Opinion: Why We Should Revise the Electoral College
The Electoral College is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory but is horrible in practice, like sharing a meal with your sibling at a restaurant. For 13 states with a total population of about 2.5 million people (most of whom were uneducated in the ways of politics), the electoral college worked. However, in a nation of 50 states, each of drastically varying populations, with just over 333 million people, it does not work out as well.
First off, what is the Electoral College? A definition from the National Archives states that “[the electoral college] is a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens .” Basically, each state has a certain number of electoral votes based on population. The state takes a popular vote for presidential elections, and whichever candidate wins the majority vote in that state gets all of the electoral votes (except for Nebraska and Maine, which split their electoral votes by Congressional district). The candidate that gets at least 270 electoral votes wins.
In 1816, a founding father and the man attributed to writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, wrote a letter to a Virginia lawyer named Samual Kercheval. It was a suggested list of amendments to the Virginia State Constitution. Jefferson says, “[L]aws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times .” Jefferson proposed the Virginia Constitution be revised every 19 to 20 years. He also believed that The U.S. Constitution should be revised around the same time. Thomas Jefferson had the right idea. The Electoral College removes states from the presidential race, which is severely outdated and does not make sense with the current political map.
The Electoral College completely eliminates many states in the presidential race since their votes don't impact the winner. Most states either lean red or blue. You can count on California to vote blue, and you can count on Texas to vote red. Because of this, presidential candidates ignore those states. If you are a Democrat and California is almost 100% guaranteed to vote for you, why spend time and money campaigning in California? Candidates instead choose to focus on swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
Another issue is that some minority voters have no power and no representation. Voting blue in a red state? Don’t even bother. Your vote would only count towards the popular vote, which doesn’t decide the presidency. This is especially true for states like Texas. Texas leans red by a 55:45 percent ratio. 45% of people voting in Texas vote Democratic, but all 38 electoral votes go to the Republican candidate. Some states, split states, like Maine and Nebraska, divide their electoral votes based on counties. Nebraska could award the Republican nominee three electoral votes and the Democratic nominee two electoral votes if its counties are split at a 3:2 ratio.
Which begs the question, how is the Electoral College fair? Spoiler – it isn’t. A common argument is that the Electoral College protects small states, but let’s look at this logically. California, the most populous state with 40 million people, has 54 electoral votes. Wyoming, the least populous state with 577,000 residents, has three electoral votes. California has nearly 70 times more people but only 18 times as many electoral votes. The Electoral College doesn't protect small states; it gives them control of presidential elections. Why is one person in Wyoming equal to four people in California? That doesn’t seem very democratic to me.
Advocates for the Electoral College argue that only conducting a nationwide popular vote would cause politicians to ignore states with lower populations. Rich M. from Off the Grid News says, “[The electoral college] also ensures that a candidate runs a national, rather than a regional, campaign .” However, this is simply untrue. With the Electoral College system, candidates only focus on swing states. Even recently, as NPR states, “President Biden spent his Labour Day laboring on behalf of Democrats in swing states ahead of the midterms.” Abolishing the Electoral College would force politicians to look more at county-by-county polling. If a presidential candidate loses the popular vote, the people have spoken.
The Electoral College is incredibly outdated. It was created because the founding fathers were scared of the uneducated people in rural communities (and let’s face it, most communities in 1789 were rural), electing a complete idiot. The founding fathers had the same mindset as Plato, the Greek philosopher. Plato said, “If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.” Plato was against democracy. He said it leads to tyranny and despotism because the average voter is too uneducated to know what they are voting for.
The founding fathers had the same thought, and they were right. They realized that the average, uneducated white man would vote for the nominee from their state without paying mind to the politics. Unlike America today, news travels slowly. The average American just needed to be more politically educated in 1787. However, today, many Americans are. We have phones, computers, and other easily accessible sources of information. It is much easier to keep up with politics now. You know who the candidates are, what they believe in, and what their morals are. Plato was right to warn us about democracy and its flaws, but Plato lived over 2,000 years ago, and our founding fathers lived over 200 years ago. Times change, and things must be amended.
The Electoral College does not make any sense from a practical or political standpoint. Starting strong, the Electoral College presents the genuine possibility of a tie. That means the vote would go to the House – but not in the way you would expect. Instead of the vote being my legislator, it is by state. That means that all 80 of California’s legislators would count the same as the two representatives of Wyoming. Democracy, eh? Power to the people, but only certain people.
Another point to consider is that if the Electoral College were not in the Constitution, it would be unconstitutional. That sentence is a bit of an oxymoron, but let’s review it. The Warren Court, a group of Supreme Court justices that leaned liberal, contrary to the Court’s usual conservative lean, established cases such as Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), which cemented the “one person, one vote” belief and mandated that voting districts must be roughly equal in population. This is to firmly establish that everyone’s vote counts the same in statewide elections.
The same should hold true if we take this a step further – to the national level. So if “one person, one vote” is constitutional, and the Electoral College cuts out a vast amount of votes, then the Electoral College itself should be unconstitutional. The Constitution, quite literally, states that all men are created equal, the same concept as “one person, one vote.” So why is it that some people are deemed less necessary than others in the election for our president, the person leading our country? Why even bother to vote as a Democrat in a red state, a Republican in a blue state, or, god forbid, a person voting for a third party? Bringing up my earlier point, why is one Wyomingite equal to four Californians?
Also, let’s not forget the popular vote numbers from the 2016 election. Clinton won the popular vote by around 2.9 million votes. To put that in perspective, about 2.9 million people are in Mississippi or Kansas. Clinton won the popular vote by the whole of Mississippi but still lost due to the Electoral College. How can something like that happen? Our system is so flawed that a man who lost by 3 million votes, a larger population than many countries, became president.
What do we know? The Electoral College eliminates non-swing states from the presidential race, erases votes that don’t align with the majority of the state, and unfairly distributes electoral votes per population. The electoral college is an archaic and outdated system deriving from rich, white men’s reluctance to give poor, white men (and god forbid women or black people) voting rights. Finally, the Electoral College goes against the very principles of the Constitution and leaves the possibility for a tie. All this is overwhelming evidence for one key fact: the Electoral College must be abolished to ensure democracy, the principle upon which this country is built.
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