CNN host Don Lemon came under fire from conservatives on Twitter late Monday after he suggested to "blow up the entire system" and remove the Electoral College so that every vote was counted.
Lemon, along with fellow CNN host Chris Cuomo, discussed the Republicans' call to fill the Supreme Court justice's seat following Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death on Friday. A 33-second clip of the discussion, in which he suggested abolishing the Electoral College, went viral on Twitter.
"We're going to have to blow up the entire system," Lemon said. To this Cuomo responded: "I don't know about that."
"You know what we're going to have to do? You're going to have to get rid of the Electoral College. Because the minority in this country get to decide who our judges are and who our president is. Is that fair?," suggested Lemon.
Cuomo explained that scrapping the Electoral College will require a constitutional amendment and two-third vote in the congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures. However, Lemon continued that if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden won the election, the Democrats can pass an amendment to make necessary changes in the Constitution to remove the Electoral College.
Conservatives did not take Lemon's suggestion well and took to Twitter to criticize him. Some users even alleged the Democrats did not respect the Constitution.
However, some Twitter users came to Lemon's defense saying people needed to talk more about the deaths due to Covid-19 in the country than the journalist's statements.
Criticism for the Electoral College
Lemon is not the first to criticize the Electoral College. Critics have called the system fundamentally undemocratic — mainly because of its the winner-takes-all system. Under this system, the candidate with the highest number of votes in a state gets votes of that state's electors for the Electoral College.
In the 2016 presidential elections, then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton failed to get enough electoral votes despite raking up nearly 3 million more than Donald Trump, who won several swing states with higher representation of electoral votes.
"The electoral college violates the core tenet of democracy, that all votes count equally and allows the candidate finishing second to win the election. Why hold an election if we do not care who received the most votes?" Professor George Edwards III, at Texas A&M University, said, according to the Guardian. "At the moment, the electoral college favours Republicans because of the way Republican votes are distributed across the country. They are more likely to occur in states that are closely divided between the parties."
