Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who is now challenging President Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, says winner-take-all presidential elections are unconstitutional and unfair to voters.
Weld and Sandford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, made their comments in a column for USA Today on Tuesday.
“For instance, 48 states give all of their electors to the candidate who wins a majority or plurality of the state popular vote, regardless of how wide or narrow the victory, the two said in the column. “This freezes out even a large minority from gaining any representation in the Electoral College, and drastically magnifies the significance of a handful of votes in arbitrary swing states.
“This ‘winner-take-all’ system, unlike the Electoral College, is not mandated by the Constitution. States could choose to award their electoral votes proportionally to their statewide popular vote, ensuring that every vote in even reliably blue or red states mattered to the outcome. This can be changed without a constitutional amendment.”
The two “agree that winner-take-all has unacceptable anti-democratic effects.”
“More than that, we believe winner-take-all is in fact unconstitutional under modern voting jurisprudence,” they said. “For that reason, we are each plaintiffs in four coordinated lawsuits across the country that challenge the constitutionality of winner-takes-all.
“The federal courts should recognize that winner-take-all is unconstitutional,” they said. "This would not only be a principled legal decision, it would also improve our democracy from top to bottom and ensure that every vote matters in our country’s most important election.”