The Electoral College Should be Abolished

A common criticism of the modern electoral college is that it allows for a presidential candidate who did not win the national popular vote to win the presidential election, as has happened in the presidential elections of 1824, 1876,1888, and most recently in 2000, when George W. Bush lost the election to Al Gore, despite Al Gore winning the popular vote. I will not argue against this criticism, because it is just one of many points that I will try to make in favor of abolishing the electoral college. What is important to note is that there have been a total of fifty-six presidential elections in the United States since the first one took place in 1788. Having four elections out of fifty-six go against the winner of the national popular vote constitutes a failure rate of roughly seven percent. for the United States presidential election process. Now while one might assume that four failures is nothing worth noting, assuming every election in the United States had was operated under a system that had a similar failure rate as the electoral college, then you would see failures across all levels of government, state, local, and national alike. Another point to make is that even when the electoral college winner is also the popular vote winner, the election results are often vastly distorted, two prime examples of this include the elections of 2008 and 2012, in which Barack Obama respectively won the presidency by 365 and 332 votes in the electoral college, but the popular vote was much closer in both cases with Obama winning the popular vote by 53 percent and 51 percent in 2008 and 2012 respectively. This is largely due to the winner-take-all method that most states use to distribute their electoral votes, save for Nebraska and Maine, where a candidate just needs to win a simple majority of votes in one state and that candidate gets all of that states electoral votes. This has the unfortunate consequence of creating swing states, where candidates focus most of their resources and fundraising to try and win votes in those states. since winning by large margins is no more important than winning by smaller margins. Now, one common argument in favor of keeping the electoral college is that it gives smaller states more weight in presidential election processes, thus forcing presidential candidates to focus more of their resources on them. I would have to strongly disagree with this argument based simply on how many votes swing states hold. As a point of reference, here is a list of all the swing states in 2012 listed by number of electoral votes. Florida: 29 Ohio: 18 North Carolina: 15 Virginia: 13 Colorado: 9 Iowa: 6 Nevada: 6 New Hampshire: 4 So out of all the swing states, only half of them had fewer than ten electoral votes, and Florida happens to have more electoral votes than the four smallest swing states combined. So what we have with the electoral college is a system that fails seven percent of the time, distorts margins of victory for winners, and fails to protect the interests of smaller states. For those three reasons, as well as many others, that I will argue that the electoral college should be abolished and replaced with a national popular vote.