Emanuel Celler Quotes

Most people don't understand the Electoral College; they don't know why it exists.

We’re the only country in the world where somebody can come in second and still be President because of the Electoral College.

People don't vote for vice president, they vote for president.

I cannot recall a single case where a Vice President contributed one electoral vote in a Presidential election.

The Electoral College is the ink blot on the Constitution

Since 2000, I have proposed changing the Constitution so that our popular vote decides the presidency.

Part of the elements of the electoral college is creation. Certainly it was created in slave states and them wanting to balance power, but there's not a specific set of the country always determining who the president is.

The presidential campaign was oriented toward the way we elect the presidency, Electoral College, not the popular vote. The popular vote doesn't matter. This is not a direct democracy. We have a representative republic, and the popular vote doesn't matter and it never has, by design.

Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College.

Last I looked - and I'm not a candidate - but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It's most states are winners take all.

Gerald Ford is the first President of the United States to be elected by a majority of one—and nobody demanded a recount.

The Electoral College is an antidemocratic relic.

They [the founding fathers] conceived of the vice president as a runner-up presidential candidate.

We will soon know whether the Supreme Court choose the President of the United States or the people of Florida chose the President.

The U. S. Presidency could be decided by a system Americans would find unacceptable abroad…. U. S. officials, working in newly democratic countries don’t spend much time encouraging laws that would allow the second place candidate for national office to triumph.

Consider this: The United States held its first presidential election in 1789. It marked the first peaceful transfer of executive power between parties in the fourth presidential election in 1801, and it took another 200 years' worth of presidential elections before the courts had to settle an election.

Let's resolve here and now that Hillary Clinton will never become the president of the United States of America.

The Electoral College is provided for in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. More space in the Constitution is devoted to laying out the Electoral College than to any other concept in the document.

Our nation is not a fully representative democracy if we do not have a one-person, one-vote method of directly electing our president. It disproportionately tilts favor to smaller states with smaller populations.

I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.

What is the purpose of the electoral college? It has a few purposes. One, it's to restrain pure democracy. Very good, very important, that's a wonderful thing.

If the popular vote elected the president today, two states - California and New York - would be all you would need. And that means campaigns would occur only there and campaigns would focus only on issues relevant to those people in those states.

Al Gore won the popular vote and didn't get elected president, so I'm not going to sit here and kill myself over not winning Defensive Player of the Year.

If we didn't have the Electoral College there would have been no George W. Bush presidency. Algore would have been elected. The Democrats have not gotten over that, and they never will get over the recount, the aftermath of that election in 2000. They are still animated by it today. It is a significant portion of the rage and anger they carry around with them every day, so they want to get rid of it.

Listen, we elected Warren G. Harding. Anybody has a chance.