No, this article is not based on any current president that may or may not have actually won the popular vote. I'm just gonna get that out of the way right now. I've just been thinking a lot about the electoral college lately (you know, like a normal person), and I've come to a conclusion: the electoral college makes absolutely NO sense to me. The more you delve into it, the less reasons you can find for keeping it around.

Essentially, during a presidential election, each state tallies up its own individual vote. The candidate that receives the most votes in each state gets all of that states electoral votes, which are determined by population. At least, that's how most people think it works. In reality, when you go to the polls, you're actually voting for an elector. An elector is a basically member of the electoral college, and when you vote for your guy, you're pretty much electing him to vote on your behalf. The trouble with this is that the elector you voted for isn't actually required to vote for the candidate who won your state. They can vote for whoever the hell they want.

You might be thinking to yourself, "why would the founding fathers make a system that took away the voice of the people like that"? The answer, unfortunately, is that the electoral college was created to do just that. The vast majority of Americans in the late 1700s were very uneducated (only one third of Americans have a bachelor's degree today), and the founders were very worried about the idiots of the nation making a really uneducated, idiotic choice for president. The electoral college was created so that if this hypothetical idiot ever won the presidency, the electoral college could step in, override the voice of the people, and elect someone else that they thought was more qualified. I'll bet a bunch of you are thinking "why didn't this happen with Trump?". I wondered that too, and as it turns out, many states have actually amended their constitutions so that the electoral college has to abide by the popular vote. Some are even bound to vote for one political party. Even when an idiot was elected, and the electoral college had its chance to show its worth, they dropped the ball entirely. It can't even do the one thing that it was created to do.

The electoral college also has the problem of the winner take all system. Whichever candidate wins the state gets all of its electoral votes, no matter how close the margin of victory is. This creates many people who's votes aren't even counted. In California, over 4 million people voted for Donald Trump. That's about 31 percent of the vote, but since Hillary won the state, all 55 electoral votes go to her. The same thing can be said in Texas; 3.8 million Texans voted for Hillary, which was over 43 percent of the total votes, but all 38 electoral vote went to the Donald. If you're voting for the losing party in sates like these, where the outcome is pretty much set in stone already, it makes you think you're vote doesn't matter, so why waste your time?

The presidential election is also the only election in which we use the electoral college. Senate, Governor, and House races don't use it; it's just this one, and that makes no sense. Apart from that, this system discounts the votes of the losing party, essentially leaving their voices unheard. States like Maine have passed laws that divide their electoral votes by proportion of votes won, but the problem persists everywhere else. We are the only democracy on Earth that does it this way, and for all the talk of America being the freest place in the world, it's odd that so many people are seemingly left out of the process. As I said before, this is not about Trump. I may have called him an idiot a few paragraphs ago, but that's neither here nor there. My point is that the voices of the people are not being heard, and regardless of whether changing the system would hurt your political party, I really don't care. It would lessen Chicago's dominance in Illinois, and make Republicans care about states that they previously would've thought were in the bag, like Texas or Louisiana. It would provide a more accurate vote that would lead to a more representative presidential election, and I can't see how that could be a bad thing.