In 1776, our country was founded upon the ideals of the era; Enlightenment ideas such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But also, America was to be the world’s greatest example of a successful democratic nation, where everyone had a fair and equal say into government policy. All white land-owning males, a relatively large portion of the population, could cast their ballots and directly influence their nation’s actions. Except, we don’t vote for our leaders directly, our votes are skewed permanently through the electoral college system, which was founded with the primary goal of keeping the power with the aristocrats, and not the pesky yeomen farmer. However, it was given a legitimate reason as to why it was necessary; the uneducated yeomen farmers would not know who they wish to vote for, and thus, the electors were necessary to help decide the best interests for each state. Now however, over two centuries later, this antiquated and slipshod system prevents us from truly being a democracy. We cannot allow this course of action to continue, and set aside our nation’s founding ideals by having a system where losers win, winners lose, and states are misrepresented.
What if I told you that you become president of the United States with only twenty-two percent of the popular vote? This may seem ludicrous, but sadly it is completely possible, albeit unlikely. Just capture 50% plus one starting at the smallest state (Wyoming), and working your way up. By the time you reach the 270 vote threshold, you just became president of the United States even though 78% of the country voted against you! With this possibility on the table, when you have a system where losers can win, it shouldn’t be a surprise when they do. The sheer fact alone of losers being able to be your President for four years, is somewhat frightening, and enough to warrant abolition.
The inherent flaw in the electoral system is surprisingly simple. Votes are given to the states and not to the citizens. And here’s why: the electoral college distributes the number of electors per state by giving them a starting value of three electors, then further allocating electors by state population. On the surface this sounds justified, but in the real world this does not work! If the college was set up strictly by population, perhaps we would keep the system. Because if we take the United States population and divide that by the number of electoral votes, we would get a value (574,000) that would decide the proper electoral value of each state. Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming all should receive one vote, but instead get three. While one million strong Rhode Island should have two votes, it gets four instead! On the flip side of this scenario, Ohio should have 20 electoral votes if distributed by population, but only gets 18. And at the biggest level, the injustices are even more clear. Texas is six short of full representation, and California is a full ten short! And in this way, the electoral college fundamentally pretends fewer people live where they do, and more people live where they don’t!
But wait! Some might ask if abolishing the college would give big states a permanent hold over power of the United States presidency? If California and New York both get a better share, and the Great Plains and Midwest get fewer votes, wouldn’t the Democrat party almost always win? The answer to both of these questions is a flat-out no. And the reason why is the often-ignored factor of minority votes. The votes of Californians and Texans that don’t ever matter if they aren’t voting for blue or red respectively. Without the electoral college ruling these votes invalid, people would actually have an incentive to go out and vote, regardless of their political ideology.
As for the big states versus the small states issue, there really is no problem. The theory that a presidential candidate can jet around between New York, Chicago, and L.A., and brush off the so-called “flyover states” is ludicrous. Even if a candidate locked down the top one hundred cities in the United States, which includes Lexington, that still only accounts for 19% of the population. However in the system we already have in place, it fails miserably at bringing attention to the small states! With today’s hyper-polarization of politics, elections only really take place in the so-called battleground states. Today, the northeast handily goes blue, the Southeast, except Florida is reliably red, the Midwest is the battleground, the Great Plains is fully red, and the west coast is blue. Without this in place, the current strategy of blasting a half dozen states with your campaign would go away, as the candidates would pander to the nation as a whole, not only a sparse few.
And so, in the end, the facts speak for themselves. Three times in American history, in 1876, 1888, and 2000, the candidate with the most votes from the citizens actually lost because of the electoral college system. Doing the math, the rate of failure of the system is five percent! One out of every 20. Would NASA stand idly by if the space shuttle had a five percent failure rate? In more laymen terms, would people stand idly by if any sport had a five percent failure rate due to a quirk in an antiquated system? States in the electoral college system are unfairly misrepresented, smaller states continue to be ignored due to their rock-solid Republican basis, and most importantly, the system breaks the ground rule of a fair democracy. All the votes have to be equal, regardless of where you happen to reside.
If we abolish the electoral college all of these problems would go away as everyone would get a single vote, and the will of the people would be allowed to rule. If America is a land for the people by the people, why are some people more equal than others?
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