Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said during a Friday C-SPAN event that people could be killed because of the Electoral College.
Raskin has sought to eliminate the Electoral College, suggesting that a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact be used to bypass the institution established by the Constitution. Raskin cited the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol building as a reason to make the change.
“We passed the nation’s first National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. We initiated that. We’re now more than two-thirds of the way there,” Raskin said. “Because it’s 2024, how about it’s time we start electing the president the way we elect mayors and representatives and senators and governors — whoever gets the most votes wins, right, rather than a convoluted, antique, obsolete system from the 18th century, which these days can get you killed as nearly it did on January the 6th, 2021. I mean, we were meeting there just because of the formalities of the 12th Amendment, which say that you’ve got to have a joint session to count the Electoral College votes sent in by the governors under the certificates of ascertainment.”
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“But we knew who had won the election. Everybody knew who had won the election. But we’re still going through these 18th century rituals and that’s what gave Donald Trump the opportunity to convoke the mob, come here, we’ll be wild and then tell them to go and fight and fight like hell, or they wouldn’t have a country anymore,” Raskin continued. “We’ve had five popular vote losers in American history become president, twice in this century alone, in 2000 and 2016. And I think the vast majority of American people think we should be electing the president just by having an election and seeing who gets the most votes rather than this convoluted, rickety system where it all comes down to a handful of states, six or seven states, instead of everybody’s vote counting equally everywhere in the country.”
Raskin sought to have the House Select Jan. 6 Committee recommend the abolition of the Electoral College in 2022.
Raskin was among Democrats who said they were looking for ways to disqualify Trump from the presidential election after the Supreme Court ruled in March that Colorado officials did not have the right to throw Trump off the ballot. Raskin claimed in 2017 that Trump was a “hoax perpetrated” by Russia on the United States.
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