What’s wrong with the Electoral College?
The Electoral College was created by Alexander
Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention
in 1787, remember this, this is important.
Hamilton proposed it as a compromise to satisfy
the small states. It was created to prevent
direct election to the presidency, or in other
words, trying to prevent a tyrant from manipulating
public opinion and rising to power.
Under the Electoral College, each state was
to have the same number of electoral votes
as they had representatives in Congress. This
meant that no state could have less than 3
votes. This poses some issues today. Small
states, such as Wyoming, are disproportionately
represented in comparison to larger states,
such as California. In the most recent election,
Wyoming, which has 3 electoral votes, cast
210,000 votes. This works out to roughly 70,000
voters per electorate. California on the other
hand has 54 electoral votes, however cast
over 9,700,000 votes with a staggering 179,000
votes per electorate. This is clearly an issue,
as it unfairly inflates the value of small
state voters, (or deflates the value of large
state voters, depending how you look at it).
This, in turn, lowers voter turnout percentage
in large states because many potential voters
feel that their votes don’t matter.
But wait, there’s more
Most states today employ a winner-take-all
system for the electoral votes. This means
that, for example, in the case of a state
with 25 electoral votes, regardless of whether
the votes were distributed 80/20 in favor
of one candidate, or 51/49, the leading candidate
would receive all 25 electoral votes, as opposed
to sharing them proportionately. This allows
for a candidate to lose the popular vote by
a significant margin, yet still win the election.
This has occurred in 5 out of the last 57
elections, most recently in the 2016 election.
Furthermore, this system incentivizes parties
to completely ignore more than 40 states that
are essentially predetermined before the election
even begins. States like California, Texas,
and New York, which collectively makeup over
25% of the U.S. population, consistently rank
among the lowest in campaign visits and advertisements.
On top of this, the system vastly distorts
the weight of certain “swing states”.
Swing states are made clear far before the
actual election, which causes candidates to
disregard the majority of the population in
favor of specific demographics needed to push
a swing state in their favor.
But what happens if they tie? Well, in that
case, the election is then thrown into the
House of Representatives and decided upon
by a state-by-state vote.
There are two big issues here.
First, each state would have equal representation,
meaning that little Wyoming at only 563,000,
would have equal say as California, with 37
million.
Second, Hamilton expected that this outcome,
where the election is decided upon in the
House of Representatives, would happen on
a regular basis! The system has never once
worked the way it was intended to work.
So if it has so many problems, then why is
it still used?
Well, even despite a growing percentage of
the population that believes the electoral
college should at least be redesigned, the
likelihood of it ever leaving are slim to
none.
This is because the electoral college is written
into the constitution, and there are currently
only two ways to amend the constitution. That
is either with a ⅔ majority vote in both
the House of Representatives and the Senate,
or by a constitutional convention called for
by 2/3rds of the State Legislatures. Given
the divide in today’s politics, these ratios
seem really unlikely considering it has only
happened 26 and one time, respectively, in
the history of the nation.
So until the states can come together and
decide to create one cohesive and equally
representative system, this is what we’re
stuck with.
