Worried about election fraud? Protect the Electoral College.

The Electoral College has successfully protected the integrity of U.S. presidential elections for more than two centuries, a record unmatched around the world. Yet the calls for getting rid of the Electoral College and switching to the popular vote have only grown louder over time.

Since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, there have been more than 700 congressional proposals aimed at reforming or repealing the Electoral College. Ironically, the system’s remarkable effectiveness might be precisely what makes it such an inviting target for criticism: the Electoral College has made election fraud so difficult to contemplate that it almost never occurs at the national level.

In 2000, a few hundred votes in Florida gave George W. Bush the presidency. Twenty years later, if approximately 42,000 people across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin had voted differently, Donald J. Trump would have won a second term — even though 7 million more people voted for President Biden.

It’s true: The Electoral College has elected the “loser” of the popular vote twice in the last 25 years. Surely, this is not ideal. However, is this level of imperfection in U.S. democracy worth accepting for the confidence that the country’s elections will be legitimate?

Our new research suggests that the current system, with all its drawbacks, is particularly resilient to the possibility of election fraud, at least as compared to the popular vote.

A critical feature of the Electoral College is that it forces whoever wants to steal votes to do it in the swing states, not the states where one party has a significant advantage. In a swing state, both parties are well-represented in the elected and administrative bodies responsible for combatting fraud. With each side on the lookout, fraudulent activity is likely to be noticed and stopped. Under the popular vote, each party would look for additional votes in the other states where the opposing party is scarcely represented.

The key to the argument is that the 42,000 votes Trump needed in 2020 had to be found in battleground states: Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. These are places where the Democratic Party enjoyed considerable support at all levels of government — all the way to the governor’s mansion, in the case of Wisconsin. These are places where a conspiracy to overturn the results would be hard to organize and maintain. This makes committing large-scale, outcome-altering fraud difficult, if not impossible.

Even in a highly polarized environment where there may be plenty of electoral officials who value winning more than they value the democratic process, a strong representation of the opposite party in the government guarantees checks, investigations and eventual punishment.

In fact, this is exactly what happened in Georgia in the aftermath of the 2020 elections. In a recorded telephone call, then-President Trump asked Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, to help him “find” 11,780 votes. Raffensperger rebuffed these suggestions; the losing candidate failed to persuade the state electoral commission or courts that the elections were not fair. In 2022, the Georgia voters re-elected Raffensperger as secretary of state.

The popular vote system creates different incentives. A Republican candidate losing elections could “find” hundreds of thousands of votes in Alabama or Tennessee or other states where the political landscape is highly tilted toward Republicans. A Democratic opponent, instead of fighting fraud in these states, would concentrate her efforts in deep-blue districts of California or New Jersey. That is, the parties would try to out-steal each other in their states of strength.

This is not a theoretical proposition. The historian Robert Caro, in his magisterial “The Path to Power,” shares the story of 1948 Texas race that helped Lyndon Johnson to get elected with the help of dubious votes from areas under almost exclusive control of his machine. The popular vote system creates incentives to conduct fraud in the places where it is easiest to get away with it — and because of that, its ability to deter fraud is inferior.

Alarmingly, however, the end of the Electoral College might be closer than it seems.

With the addition of Minnesota just last May, 16 states and D.C., controlling 205 electoral votes in total, have joined an agreement to allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, no matter the result in their individual state — a way to bypass the Electoral College’s undemocratic aspects. With Michigan’s Democratic-controlled legislature expected to follow soon, the number of votes in the compact will increase to 220.

If states controlling 270 total votes join the compact, the system effectively switches to the popular vote, regardless of what other states do. This development would gravely undermine U.S. election integrity. 

The Electoral College may encourage excessive and distorted campaign spending, candidate visits and even recounts in a few closely contested states. This makes swing states highly visible arenas of tough political competition by legal means. What the system discourages, however, is competition by illegal means: a divided local government is highly unlikely to cover up outcome-changing fraud, making fraud virtually impossible to pursue successfully in states where it could alter the outcome.

It is no accident that the Electoral College is the only presidential elections system worldwide that has been working for almost 250 years. 

Georgy Egorov is James Farley/Booz, Allen & Hamilton Research Professor at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.

Konstantin Sonin is John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.