Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) posted an Instagram Live story on Monday mocking the United States’ voting system and calling for the abolishment of the Electoral College.
“We’re coming to you live from the Electoral College,” Ocasio-Cortez said as she recorded an empty desert highway. “Many votes here as you can see — [it’s a] very efficient way to choose leadership of the country. I mean, I can’t think of any other way, can you?”
The self-proclaimed “radical” congresswoman cited a March 2019 report from New York Magazine’s daily Intelligencer newsletter titled “Here’s Every Defense of the Electoral College — and Why They’re All Wrong.” She subsequently noted that the report is for “all the Republicans getting big mad [because] the electoral college is, in fact, a scam.”
Ocasio-Cortez touched on several intersecting points, all of which are based on the underlying idea that the American voting system is racist and therefore is discriminatory against minorities.
“The Electoral College has a racial injustice breakdown,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Due to severe racial disparities in certain states, the electoral college effectively weighs white voters over voters of color, as opposed to a ‘one person, one vote’ system where all are counted equally.”
She also pointed to the often-made argument in favor of the electoral college which contends that with a popular vote system, states with urban population centers would have too much power over the direction of the country.
“You may have heard this Electoral College argument the most: that families in suburbs [and] cities MUST have their vote suppressed in order to give rural votes a ‘fair shake,'” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Could you imagine if we had this kind of democracy-altering ‘fairness’ provision for literally any other group? If we weighted, for example, Black [and] Indigenous voters more because of fairness?”
“But that ‘rural representation’ argument doesn’t hold up either, as there are rural parts in virtually every state and popular vote elections show that candidates still visit center and rural communities’ needs,” she continued.
The freshman lawmaker also argued that Republicans live in blue states and that their votes would count equally in a popular vote-based system. Rather, it eliminates preferential treatment for some voters over others, she contended.
“#FactsAreFacts, America,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “The Electoral College has got to go.”
The New York congresswoman has long called for the American government to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as the entire Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Interestingly, as with her calls to abolish the Electoral College, she claims that both ICE and DHS are racist institutions and further claims that her position is supported by evidence.
“Because of the core structure of ICE, I believe — and frankly, the entire Department of Homeland Security — this was established by George Bush right in the wake of 9/11, right as the Patriot Act and all of these different institutions that were frankly very large threats to American civil liberties started to get established,” Ocasio-Cortez said during an interview in July.
“I feel like we are, at a very, it’s a very qualified and supported position, at least in terms of the evidence, and in terms of being able to make the argument that we never should have created DHS in the early 2000s,” she said.