Ann Althouse, Electoral College Reform: Déjà vu 95 Nw. U. L. Rev 993 (2001).
Abstract
The 2000 presidential election has stirred up a great deal of concern about the evils of the electoral college.Before deciding to plunge into a new effort to abolish that seeming relic of an eighteenth-century compromise, one would do well to revisit a more recent era, the period from 1960 to 1971, when the proposal to amend the Constitution to provide for the direct election of the President came as close as it has ever come to success. This Review considers three books from that era that recount the story of how the idea of the direct election of the President gained currency and eventually met defeat. What can the story of the 1960s era effort tell us about the newly stimulated move to amend the Constitution? Does the 2000 election any more than the 1960 and the 1968 elections demonstrate the folly of the electoral college? If the legal and political climate has changed since then, is it a change more favorable to amending the Constitution, or less?
