Why the electoral college stinks: An open letter
Honourable Congressmen and fellow citizens.
The United States is facing a big crisis right now. Our founding fathers wanted us to have democracy and the freedom to vote for the leader. But now, this dream is crushed and the United States’ voting system is undemocratic. Yes, our own democratic system is rigged. And here’s why.
In the US, there is something called the electoral college. It is a group of electors who votes for the president and the vice-president. The number of electors are divided by states and according to the rules of the electoral college, every state gets at least 3 votes each. And so some states that should have less than 3 votes has 3–4 votes. This takes away the votes from the states with lots of population, for example, California is missing 10 of its votes. Because of this, you need four Californians to have the same voting power as one Wyomingites.
When the electoral college was created by the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton laid out that electors should not be federal officeholders and that they should have no political biases. He also argued that electors meeting in D.C (District of Columbia) would be more convenient than having votes collected from all around the states, in which at that time took, 11 days to get from most states with the pony express. But now, with telecommunication, it doesn’t even take a second to connect across the states.
Another reason that the electoral college was created in 1787 was to “protect the small states.” By that they meant that they wanted the candidates to travel to small states with less population to campaign as much as a state with lots of population because small states will also have the state votes. But this is also not what the electoral college is doing right now. In 1787, the United States only had 13 states and the populated southern states did not want a direct election for the president and so the government made the southern states eligible to less state votes.
The votes are unfair depending on where you live. But your votes also don’t matter. The electors from the electoral college does not have to follow the popular vote. Meaning that the electors can choose any candidate and not necessary the votes that people want.
Also, if a candidate wins the most votes in a state, the candidate will take 100% of the state’s vote. This means that even if you win by 1 vote or 1 million vote, the candidate would take all of the votes. That means that lots of votes that are left over after the majority wins is spoiled and has no matter to the elections.
The biggest evidence that the electoral college is not working is the 2016 presidential election. The popular vote, the vote results by the citizens, was Trump getting 46.09% and Clinton getting 48.18%. Obviously, Clinton would have won this election by 2.09% right?
Nope! Because the electors chose Trump over Clinton disobeying the popular vote, Trump got 304 electoral votes when Clinton, the actual winner, got only 227 electoral votes. This is not democracy. Only the 538 electors get to choose who leads to country out of the 325 million American citizens. Would you be okay with a country that only allows 82,769/50,000,000,000 of the citizens to vote? Because I won’t.
When you look at all the presidential elections in the US out of the 45 times that it happened, 5 people lost the popular vote while winning the electoral vote causing them to be the president. That is an 11% failure rate of the presidency election. More than 1 in 10 presidents were not the people that we voted.
Too many votes are being invalid because of the electoral college and its actually not even doing its job! Another purpose that it was supposed to give was that it was supposed to stop irrational presidential candidates from becoming president. And guess who started trade wars with China and weakened the US’s economy? (*Cough* Trump *Cough*) And so what exactly is the purpose of the electoral college?
We need to abandon the electoral college and move on.
Thank you and best regards,
An American citizen whose voice has not been heard.
