The Electoral College Should Distribute Votes Proportionally

As my opponent agreed to in the comments, I can argue for abolishing the electoral college altogether, and explain why their proposed plan is worse than that. The problems with the electoral college1. Losers could still win with a proportional electoral collegeImagine in this case, since the electoral college over-represents smaller states, and under-represents larger states, the loser of the popular vote could still win the electoral college under a proportional electoral college system. Wyoming, Alaska, and a number of other states should have 1 vote or only 2 votes for it to be proportional to the percentage of the popular vote that they contain. The fact that these states have 3 or 4, means that if a candidate were to get a large majority in these states, they get 2 votes or 3 votes, when they should have gotten 1 or 2 votes. Then in a state like California which is missing 10 electoral votes that it should have if the votes were distributed by population only, that also throws things off-balance since the winning candidate could have gotten more votes from California. In addition, only 18% of people live in rural areas in the United States[1]. With how the electoral college is distributed, rural states are given much more representation they should be, Idaho gets 4 electoral votes, when they should have 2, Wyoming gets 3, when they should have 1 and so forth. 2. Proportional voting doesn't completely and fairly represent the peopleBecause the number of electoral votes a state has is so small in comparison to the number of people living in that state, you can't have a perfect proportional system all the time. For example, suppose 57% of people voted for candidate A and 43% for Candidate B in a state. The state has 20 electoral votes. 11 goes to Candidate A, because 11/20 is the closest proportion to 57%, and 9/20 goes to candidate B. Unfortunately, Candidate A only got 55% of the electoral votes, even though they received 57% of the popular vote, and Candidate B received 45% of the electoral vote in that state, but only got 43% of the popular vote. So, the people who voted for the losing candidate is a little more represented than those who voted for the winning candidate, which could throw things off and make the losing candidate win over all in the electoral college if this happens several times. This problem gets worse as the state has less electoral votes. 3. It is subjective whether the electoral college protects us from getting unqualified candidatesTo many people, President-elect Donald Trump would have been considered unqualified, and the electoral college clearly did nothing to prevent him from gaining office. Again, this is subjective opinion though. To others, his business leadership qualifies him to be president. Since it's really a matter of opinion whether a candidate is a good candidate or a qualified candidate to be president, it would make sense to have a direct popular voting system. People, in general, wouldn't vote for a candidate if they personally believed a candidate was not qualified for the job. So, if someone gets the most popular votes, that means that most people believe that candidate was the most qualified. What authority does the electoral college have over the people for determining who is qualified and who is a bad versus a good candidate? All we're doing is changing whose subjective opinion is determining who is more qualified, some 538 electors are doing it now, whereas we could have over a hundred million voters do it. If you ask me, it would be better for more people to determine it because it is more likely that 538 people will put in the wrong candidate than tens of millions of people. Defending a direct popular vote4. Refuting the common claim that a direct popular vote would result in candidates caring only about big cities It is often claimed that we have the electoral college in order for candidates to pay attention to the small states and not only pay attention to large cities. However, if you look at how each city is, the top 100 largest cities don't even make up 20% of the US population.[2] You can't win by getting a majority of 20% of the votes. 5. America values democracyAs is evident by how we changed how senators are elected with the 17th amendment making them directly elected by the people, we clearly value democracy. To expand this value, it would make sense to make the president directly elected by the people as well and to abolish the electoral college altogether as it hinders democracy.Sources: [1] http://data.worldbank.org... [2]