The Equal Protection Challenge to Winner Take All: A Legal Guide
Lawrence Lessig @ Medium Sep 14, 2017
Today, the non-profit that I founded, EqualCitizens.US, announced it would crowdfund support for two lawsuits to challenge the way votes are allocated in the Electoral College. All but two states allocate their vote according to a winner-take-all system, in which the winner of the popular vote gets all the electoral votes for that state. We believe winner-take-all violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and we intend, through EqualVotes.US, to build a case (and a campaign) to get the Supreme Court to agree.
We’re not the first to have this thought. (I was brought to see it by Sam Issacharoff’s essay; last November, I published a related argument on Medium by Jerry Sims.) And we’re not so naive to believe that this fight will be easy. But we do believe that a credible and true argument can be made, and that there is real value in raising and pressing this argument now. In this post, I offer a guide to that legal argument, styled, for quick skimming, as an FAQ.
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