The Electoral College Increases Election Security | Opinion

The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by Jason Snead and Trent England during a Newsweek episode of The Debate about the Electoral College. You can listen to the podcast here:

Justice Elena Kagan's opinion in the faithless elector case talks about this understanding that the Electoral College was created to represent the states, and that when it's working correctly, it does represent the states.

If you have the interstate compact go into effect, then you have a federal election and you have a presidential candidate who wins under the electoral college as it's written in the Constitution, but loses under the terms of the national popular vote. Then you've just created a political crisis where the backers of each of those two candidates are going to fundamentally disagree about the legitimacy of the election. And however that ultimately plays out, if it goes to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court makes a decision that the national popular vote is, or is not constitutional, then you have just perpetually sown seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of that election — and future elections, for that matter.

Like it or not, we're at a stage in American history where the process of electing candidates to office and the rules of our elections are a political issue. We have a lot of voters on both sides who have fundamental doubts about the integrity, legitimacy, and credibility of our election system. It seems to me that making a change on a constitutional level without going through the proper process to accomplish that is an excellent way of sowing the seeds for a political crisis and it's entirely unnecessary.

Jason Snead is the Executive Director of Honest Elections Project and Trent England is the Executive Director of Save Our States.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.