state legislators to change it.

That's the law as per the Constitution. A better question is, why do we still have this stupid electoral college system at all?

Because that's the way our system works. How primaries are run are determined by the parties that are holding the primaries not the federal government.

The current winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes is not in the U.S. Constitution. It was not debated at the Constitutional Convention. It is not mentioned in the Federalist Papers. It was not the Founders’ choice. It was used by only three states in 1789, and all three of them repealed it by 1800. It is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all method. The winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes became dominant only in the 1830s, when most of the Founders had been dead for decades, after the states adopted it, one-by-one, in order to maximize the power of the party in power in each state.

Although the whole-number proportional approach might initially seem to offer the possibility of making every voter in every state relevant in presidential elections, it would not do this in practice.

It would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote;

It would not improve upon the current situation in which four out of five states and four out of five voters in the United States are ignored by presidential campaigns, but instead, would create a very small set of states in which only one electoral vote is in play (while making most states politically irrelevant), and

It would not make every vote equal.

It would not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate with the most popular votes in the country.

A national popular vote is the way to make every person's vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and DC becomes President.

Any state that enacts the proportional approach on its own would reduce its own influence. This was the most telling argument that caused Colorado voters to agree with Republican Governor Owens and to reject this proposal in November 2004 by a two-to-one margin.

The political reality is that campaign strategies in ordinary elections are based on trying to change a reasonably achievable small percentage of the votes—1%, 2%, or 3%. As a matter of practical politics, only one electoral vote would be in play in almost all states. A system that requires even a 9% share of the popular vote in order to win one electoral vote is fundamentally out of sync with the small-percentage vote shifts that are involved in real-world presidential campaigns.

If a current battleground state, like Colorado, were to change its winner-take-all statute to a proportional method for awarding electoral votes, presidential candidates would pay less attention to that state because only one electoral vote would probably be at stake in the state.

If states were to ever start adopting the whole-number proportional approach on a piecemeal basis, each additional state adopting the approach would increase the influence of the remaining states and thereby would decrease the incentive of the remaining states to adopt it. Thus, a state-by-state process of adopting the whole-number proportional approach would quickly bring itself to a halt, leaving the states that adopted it with only minimal influence in presidential elections.

The proportional method also easily could result in no candidate winning the needed majority of 270 electoral votes. That would throw the process into Congress to decide the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country.

If the whole-number proportional approach had been in use throughout the country in the nation’s closest recent presidential election (2000), it would not have awarded the most electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide. Instead, the result would have been a tie of 269–269 in the electoral vote, even though Al Gore led by 537,179 popular votes across the nation. The presidential election would have been thrown into Congress to decide and resulted in the election of the second-place candidate in terms of the national popular vote.

Awarding electoral votes by a proportional method fails to promote majority rule, greater competitiveness or voter equality. If done nationally, the whole number proportional system sharply increases the odds of no candidate getting the majority of electoral votes needed, leading to the selection of the president by the U.S. House of Representatives.

In a situation in which no candidate gets a majority of the electoral votes, with the current system, the election of the President would be thrown into the U.S. House (with each state casting one vote) and the election of the Vice President would be thrown into the U.S. Senate. Congress would decide the election, regardless of the popular vote in any state or throughout the country.

A system in which electoral votes are divided proportionally by state would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote and would not make every voter equal.

It would penalize fast-growing states that do not receive any increase in their number of electoral votes until after the next federal census. It would penalize states with high voter turnout (e.g., Utah, Oregon).

Moreover, the fractional proportional allocation approach, which would require a constitutional amendment, does not assure election of the winner of the nationwide popular vote. In 2000, for example, it would have resulted in the election of the second-place candidate.

A national popular vote is the way to make every person's vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and DC becomes President.