The Electoral College Should Be Abolished and Replaced in the American Voting System

My opponent argues that the current system sustains the current two-party system effectively. This, I agree, is true. However, who says the two party system is even effective? I'l try to keep this short, as this topic is probably more suitable for a different debate, but I think most people will agree with me when I say that a system that seperates people into two different groups isn't effective. Most people in the US aren't simply blue or red, but have many different ideological beliefs that aren't necessarily represented well in the current system. Additionally, I don't think a Congress where (according to USNews.com, citing research from UCLA, 1) 70% of "major bills" are fillibustered is representative of a well-funtioning two-party system. If anything, the two party system supports endless bickering between representatives and citizens simply because they are a different party. In fact, most of our founding fathers dreaded a party system, including John Adams and George Washington."There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties"-John Adams"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism."-George WashingtonI'd say it would be more effective to abolish the party system altogether because of these points, but I digress.As for my opponent claiming that it would prevent voters from choosing unsuitable candidates, I already touched on that in my opening. Citizens have much more information available to them than 200 years ago in order to make an informed choice. Now, citizens actually using that information is a different story. Abolishing the Electoral College would not change the usage of these mediums negatively in any way. In fact, according to a Yale study from 2003 (2), people tend to vote by party rather than personal preference (another reason to abolish the party system), so it doesn't seem like many people use these mediums to begin with.We still have the nomination voting system based on delegates in order to weed out bad candidates. That wouldn't change if you abolished the electoral college. If there were any place for people like Donald Trump to lose the election, it would be during the Republican National Convention where the delegates would switch their votes so that he doesn't become the nominee. The Electoral College only applies (at least in my argument) to the general election, not the fight for the nomination, so the candidates should already be filtered by the government before the NC is even involved.Finally, the issue of small vs. big states. My opponent argues that the EC allows small states to have their voice heard. This is true. The small states do have their voices heard in the current system. However, that does not mean that the voice of every citizen is heard in this system. Instead of thinking of this as a state issue, we should be thinking of this as a populus issue. There is more than one ideology in every state. The current system ensures that only the majority of every state has their voice heard due to the winner-take-all system. Abolishing this system would ensure that even the voice of the minority voter is heard on the national level.If the 2000 election taught us anything, it's that states don't follow one big ideology. If you look at the spread of the 2000 election by infoplease.com (3), you can see just close the race really was. In California, Gore won by 5.8 million to 4.5 million votes. We consider California to be a state that is predominately Liberal, but we fail to comprehend how close it truly is. Because of the current system, the 4.5 million people that voted for Bush in 2000 got ignored on the national level. Same with Texas. 2.5 million people got ignored because they voted for Gore. Finally, look at states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Missouri. All of these states are not swing states by any means, yet their elections came down to a less than 4 point difference in the election. However, I can almost garuntee that these states weren't campaigned in very much because they weren't swing states. The EC tends to make candidates focus most of their time in "swing states", neglecting the fact that most voters can be swayed with the right campaigning (therefore swinging the elction). We should not look at the election as a collection of states, as that minimizes the impact of ideological minority votes. We should look at the election as one of the people, by the people, and for the people, not the states. But the EC, however, forces candidates to look at the country as vote-giving states rather than as people, which is simply against what this country is built on.Even if we were to abolish just the winner-take-all system from the EC (in favor of a proportional system), we would still have the issue of faithless electors and the voter:electoral vote ratio inequality to contend with that make it a worse system than a direct election.Sources: (1): Fillibuster: http://www.usnews.com...(2): Yale Study: http://news.yale.edu...(3): Spread of 2000 Election by state: http://www.infoplease.com...