Well, this has been one hell of an election and one hell of an upset. As a result, there are many jaded people on one side of the spectrum that are angry and protesting the results of this election. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, but there’s a petition floating around demanding the removal of the Electoral College--you know, the 200+ year old system that has been used in every election since the founding of our nation. It’s been revised at least once and that resulted in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. At any rate, these people want to replace the current system with a popular vote which, for people that need a definition, the winner is the one with the most votes. There are several problems with this system and I’m sure our founding fathers were well aware of the idea of using popular vote to elect our President.
Warning: this much red may trigger a Liberal
Here’s the first issue I have with a popular vote: look at the map above. You see the counties that are blue? Most of those counties either have a major city or have part of a major city’s suburbs. Obviously, anyone knows that cities have a higher population than the countryside and there are many states especially in the Midwest that don’t have high populations like New York or California. Basically all one would need to do to gain a superior edge in an election would be to campaign in the cities and their surrounding suburbs and you’re well on your way to winning. It would devalue the vote of some who say lives in Alaska or Wyoming and leave the fate of our nation to a certain demographic of people that more than likely have little to no idea of the needs of other groups outside their city and the states with those cities would have way more say than the ones that don’t.
Next, it would disenfranchise those states with low populations. At the moment right now, they have a voice and they’ve had a voice in the elections since 1787. The founding fathers were geniuses when it came to addressing how the new federal government would be run. They figured that to give each state an equal voice in their government they would have two senators thus promoting a level playing field regarding a means of addressing the states’ rights. The amount of representatives is determined by the population of that state so you add two to that number and you get a certain amount of votes that said state has in the Electoral College thus states like Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas still have a say in who gets elected. Now grant it the states with larger populations still have more votes than they do but like these states they also have different demographics, needs, and issues thus keeping the playing in somewhat equilibrium.
The next reason why a popular vote is a bad idea is just how close the current popular vote was this time-- around 470,000 votes is not that big of a lead. A lead that short would invite recounts lawyers suing states for perceived voting malpractices maybe even lead to stuff like an increase in voter fraud. Our elections would become mired in controversies, court battles, and one long nightmarish recount after the other in states across the US.
Lastly, those that want a popular election as opposed to our current system, your state already determines who their electoral college votes goes to by the popular vote i.e. which candidate gets the most votes in that state. Sorry to New York and California that the majority of people in the South and Midwest voted opposite of you. Please stop crying and move on with life. This election cycle is over and we need to move on. Stop consuming the poison that is electoral politics and come together as a nation and celebrate that once again our REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY worked. If the situation was switched, trust me-- I would still be making the same argument for our current election system. So get out there and hug a Democrat, kiss a Republican and take a Libertarian out on a date. Just stop it with the violence the protests and the hate on both sides.
