… "The Electoral College does mean a small number of states have undue weight in the outcome of our elections and that smaller manipulations can have broad national consequences," said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded ballot access.
What she means by manipulations are the efforts by Republicans to change election laws in their favor.
"Vote suppression is one way of doing that — subtracting voters from the electorate who you think won't vote for your preferred candidates," she said. "But this new trend of actually taking over the machinery of elections and giving themselves the power to run things or make decisions or count the votes is another way of doing this."
Republican state lawmakers in places like Georgia and Texas have advanced bills that would give new powers to legislatures to fire election officials and overturn elections.
Democrats don't have the votes in the states or in Congress to stop these laws, so Democrats are trying to build public pressure against them. Republicans say their goal is to fight future election fraud. The 2020 election was declared the most secure ever, but Trump continues to push the lie that the election was stolen from him.
On the other hand, Republicans don't have to convince the public. They have the votes to pass ballot restrictions, and in some cases they have never held public hearings.
"This is the essence of the minority-rule position, right?" Harvard's Mukunda said. "You don't have to convince the public that the system is fair. You just have to convince them that it's not so unfair they should overthrow the system."
And for Republicans, the system, with all its minoritarian features — the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate, the filibuster, partisan gerrymandering — is, at least for now, working in their favor. But maybe it's not good for democracy when one party doesn't have to try to win the most votes in a presidential election.