Earlier this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren held a Town Hall event and floated a few of her ideas for her presidential campaign. The town hall, held on CNN, addressed a lot of important, and somewhat radical ideas, the main one of which is gaining a lot of media attention: Senator Warren wants to eliminate the electoral college from presidential politics.
In the past, Senator Warren has been a severe critic of the electoral college. At her town hall in Jackson, Mississippi, Warren was asked how she planned to expand voting rights. She responded by taking her previous stance on the electoral college a step further, by calling for its removal altogether. She made the point that by the time a general election comes by, those vying for the title of the next President of the United States are not stopping by every state to show each and every citizen how much they care about their individual votes. As a result of the electoral college system, presidential candidates don't go to states with a small number of electoral votes, but they also do not stop by the large states that are practically guaranteed to go in one direction (i.e. California or Massachusetts) because these states are not the country's battleground states. Senator Warren wants to make sure that Every. Single. Vote. matters when it comes to choosing our next president, rather than the votes of a powerful few.
The town hall cheered their approval as she said:
"My view is that every vote matters and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College."
Naturally, such a strong statement attracted a lot of media attention—and not all of it positive. Those criticizing Warren's proposal claim that the only reason that Democrats want the electoral college abolished is that they would do anything to beat Donald Trump and secure the seat of the presidency going forward. They go on to claim that if the Democrats were capable of choosing a more appealing candidate then all of their misgivings about the electoral college system would suddenly evaporate, in favor of keeping it in place for all eternity. While this argument may have some truth to it, it is worth considering that Democrats in power are not the only people who want the system changed.
From a non-professional politician's perspective (a fellow student's perspective, in fact), the electoral college is "a way to maintain social holds from past institutional government to keep white men in power." The electoral college is a system that keeps the power in this country between two large parties: it can be preached and preached and preached about how the system is fair and grants equality to all, but at the end of the day, the two big names on the ballot are going to be a Democrat and a Republican. With individuals feeling that they need to vote in a partisan matter in order for their vote to carry weight, an Independent candidate will never win the presidency for the simple reason that the majority votes in the electoral college are often predetermined to be either red or blue, and many of the voters do not want to break the status quo and vote differently.
The electoral college has had its benefits in the past—it was certainly the ideal system at the time at which it was constructed, but the leaders of today are making the people think: if the times are changing, shouldn't our laws and methods change to match it?
