Abolish the Electoral College

RebuttalI originally was a supporter of Maine's electoral college system, however now I don't think that it would be beneficial for the rest of the country to adopt a similar method. The reason behind this is that the outcome of the election would almost always be the same unless there was some drastic change in the country's ideology. If we look at our favorite example of Wyoming, we see that they voted roughly 68% for the Republican candidate in every election since 2000. If every other state follows this, pattern (which they do, mind you) there will constantly be the same results in elections. This is why swing states are so vital to the electoral college system. If they send electors proportionally like my opponent proposes, there would never be any mediation in the presidential elections since they would always send roughly 50% blue and 50% red electors. The issue with the faithless electors argument is that in reality this usually has no impact on the election whatsoever. In US history, there have been 157 instances of faithless electors. In 71 of those instances, the elector was forced to change their vote since the candidate he/she intended to vote for died. In the remaining 83 instances the elector either changed their choice, or actually just made a mistake. In only one case did a faithless elector change the outcome of an election and that was in 1836. Nowadays it is much more rare for an elector to swap anyway since elections are, unfortunately, based more upon parties and less upon the individual candidate [1]. DefenseI am aware that the early presidential candidates did not campaign in order to get elected, however my opponent implies that this was a superior method to the present, obviously capitalistic campaigning system today. I argue the contrary, as back in the early 19th century the presidential elections were far closer to an oligarchy than a democracy since the people did not actually vote, or at least their votes had very little impact. Nowadays campaigning is required in order to secure the people's votes. Although I admit that campaigning comes hand in hand with corruption, it is a far more democratic system to the aristocratic methods utilized in the early days of the Constitution. My opponent says that small states such as Wyoming still do not get much attention with the electoral college system, and this is true. However if we had an election based on a popular vote it is likely that no presidential candidate would ever visit Wyoming. He also states that Wyoming have never swung in an election. This, although probably not relevant to the overall point of this debate, is not true as they have sent blue electors seven times in the past century [2]. My counterpart states that the larger states are not neutralized by the electoral college, but in fact are just merely discriminated against since an individuals vote in California has less impact than a vote from Wyoming. True, an individual vote is indeed devalued in larger states such as California. However there are problems to this accusation. One, as my opponent noted, the individual is not the one who actually votes for the president and therefore an individual vote, no matter what state it came from, is technically completely irrelevant. Second, it still does not rebut the argument that larger states need to be contained. My opponent says that the electoral college does not actually achieve this, however I contest with that view point. If we had elections based on popular vote, the country would be dominated by California, New York, Texas, and Florida. The majority of future presidents would come from these states, since a state is more likely to vote for a local than someone from the opposite side of the country. This eliminates or seriously hinders thousands of other, eligible candidates. It also, as my opening argument stated, would prevent campaigning in smaller states since there would be little to no point to spending the money on a trip to Wyoming when that money could be spent campaigning in California. Sources:[1] https://en.wikipedia.org...[2] http://www.270towin.com...