The Electoral College

I hope we can both expand our horizons and know more about this topic. I will now start with why the electoral college is bad. Since we share the burden of proof, you also have to make your arguments, so try not to do rebuttals until round 3. When I say "large state" or "small state," I'm referring to the population. I'm also going to refer to DC as a state for simplicity. Since 49 of the 51 states use the winner take all approach, and the different approach of Maine and Nebraska realistically cause a deviation of at most 1 electoral vote in each direction had they been winner take all, I'm going to go over the issues of the winner take all approach. Here's a quick overview of how the electoral college basically works. By that I mean that the following explanation isn't how the electoral college technically works, it's what the way the system functions right now does. Presidential elections are split into 51 statewide elections. In almost all of them (49 of them), the candidate who wins a plurality in that state wins all of their electoral votes, and a candidate with at least 270 votes (out of 538 total) wins the election. However, many electors are not forced to vote for the winner of their state. States start out with two electoral votes, and electoral votes are added on proportional to population, meaning that smaller states get proportionally more representation than larger ones. As of 2010, 710,000 people equated to one additional electoral vote. The number of electoral votes a state has is and the population to electoral vote ratio is updated every 10 years in the census. The first issue of the electoral college is that it gives small states more power. The divide is not between small and large states; for example, DC and California are relatively similar, despite one being the largest state and one being the third smallest. States are arbitrary boundaries; someone living on the Eastern edge of New York shouldn't get less power than someone 50 miles East in Vermont. Voters in smaller states getting more power is therefore unjustified. Another issue with the electoral college is that it is inaccurate. The electoral college runs into rounding errors and is slow to update how many electoral votes each state gets. Take Wyoming and Montana. Montana has nearly twice as many people as Wyoming does (75% more), and yet it has the same amount of electoral votes that Wyoming does. On the other hand, Rhode Island has almost exactly as many people as Montana does (just 6% more), yet it has four electoral votes to Montana's three. Why? Because of rounding errors. Wyoming's population is on the low end for 3 electoral votes, while Montana's population is almost high enough to qualify for four electoral votes. However, Montana only gets three because it is just short (it deserves 3.4 electoral votes) and so rounds down to three. Conversely, Rhode Island has just enough population (it deserves 3.5 electoral votes) for its electoral vote count to round up. There is no reason states should get penalized for being just short of qualifying for an additional electoral vote and rewarded for barely having enough population to get the extra electoral vote. This leads to unfair situations where two states have nearly the same population but one gets more power than the other. . https://en.wikipedia.org... Rounding isn't the electoral college's only inaccuracy. Since electoral votes are updated every 10 years, any change in population since then is not accounted for. This can lead to seriously unfair situations. Take Michigan and North Carolina. Michigan has one more electoral vote than North Carolina, or 7% more representation. However, Michigan has 30,000 less people. The reason for this is that at the time that electoral votes were reallocated, Michigan had more people than North Carolina. However, North Carolina then increased in population, meaning that there were more voters, but the electoral college had to wait until 2020 to give North Carolina increased representation. . https://en.wikipedia.org... Another issue with the electoral college is that it bases itself off of population rather than voters. This was used by Southern Democrats. States in the South had inflated population counts due to slaves counting as 3/5 of a person, but they couldn't vote. This meant that Southern whites had more representation than they deserved. This isn't as much of an issue now, but it does not logically make sense. If you live in a state but don't vote, you increase the number of electoral votes a state has despite not voting. The most problematic feature of the electoral college is that (in most states) it uses a winner-take-all system. This is a serious problem for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it means that winning by a thousand votes is as good as winning by two million. The two million extra votes count for nothing, so those voters' voices are ignored. However, in reality, those two million voters really do matter. Why should they be ignored? This brings us to the second point. A winner take all system creates safe states and swing states. Safe states are states that are almost guaranteed to vote for one party. These states comprise 63-69% of the population, depending on how safe a safe state has to be. Since these states are safe, no candidate needs to campaign in them; no matter how hard you try, your efforts won't flip the results. Instead, candidates fight for swing states, which are states that could vote either way. Because you only need to win by a plurality, candidates want to win a lot of swing states by just enough to be awarded all of the electoral votes. This is quite similar to my first point; just because you live in a different place does not mean your vote should count more or less. Because candidates only need to campaign in swing states, they only need the vote of 1/3 of the country; their win in their safe states is guaranteed. In fact, 57% of all campaign events in 2016 took place in just four states, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. 2016 isn't a fluke. In fact, 2012 was worse. 70% of all campaign events took place in four states, Florida, Iowa, Virginia, and Ohio. If you look a little deeper, you'll find that in 2016, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Arizona received at least four campaign events, and together comprise of 94% of all campaign events. In 2012, the list was the same except without Arizona and Michigan. The same story goes for money. In 2012, the only states to get at least a million in TV ad spending were the ones within 3% of the national margin. The ones within 2% all got at least 30 million. The swing states consistently get nearly all of the attention in presidential elections. The electoral college disenfranchises 2/3, or a majority, of the population. Their vote counts for nothing when deciding on a president that will affect them all. . http://www.nationalpopularvote.com... . http://www.nationalpopularvote.com... This issue is not just limited to presidential elections. Swing states get favorable treatment even when a president is in office. "[They] receive 7% more federal grants than spectator states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations, more Superfund enforcement exemptions, and more No Child Left Behind law exemptions. " . http://www.nationalpopularvote.com... This next flaw is really just a consequence of winner takes all and small states having more power. Five times in history, or in 9% of our presidential elections, the winner of the electoral college did not win the popular vote. (I'm including 1824 because that was decided by the tiebreaking mechanism, which is part of the system we are debating. ) The president serves the people, not a specific set of states. The final flaw is the fact that the electoral college is susceptible to the spoiler effect. This means that if a third party runs, they hurt whomever they are closest to politically. This means that third party candidates can distort the result of an election by drawing votes away from the actual opinion of the vote base. This also means that many supporters of third parties will instead vote for the primary candidates, leading to a two party system that limits choices. Just as a reminder, your post should be about the benefits of the electoral college. Counterarguments come in round 3.