This has been a popular subject over the last week. Of course, it has nothing to do with the recent election results and the fact that the losing candidate won the popular vote by a small margin of 1.1 million voters. I think citizens are just finally starting to take a serious look at government and reevaluate our current election process. Isn’t that wonderful, citizens inquiring about democracy out of thin air?

Let’s face the music: Donald Trump won the presidency with 61 million votes and by winning 290 of the required 270 electoral votes to become president. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, earned 62 million votes, yet only 232 electoral votes to lose the presidency. But wait…how did Hillary earn more overall votes yet fewer electoral votes than Trump? More people wanted her to be president, doesn’t that mean she gets to be president? Well, not according to the Electoral College (EC), the covert assemblage of elites that holds the real election for president every four Decembers.

The original purpose of the EC was to serve as a compromise between the election of president directly by the people and by Congress. The EC is supposed to be a buffer that protects the nation from electing a raving lunatic or a dead gorilla (oh, I can feel the memes coming). The electors, however, are supposed to vote for the candidate that the people of their state voted for, essentially making the EC a system in which candidates win states, not individual’s votes. Why is this problematic? Well, first off, most states are winner-take-all; meaning that whichever candidate earns the most votes in that state wins all of that state’s electoral votes (Maine and Nebraska are the only exceptions to winner-take-all). That means that in a state like California, which is worth a whopping 55 electoral votes, the loosing candidate can earn millions of votes, but have absolutely none of them count. This is my biggest gripe with the Electoral College. It literally tosses votes in the trash, and it’s a simple consequence of geography.

I'll use myself as an example. I voted for Hillary Clinton this election, and I live in Iowa. Trump won Iowa and all six of its electoral votes. Hillary earned zero. That means that I literally wasted my vote because my candidate didn’t win. Let’s say I vote Democrat every election. What am I to do? Iowa is a swing state. We elected Obama two elections in a row, but prior to that, we elected George Bush when he was up against John Kerry. So, if I really want my vote to count, do I move to consistently-blue California? Seems a bit extreme, but what else am I to do if I want to ensure that my vote counts?

My next beef with the EC is the narrative that it “protects the small states; the rural, country folk; protects us from the big cities and the elitists controlling the election.” This narrative is false for a number of reasons. First, it creates this “us vs. them” storyline between “rural” and “urban” people. People are people, and while the geographic area they live in definitely influences their culture, there is no reason why this narrative needs to be considered in an election because we are in the age of technology and mass communication. Fortune 500 CEOs can live in rural Arkansas. Big-time lawyers and doctors inhabit the plains of Kansas. New York City is rampant with industrial laborers and people with no more than a high school diploma. The EC makes us believe that it’s giving everyone equal say and influence over an election, when in reality it’s taking away from everyone, equally. If your candidate doesn’t win your state, then your vote goes straight down the drain, and that doesn’t change whether you live in San Francisco or Pattonsburg, Missouri.

Second, drawing lines and creating voting districts leads to inevitable gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the manipulation of voting districts to give a political party an advantage in an election. Any time an election depends on winning geographical areas, gerrymandering is always suspected to be at play. Look below at Maryland’s outrageous districts, and also take a gander at North Carolina.

Both parties utilize gerrymandering, and it essentially fixes elections before they even happen. This is a huge reason why political parties are less inclined to work with each other: candidates know that they only need to appeal to their own party’s constituents during an election, and thus can ignore the other side because if their party drew the state’s districts, they’ve got in the bag! No more appealing to Evangelicals in a Democratic Illinois, nor to Hispanic voters in Texas…¡hasta luego, Rejaldo!

Last issue with drawing borders: where does it end? At this point in time, more people live in cities than ever before. Do we start dividing Chicago into individual electoral votes for the presidential election? Some would say yes. I say no, because where would it stop? We can’t settle for Illinois because more than half of its population lives in Chicago, so now we have to cut Chicago out of Illinois and make it its own district. But now Chicago itself is too big. Now we have to split up the suburbs. Eventually, we will be splitting cities to the point where we will have cities versus states in the presidential election, and that just seems absolutely bonkers. Look, more people live in California because it’s a huge state with beautiful weather and loads of opportunity. People don’t like living in northern Minnesota or Maine because you lose at least one toe each winter. Why punish the millions of people who vote Republican in California every four years, and likewise for the Democrats in Texas? Why does anyone live in Florida? They can’t seem to help out the nation with any election, and alligators are snatching people up left and right.

I will conclude with this: we live in the information age. People are smart enough and are well informed enough to make conscious and competent decisions. More of those people are living in big cities, and those cities are clustered in certain regions of the country. So, why would we have a voter system that disenfranchises the diversity of opinions and beliefs that permeate the greatest physical testimonies of civilization? Why do we let a side election determine our president? Why, in this age of information and communication, do we allow ourselves to subject our democracy to an institution designed to allow the elite to have the most say? Isn’t it time we put the demo back in democracy? If so, then it is our civic duty to dismantle the Electoral College and elect our executive leader directly. Now if only we could rid ourselves of the two-party political system…