A Democratic Nightmare, the Electoral College
By: Joshua Kimmy
Tags: 2016 Election, Electoral College

“Hillary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump in last month’s presidential election. But due to the magic of the Electoral College, Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.” -Vox.com

In today’s political landscape, we might find ourselves asking, “How is it that Donald Trump won the presidential election if he didn’t actually get more votes?” It’s due to the antiquated system we use for choosing the president: the Electoral College. It’a system we’ve had since our second president. It’s an engrained part of American politics. At risk of showing my hand too early, this system is almost bafflingly stupid. In essence, this system uses the majority popular vote only as a suggestion, preferring to use each state individually. The Electoral College is supposed to give smaller states a voice, to prevent them from being drowned out by the other more densely populated states.

(A map from vox.com displaying how many electoral votes each state gets.)

Let me quickly explain how this system works because it can be a headache. Each state has a specifics number of electors (shown above) based on its number of members in congress. In 48 states, whichever candidate wins the popular vote gets all the electors from that state automatically. In Nebraska and Maine that is not the case. These voters are called split voters and can vote for whomever they choose. After the popular vote is held, the electoral college votes and their choices decide the president.

So, it’s easy to see some of the inherent flaws in the system already, yeah? The first major problem is that it only encourages presidential candidates to visit states with large numbers of electors. States like Montana or North Dakota with only 3 electors seem like small pickings compared to states like Texas and California with, get this: 38 and 55 voters respectively. So, when you see a presidential candidate visiting the same few states over and over again, or when you wonder why they never seem to come near you, this is exactly why. Each candidate is trying to min/max the number of electoral voters they get. This system the founding fathers created is all or nothing, so you have to play the game to win, and that means states like South Dakota or Idaho get passed up.

The second major problem is that the electoral college system feeds into our own countries insistence on the two-party system (which has its own flaws that I don’t have time to go into). When the popular vote is cast, each state is declared either red or blue and whichever team gets the win, gets all the voters. As a result, candidates from outside the major parties are often ignored, or are said to me taking votes from whichever candidate is closest ideologically. To see why this is an issue, we should look at the 2016 election. There was a candidate from the green party named Jill Stein, who ran against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. If our system included her in the final electoral vote, the fear is that she would steal electors that would otherwise go Clinton, and give Donald Trump the presidency. (A scary thought I realize).

Finally, the electoral collage does its part to directly disenfranchise voters from losing states. The current system is quite literally all or nothing. If a candidate wins a state, they get ALL the electors from that state, no exceptions. So all the voters (who all have voices that deserve to be heard) who voted for the losing candidate in a state are S.O.L. To see directly how this disenfranchises voters, let’s all look back at the 2016 presidential election. Pennsylvania and Florida were won by about 200,000 voters by Trump, and Clinton won Massachusetts by almost a million voters. At the end of the day though, Trump gained 49 electoral votes, and Clinton walked away with only 11. The voices of the almost one million people in Massachusetts were drowned out by those 200,000 people, whose voices are apparently more important to our government.

The Washington Post published an article called “In Defense of the Electoral College” where the posed their view on why we should keep this disastrous system. They argue that “the core of our system is Federalism”. They describe the arguments that the founding fathers made on both sides of the issue. On one side the popular vote, on the other a congressional vote. The middle ground was the Electoral Collage. I think that this points to a big flaw in the way people look at change in America, something that frustrates me. The school of thinking that suggests the founding father’s word is law and that we cannot change who we are. I think that it’s time in America for radical change, for change that the founding fathers couldn’t have imagined. Instead of that, we have a system that favors conservatism.

This all makes me angry, very angry. So unbearably frustrated after the 2016 election that it made me wonder, wha’t the point even in voting? Especially if, like me, you live in a state that leans heavily one way or the other. If you find yourself in the same position, just know we’re not alone. 41% of Americans favor a popular vote in place of the Electoral College. On top of that, a list of major political players and 2020 contenders also support the move, including Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg. So in 2020, don’t feel like your vote doesn’t matter, use it to vote for someone who cares about the voice of every single American. For someone who will abolish the Electoral College.